Hello friends!

Wrapping up another productive couple of week here at POA Network. In this update, we share some media coverage of POA Network, upcoming events and an edition of Humans of POA featuring one of our core developers Andreas Fackler!

1. POA Bridge Update

We are proud of what we have accomplished when developing the POA Bridge. Since its launch under a month ago, we have had over 3 Million POA tokens transformed and new users every day. We are excited about the upcoming updates and use-cases we have planned for the POA Bridge.

2. Governance Update

POA’s governance system is designed to promote geographical decentralization and diversity of opinions. Powered by individuals coming from different walks of life, different professions, and different levels of technical training, POA’s governance underscores equality of every validator. Every validator has same weight in voting and same right to introduce ballots. Hence, each individual validator should have no more and no less power to affect the network development than the next one. We strive to build processes and tools to uphold that.

The network has 17 validators on Core network and 22 validators on Sokol testnet. Special thanks to validator candidate Alexander Beal for creating a post showing concise tables of the current validators on both Core and Sokol testnet. With POA’s governance systems, there is a high level of decentralization and power is not concentrated with one validator. All validators are equal.

Our Humans of POA this week, Andreas Fackler, is also working on a DApp we have developed, POA Ballot Stats. The POA Ballot Stats is one of our governance DApps that shows the level of participation of all the Core validators over a specified period of time. You can check the results below showing level of participation over a 12 week period on Core network of some of the validators. Be on the lookout for a special edition governance newsletter and an accompanying Medium post soon!

3. POA Network Interview With CryptoNews

Ziggy Zeidan was interviewed by CryptoNews where he talked about all different aspects of POA Network development, from validators, governance, POA Bridge and upcoming projects from the network. Check out the article here.

4. POA Network Meetup in Toronto

On May 30th, POA Network had their very first meetup which happened in the city of Toronto! The meetup was a casual event bringing together members of the POA community in Toronto as they discussed all things POA related and got to ask any questions they had about POA! We look forward to the next meetup in Toronto and other cities too!

5. CPC Conference

As we come into the summer, POA Network will be presenting and speaking at many conferences related to blockchain and technology. The first of those will be the CPC Crypto Developers Conference where POA Network’s tech lead Igor Barinov will be talking about interoperability protocols, the POA bridge and also a join panel discussions talking about Ethereum development and scalability!

6. A Portion of POA Foundation Tokens Will be Unlocked to Support Ecosystem Development

50,492,160 tokens were set aside for a 2 year vesting period and are to be distributed for the further development of the network. This 2 year vesting period starts from mainnet launch which occurred on December 15, 2017, and ends on December 15, 2019. The first distribution is scheduled to occur exactly 6 months after mainnet launch which is on June 15, 2018 of 12,623,040 tokens and the subsequent distributions will occur every 3 months starting June 15, 2018.

We’re excited since these unlocked tokens will be used to encourage development of more projects in the POA Network ecosystem! Some examples include additional enhancements to ourPOA Bridge,Open Source Blockchain Explorer, Mana, the Ethereum client, and much more.

More details can be found about this process in our original whitepaper paper below:

GitHub poanetwork/wiki POA Library: wiki, how-to, FAQ. Includes instructions how to set-up a new network, to run a full node, connect wallets, - poanetwork/wiki

https://github.com/hashguide/wiki/wiki/POA-Network-Whitepaper#economy

Humans of POA #9

Our “Humans of POA” this week is Andreas Fackler! A core developer who loves coding in Rust and working in open source projects!

What is your name: Andreas Fackler (It’s a German name with an unfortunate pronunciation.)

What is your role: Rust developer. The Parity Ethereum client and the ecosystem evolving around it are based on Rust. It’s a systems programming language and allows you to write fast code, and it’s strongly typed and rather strict: It makes it a bit harder to express what you mean, and a lot harder to accidentally express what you don’t mean. Much like with Haskell and Lego, and unlike with JavaScript and wooden blocks, you have to work a bit until things snap into place, but when they do, they are usually stable.

Why did you join the POA team: I enjoy working on amazing open-source projects in one of my favorite programming languages, and am excited about the cryptocurrency/smart contract space and about cryptography.

What are you currently working on: Firstly, a new implementation of “The Honey Badger of BFT Protocols”, which is a protocol that allows a bunch of computers to agree on a list of “transactions” (or any kind of entry, really), even if some of them are controlled by an attacker who wants to prevent this. It is asynchronous, which means it makes no timing assumptions and works without modifications in any time scale: If information is exchanged via fiber optics, it will handle thousands of transactions per second, if it is exchanged via carrier pigeons it will handle a few per day, but it works either way. Honey Badger is a candidate for replacing POA’s consensus mechanism, promising faster guaranteed block finality and more robustness against changing network conditions.

Secondly, I’m working on a tool that gathers and displays voting statistics about the POA Network’s validators. The network depends on the validator’s active participation and many of their actions are already publicly available as a record on the blockchain. This tool extracts information about how many ballots they participated in and how many they missed, and shows a ranking accordingly.

What is a typical day working with POA: I work remotely, from home, and organization and communication are friendly, uncomplicated and straightforward, so there’s very little overhead. I basically write, read, discuss or review code almost 100% of my workday.

In our Honey Badger implementation, it’s currently mostly coding and reviewing. The algorithm is conveniently modular, so it lends itself to implementing and testing one module at a time.

The ballot stats tool involves a lot of reading up about the underlying Rust libraries and the Parity code, but also familiarizing myself more in-depth with the technical details of Ethereum and Solidity.

How do you see POA Network evolving in a year and going forward: A year? In IT in general, and in cryptocurrency in particular, I’ve learned not to make any predictions. I think that a fast and efficient Proof of Authority-based blockchain with frictionless Ethereum interoperability is an extremely valuable part of the ecosystem, and I also see an enormous potential for synergy and collaboration.

But the only prediction I can make with confidence for the next few months is that we’ll see at least one new development that, if you explained it to me right now, I would rule out as 100% impossible.

Warmly,

POA Network Team

Keep in touch & be the first to know

Stay tuned for more updates at POA Network Medium and Twitter