Welcome, Theta community to our April update on the Network! In these times of COVID-19 we hope that you and your loved ones are all staying well and safe! Sometimes things don’t work out the way you plan. The Theta team had scheduled a major marketing push in the lead up to Mainnet 2.0. With the unfortunate and tragic spread of the virus, their travel plans had to be postponed, including a marketing tour through South Korea, Hong Kong, and Vietnam and a meetup held with a Korea-based partner. While these travel restrictions may still be in place in May, this at least gives them time to re-tool the marketing efforts for Mainnet 2.0 in other directions, and give it the push that the release and the community deserves. The development never stops. Major news is, last week, Theta Network was chosen by Contentos to be integrated with the COS.tv video platform to improve user experience and reduce the bandwidth cost of video content delivery. By adding Theta Network to Contentos’ video infrastructure, they can reduce content delivery costs by 50% or more. This enables COS.TV to achieve more stable and sustainable growth, and adds a new way to increase user engagement through token rewards. This is another big win for Theta, after earlier announcing that both Maekyung Media and CJ Hello, the two largest media companies in South Korea, had agreed on a partnership with Theta Labs. The partnership also marks an increase in blockchain technology adoption in video content. And the Network is booming! At the time of writing, there are 768 Edge Cachers, 375 Guardian Nodes and 11 Enterprise Validators, including Samsung, Binance, Blockchain and gumi Cryptos Capital. Moreover, On March 28th, another 100 users were onboarded onto the Theta testnet to run Guardian Nodes! Testing is proceeding well and on target for the launch of Theta Mainnet 2.0 in May. Theta team is hard at work (from home) and they’ll have more exciting releases coming along the way. Take care and stay tuned!

Development

GitHub metrics:

THETA has public repositories and private repositories. Overall, the Project has frequent commits to the collection of repositories.

Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):

The date of the official launch of Theta Mainnet 2.0 isWednesday, May 27th. Roughly two weeks prior to that date, the exact block height will be announced that Theta blockchain will switch to Mainnet 2.0 code.

The primary reason for pushing back the release date is simply to allow for more testing of the Mainnet 2.0 code. While the Mainnet 2.0 code is complete, and as some noticed already has been released on the Theta GitHub, there are significant changes and having just a few weeks to fully test before the projected Q1 release date was a tight window. In addition to the hundreds of Guardian Nodes that would come online on mainnet, the Mainnet 2.0 code must be run by all the major exchanges that list Theta, as well as Enterprise Validator Nodes (Binance, gumi Cryptos, Samsung NEXT, and Blockchain). Any issues arising from untested code could be disruptive to a lot of key stakeholders in Theta, so out of an abundance of caution, the decision was made to allow more time to observe the Mainnet 2.0 code functioning properly and make any improvements as needed. Also, delaying the release of Mainnet 2.0 won’t have any negative effect on work in progress with video platform partners, so that potential risk factor did not present an issue.

The Theta community, including the 300+ Guardian Nodes operating on Theta testnet, are excited to get started on Mainnet 2.0. More Guardian Nodes are being onboarded to testnet_sapphire so that when Theta Mainnet 2.0 launches the protocol will be as decentralized as possible. At the same time, the team will be running stress tests on testnet_sapphire to ensure that Theta can accommodate the necessary level of concurrent users that video platforms require.

Stress testing will tentatively follow this schedule between now and the release of Mainnet 2.0:

Testing of peak concurrent viewers on Theta Network:

April — 500k concurrent viewers

May — 1m+ concurrent viewers

Testing of number of Guardian Nodes participating in Theta consensus

April — 600 Guardian Nodes

May — 750+ Guardian Nodes

Another silver lining of pushing Mainnet 2.0 launch to May is that it gives Theta community time to get involved in building tools and applications for the Theta ecosystem. The team has enlisted DevPost, the leading hackathon community (they are currently running hackathons for Facebook, Samsung, and EOS among many other top names), to host the 1st Theta Network virtual hackathon beginning in early April. The hackathon will run for 2 months and feature project feedback from Theta team, as well as other marquee advisors and supporters of the Theta Network. Additionally Theta Labs is setting aside a hackathon prize pool of $25,000 in tokens, 100% of which will be awarded to the top 3 community projects at the end of the hackathon. The team has got a few ideas of Theta blockchain tools and apps they’ll propose, but want to also give the Theta community the flexibility to build the projects they want to.

Got a project idea? Email them at support@thetatoken.org, or reach out to Wes on Telegram at @wlevitt so we can make sure you have the tools you need!

Why the team is creating the Theta blockchain?

The team’s long-term vision for the Theta Network is a decentralized end-to-end protocol for processing and delivering data, not just video but all types of data. Decentralized data delivery, at the edge, powered by you. That vision encompasses three main components that are to be powered by Theta edge nodes, run by the community:

Data Delivery — Initially focused on video delivery, and implemented on THETA.tv and multiple other video platforms coming soon. But the scope of decentralized data delivery goes beyond video into file updates, game patches, OS and app updates, web content, and any other form of data delivery.

Data Storage — As Theta expands from livestreaming applications to Video-on-Demand (VoD), app updates, and game patches, it becomes necessary to have a decentralized solution to data storage. Theta nodes can cache the most in-demand live and static content and files to ensure they are able to contribute to the network and earn TFUEL.

Data Encoding — By allowing Theta nodes to perform ingest/encoding of raw video and data as close to the source as possible, particularly for live events (professional sports, concerts, conferences, for example), the Theta Network will truly become an end-to-end solution for video and data. Building out this functionality is a natural extension for the Theta team, based on the team’s experience encoding live VR events in 2016 for SamsungVR, Intel IEM, ESL, and others.

Awareness and social encounters

Theta Network was recently featured by NEC at a private enterprise forum as a potential 5G use case for streaming VR and other bandwidth-intensive content. Coming soon the team will have a more public exhibition at NANO OPT Media in Tokyo in April.

The team also had planned a major marketing push in the lead up to Mainnet 2.0, including a marketing tour through South Korea, Hong Kong, and Vietnam and a meetup held with a Korea-based partner. With the unfortunate and tragic spread of the COVID-19 virus, their travel plans to these countries had to be postponed. While these travel restrictions may still be in place in May, this at least gives them time to re-tool the marketing efforts for Mainnet 2.0 in other directions, and give it the push that the release and the community deserves.

Finance

On March 28th, another 100 users are being onboarded onto the Theta testnet to run Guardian Nodes!

Testing is proceeding well and on target for the launch of Theta Mainnet 2.0 in May. Theta team is hard at work (from home) and they’ll have more exciting releases coming along the way.

Live Network Statistics: April 9th, 2019

You can now see the distribution of Pre-Guardian Nodes, Edge Cachers, and Enterprise Validator Nodes in real-time at thetatoken.org! Scroll down to “Live Network Stats”, which will update each time you refresh the page.

Edge Cachers: 768

Guardian Nodes: 375

Enterprise Validator Nodes: 11

Information from Theta explorer:

Theta markets:

Information from Coinlib.io:

Network

For those, who are a little behind of times, this January, the SIVER.tv team announced that SLIVER.tv officially renamed THETA.tv.

THETA.tv Launch AMA:

The information is taken from Similarweb.com.

Roadmap

Q1 2020

Theta Mainnet 2.0 goes live with Multi-BFT consensus mechanism and growing number of enterprise validator nodes

Guardian Nodes launch on Theta Mainnet 2.0

Release of specialized smart contract support

Theta streaming protocol supports full Video-on-Demand (VoD)

Q2 2020

Beta launch of decentralized data storage

Beta launch of decentralized file delivery of any content type, such as game patches, applications, OS updates

Beta launch of Theta protocol adapted to Smart TVs and IoT devices

H2 2020

Release of generalized Turing-complete smart contract support

Beta launch of decentralized encoding protocol

Production release of the end-to-end Universal Edge Cacher

Partnerships and team members

Contentos, a public-chain project for the global digital content industry, has partnered with the decentralized video delivery protocol Theta Network, which will be integrated with the COS.TV video platform to improve user experience and reduce the bandwidth cost of video content delivery.

COS.TV platform has achieved huge growth in 2019. According to Alexa ranking, in January 2020, the traffic of COS.TV has surpassed Steemit.com. However, the issue coming is the rapid rise in content delivery costs. By adding Theta Network to Contentos’ video infrastructure, we can reduce these costs by 50% or more, thereby enabling COS.TV to achieve more stable and sustainable growth, and adding a new way to increase user engagement through token rewards.

Earlier, Samsung and CJ Hello, two of the largest media companies in South Korea, have also agreed on a partnership with Theta Labs, which will use Theta’s decentralized video delivery.

“We are very happy to work with Theta, which will help reduce our video content delivery costs and increase market share. The partnership also marks the development of blockchain technology adoption in video content.”

Contentos co-founder and CEO Mick said.

“We’re excited to bring COS.tv on to the Theta Network, and add to the growing number of platforms seeing real benefits from using Theta for video delivery. As COS.TV continues to grow rapidly, Theta integration will help attract even more new users while keeping CDN costs low.”

said Mitch Liu, CEO of Theta Labs.

About Contents:

Contentos (COS) is a decentralized global content ecosystem, which is invested jointly by Matrix Partners China, IDG, Gobi, and supported by Ontology, DHVC, Node Capital, Binance Lab, LD Capital, etc. Contentos aims to build the public chain platform that brings values back to content creators and users.

Contentos has reached a strategic partnership with the photo-editing tool PhotoGrid, the well-known live broadcast platform LiveMe, and the short-video platform Cheez. These three products have brought Contentos millions of global content creators and 60 million monthly users. In addition, Cheetah Mobile’s CleanMaster and related game products are also directly involved in the Contentos ecosystem.

Recently, Theta collaborated with Suterusu to add privacy features to Theta blockchain:

Suterusu brings ZCash-level privacy to any blockchain platform or application. It integrates a state of the art trustless ZK-SNARK scheme with nearly constant size proofs, and efficient proof generation /verification. Suterusu provides privacy protection for several major blockchains and dapps, such as BTC and ETH, as well as DeFi products like Standard Tokenization Protocol and SWFT. Other public blockchains such as Neo and IOST have also negotiated with Suterusu to build layer-2 protocols to support privacy protection on their networks.

Adding robust privacy features will be just part of the continued technical improvements made to Theta Mainnet 2.0 throughout 2020, all designed around the primary goal of adoption — making the Theta protocol easier for platforms to use and more aligned with their goals and needs.

Theta Network x NASA

The Theta Network team is working with the NASA teams to bring you a livestreams of ROCKET LAUNCHES !

Watch Rocket Launches. Earn TFUEL. To the Moon!

NASA.THETA.TV

MISC

This Week in Blockfolio Signal: Theta Network mentioned.

Social media metrics

Social media activity:

Social media dynamics:

Theta community continues to grow. However, there is a slight fluctuation in the number of subscribers of Theta social media channels these weeks.

Official Telegram group — Discussions on development, possible partnerships, etc.

See also Official Telegram Theta trader, the channel for price and trade-related discussion.

Official Chinese Telegram group and Official Korean Telegram group.

Follow Theta on Facebook.

Check out Theta Twitter page.

Join the discussion on Bitcointalk.org — since November 23rd, 2017.

This is not financial advice.

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Medium. Twitter. Telegram. Reddit.