Katie DiMento —

Being one of the first protocols we supported, Stellar has been part of our platform’s deploy tooling for over a year. We’ve seen a lot of growth on this protocol in the second half of 2019 with expanding feature advancements, and will continue to deepen our commitment to the protocol.

Earlier this summer, Blockdaemon became a grant recipient of the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) and along with that affirmed several product updates we will be delivering over the next year. Blockdaemon is working to become a Tier 1 provider of public nodes. Tier 1 organizations are advanced and reliable Stellar teams that agree to help promote decentralization by running at least three validators. They coordinate changes to their quorumsets and hold themselves to a high standard of uptime and responsiveness. They work closely with each other and with SDF to ensure the health of the network, maintain good quorum intersection, and minimize network disruptions.

Blockdaemon runs three validator nodes that include full archives, which have pushed our devops practices much farther. These public nodes have been a testing ground for development of some advanced features for the platform that will be coming over the next few months. These will include a much deeper view of node metrics and logs in the Blockdaemon UI.

We’ll also be offering more control to users – configurable ledger retention, node seed management for validators, updating quorum set selection to account for the newer quorum guidance etc. And, by popular request, we’ll be adding core-only nodes and looking at even lighter deployment options. We will be supporting all of these node options via our Blockchain Package Manager (BPM) for on-prem deployments.

BPM will be able to be executed on any major OS and allows users to deploy a Stellar node that can be monitored no matter where it resides – on-prem or in the cloud – which opens up new ways to orchestrate the Stellar network. With reliable deployments, enterprise grade security, and easy configurability, BPM allows users to overcome documentation and technical challenges to ensure transparency in their projects while keeping costs in check. As a standard, we will offer out the box monitoring, and flexible integrations with existing monitoring environments. Metrics and logs can be forwarded to existing monitoring solutions as well. BPM nodes broadcast telemetry to Blockdaemon, and recommendations and alerts can be pulled from Blockdaemon services, but Blockdaemon cannot connect directly to BPM nodes, ensuring true decentralization.

As our commitment to the Stellar community, Blockdaemon will also be contributing code commits and improvements based on our experience and our infrastructure deployments. In addition to logging alerts, building pertinent scripts and ansible playbooks, we will continue to fix general bugs that come up and generate proper bug reports. We look forward to growing with Stellar and collaborating with a top-notch community to push the financial ecosystem forward.

Visit our Stellar Protocol Details page for more information on how you can connect to Stellar today!