July is the height of summer and work on Insolar Blockchain platform for its release at the end of September has been really heating up! This month has seen an Insolar research team member win an award, and an Insolar project be nominated for another award. The team has been expanding too, with five hires throughout the month.

1. Community

Announcements

Insolar Research Team Member Wins Award

Senior scientist in the Professorship of Computational Social Science, at ETH Zurich, and Insolar research team member Dr. Evangelos Pournaras was awarded Best Demo Award at the 13th IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems (SASO 2019). The award was granted to Dr. Pournaras and his academic colleagues for their paper which illustrates a technology readiness level (TRL) 6 live demonstrator of the Dynamic Intelligent Aggregation Service (DIAS), which performs real-time, decentralized data analytics in a privacy-preserving way.

Insolar A-rated by due diligence provider

Insolar has partnered with Xangle to provide further disclosure on token data and corporate information, to enable the underlying valuation of the blockchain project. Insolar was A-rated in terms of the due diligence and disclosure provided. The partnership aims to make information about Insolar more accessible, with the company regularly informing Xangle of its major updates to increase transparency around the project.

Insolar Conference Roundup

Late last month Insolar had the privilege of welcoming blockchain representatives from around the world to our home town of Zug for the Crypto Valley Conference. Later on that week, we travelled to London for the Blockchain Summit. Both conferences provided us a chance to speak with organizations looking to implement distributed ledger technology, whether from the enterprise community or the public sector.

Insolar Nominated for UK Energy Innovation Award

Insolar was shortlisted for the UK Energy Innovation Awards supported by the Energy Industries Council. Insolar is nominated for an award as the Best DSO Enabling Project. Insolar’s innovative project entails the creation of a Transactive Energy System based on the company’s blockchain platform.

Top Tech News

Development update. June 24 — July 6, 2019

Development update. July 8 — July 20, 2019

Top Articles

Making the Case for Utility Operated, Blockchain Enabled Power Systems

Insolar co-founder, Peter Fedchenkov, collaborates with Insolar researcher, Shivam Saxena, to make the case for power systems functioning on blockchain. It’s an exciting time for utilities to dive into new territories and discover new revenue/value streams going forward. Using blockchain as an enabler of these technologies may certainly assist them in not only keeping up with the times, but perhaps move even one step ahead.

Insolar Architecture Basics (1/2)

Insolar architect Vladimir Stepanov shares his thoughts on Insolar’s architecture following a conversation about Insolar with a senior software engineer and blockchain architect for one of the world’s largest software providers. The conversation allowed Vladimir to explain some basic architectural aspects of Insolar Blockchain Platform and clarify how we achieve scalability, transparency and permissioning within one system. The article takes a look at some of the main topics that engineers often ask about Insolar architecture.

2. Engineering highlights

The App Logic team began work on the development of a backup mechanism for the system, while also discussing and planning request deduplication logic. This will ensure that several virtual nodes never process the same request. Request results are now identified by a hash.

Logic for nodes processing requests has also been altered so that Pulse changes on a node processing a calculation do not result in the cancellation of the request, instead resending the request. Meanwhile, the result of updating an object is now sent to the node responsible for the object in the current pulse, since only that node can work on the object in the current moment.

The team also completed work so that message types now use an asynchronous delivery mechanism. This allows to decrease network traffic between different nodes.

The Business Services team fully integrated the WebWallet application with Insolar via new API services. Pages to log in, create a new wallet and restore key functionality have been added. Integration with CoinMarketCap’s API has also been developed. Services have been prepared to integrate the observer node with exchanges and changes were made to the API. Work is now in progress to develop a database for quick reports, based on data obtained from the platform.

The Ledger team implemented Filament iteration, meaning that objects can now have an associated entity list (like requests) thousands of elements long. Moreover, test coverage has been improved, with many message handlers now being secured with unit tests.

Work on detached requests has been completed. This will allow atomic transfer operations to be performed. In addition, deterministic Jet splits have been implemented. This will allow Heavy Material nodes to track replication messages and check data integrity. Furthermore, Light Material node integration tests have been introduced. Integration tests will facilitate the correct functioning of business cases.

The Smart Contracts team continued its work on saga transactions, with support for detached requests in Logic Runner being added. Plus, multiple stability fixes and performance improvements have been carried out.

Contracts which are required for the MainNet have been converted to built-in format; previously being externally executed in an isolated environment. Furthermore, code refactoring for contract execution was carried out to increase maintainability, simplify the understanding of code and prepare it for the implementation of upcoming features.

The Network team have fixed various bugs related to Goroutine leaks in the network. The initial implementation of a new scalable asynchronous network consensus is now ready.

In addition, the team also reworked the node authentication mechanism. The node bootstrap protocol has been changed to be compatible with the new consensus and authentication load balancing.

3. Team

Yury Popov joined Insolar as a Software Engineer

Yury has extensive experience in the development of high-load systems with millions of users. He developed trading bots for cryptocurrency exchanges and successfully maintained cash flows in the tens of millions of dollars. Yury holds a degree in Computer Science.

Tatiana Maslova rejoined Insolar as an Office Manager

Tatiana has 2 years’ experience in IT company as a Personal assistant to a CEO and 4 years of administrative experience, external and internal events management.

Maria Vasilenko joined Insolar as a QA Engineer

Maria has been working in quality assurance for over 3 years, developing automation on Java and Kotlin. She graduated from the Moscow State University of Civil Engineering with an engineering degree in Automated Information Processing and Control Systems.

Sergey Kolomiets joined Insolar as a Software Engineer

Backend developer with over 5 years’ experience on different projects. He holds an engineering degree from MSFU. In his previous place of work, Sergey worked leading a team of PHP developers at Inspiritum creating a Carrier Billing Aggregator.

Pavel Stanilevich joined Insolar as a Night Community Manager

Pavel holds a degree in law but found the profession for him in customer care. Pavel previously worked at IQ Option and can assist and support customers in both English and German.

Do you think big and have what it takes to be part of our team? You can see all of our openings here.

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