September was a solid month of progress and development for Skycoin. The Skyfleet were treated with a range of fascinating new interviews from co-founder Synth and a series of informative community-written content. Here are the highlights for the month:

Software

All developer efforts continue to be focused on developing the Skywire mainnet. Several key software challenges must be overcome, including the off-chain Coin Hour payment system for bandwidth-metered micropayments between nodes. The September testnet reward pool is 12,000 SKY for DIY miners and 18,000 SKY for Official Skyminers. This equates to $108,000 worth of Skycoin distributed to community for their participation. Questions and answers about Skywire and the testnet can be found on the Skywire Github Wiki.

Hardware

In keeping the Skywire focus, we saw unofficial images of two different motorized WiFi antenna prototypes. These antennas will allow users to transmit and receive traffic on Skywire as part of a wireless MESH network or community wireless ISP.

The Skycoin China Team during some bubble soccer team bonding.

Conferences

The Skycoin team continues to focus and spread Skycoin news to the mainstream with a strong showing at the TechCrunch Disrupt meeting in San Francisco in early September. We shared the stage with new drone manufacturing start-ups, NASA and IBM’s new quantum computer. As usual, attendees could not get enough of the Skyminer — the little box that earns you Skycoin as you sleep. Check out the event photo album from the event and the awesome team video!

The Skyminer proudly on display at TechCrunch Disrupt, San Francisco.

Interviews

The Skyfleet got their Synth fix in September with more than 4 hours of new Skycoin project updates and commentary on crypto and world affairs. Synth sat down with Christian of Coin Interview for chat number 5. They discussed pipelined Skycoin hardware projects, plans for Coin Hours buybacks, network security and global trade. Synth also checked in again with Crypto Rich where he explained the reasons that Skycoin will emerge out of the “altcoin winter” as one of the leading coins. There was an official video release of the Synth’s Keynote speech from the Blockchance conference in August, the hilarious Keynote Q & A session and a one-on-one interview with Synth.

Synth’s excellent Keynote presentation at the Blockchance conference.

Articles

September was a massive month for new Skycoin written material. There was an official feature on the community-driven CX video game projects CrappyBall and Snakes CX.

Skyfleet writers were on the top of their game this month as well. Stalwart Charles Bivins discussed ‘Will Skycoin service the Cryptocurrency Market Apocalypse?’, provided a roundup of Skycoin conferences and put out a great explainer on Skycoin Coin Hours.

Lawrence Qholloi wrote an excellent Biomimetic analysis of the Skycoin ecosystem and an informative piece on the potential for Skywire to liberate people with community-built wireless ISP infrastructure.

Community

On Reddit, ChocolateLab put together a comprehensive explanation of the future potential and power of Skywire. AskaCappa compiled a list of all the various international Skycoin groups. /u/magicstone wrote two explanatory articles in Vietnamese (on setting up a Skywire node and configuring the orange pi Skyminer board) with the goal of assisting newcomers from Vietnam to get involved.

Prominent Skyfleet member MacSkyver shared a video of his appearance at the Global Assets and Wealth Forum, a Platinum Circle hosted event in Singapore where he represented Skycoin.

We also had two strong community meetups in September. Skycoin Zanshi hosted a meet up for Irish Skycoiners to discuss Net Neutrality, Skywire and all things Skycoin. It was a great success.

There is a strong community developer team in Havana, Cuba, where 15 eager coders got together and and worked to reduce layers of Skycoin Docker images. These changes were merged by the Skycoin devs, illustrating the strength of our decentralized, international contributor base!

Skycoin Cuba developers meet in Havana to work on Skycoin Docker clusters.

Skyfleet, keep up the amazing work as we look forward to a massive couple of months to finish 2018!