As we continue to test scaling and performance of the Tardigrade network, we are continuing our practice of using paid data and bandwidth for our testing to reward our early SNO adopters.

We’ve used surge payouts to accelerate the growth of the network and the good news is that we’ve reached our launch gate. We are not extending surge payouts for the month of February, at this time but you will still receive surge payouts for January. We may use surge payouts as an incentive in the future if we need to grow the network again in advance of customer demand.

We don’t want to grow the network to large ahead of customer demand or too slow. We’re in a good place at around 25 PB to meet expected usage for the foreseeable future.

One additional thing we want to share is that we’ve completed testing on the new payout automation tools. We’ve developed expertise in payouts at scale and the new tools are far superior to the manual process we’ve used in the past. In an effort to optimize for overall performance and scalability, we have a few limits we’ve introduced related to the database. One of these limitations has an impact on the calculation of billing for January.

While this impact is only temporary, it will impact the February payout. With the steps we took to increase the overall ability of the database to handle concurrency, we introduced a lag in payout settlements that resulted from the extended time for order limit settlement.

Essentially, the steps we took to improve scalability and to ensure that payouts were accurate and complete introduced a delay in the ability to calculate payouts in real-time. This is a temporary artifact of these improvements and we expect this lag to be resolved this month and not to reoccur in future payouts.

February is the last month we will use the manual processes before we complete the transition to the automated tools. Here’s what you can expect for the February payout:

For this payout, the pull for payout data will be current as of 7 days prior to when the payout process is run. The issue with the lag in payments is related to the calculation of payouts from order limits. Order limits roll up over a 7 day period as order limits expire.

The February payout will be offset by one week as described above

The offset week will be included in the next payout

All future payouts will run during the first week of the month as an automated process and will cover all usage for the previous month without any additional lag in calculation

The new tooling automatically calculates payouts as a Satellite process, and includes held amount as well as storage, customer egress, repair and audit traffic.

The new payout process will allow the SNO Board to query for payout information as well as held amount.

We made the decision to make the incomplete February payment covering the first 3 weeks payouts on time, rather than delay the entire payment. The March payout will include all of February’s activity plus the last week of January. The changes to the order limit rollup and the new automated payout process should ensure smooth sailing with payouts going forward.

Overall, we’re really happy with the new payout process. We expect the community will appreciate the improvements, and especially improvements to the timing and accuracy of future payouts from Tardigrade Satellites.