Connext Community Update #1

Local Hubs and Open Source Development and ETHSF, oh my!

The past few months have been a flurry of travel, new connections , and buidling that’s left us more enthusiastic than ever about the future of Connext and the Ethereum community. We’ve also got quite a bit of news that we’re excited to share with all of you.

TL;DR

Philosophy

Over the last few months, we’ve spent a lot of time talking with other companies in the space. We’ve learned about their issues; what’s going well, what’s not, what their concerns are, and what they want to see in collaborators.

We’ve thought about our role in a decentralized economy— how we fit in, what a business model or token could look like, the future of state channel technology, and the future of Connext itself.

And through these conversations, we’ve come to a few conclusions:

State channel technology should be open source.

State channel developers should not engage in rent-seeking behavior.

Collaboration on this technology benefits the entire Ethereum community.

Consequently, Connext should become an open source, permissionless infrastructure.

As a result, we plan to emphasize the following in the coming weeks and months:

Adherence to open source development principles and practices

Code refactoring and documentation updates to improve accessibility and user-friendliness

Community growth

Community-driven decision-making

Quick-hit Developer Updates

In case you missed it, we teamed up with Spankchain to launch the first non-custodial payment hub that is not only deployed on mainnet but is also already being used for real payments on a production platform.

We’ve extracted our hub code from Spankchain’s codebase, containerized it, and deployed it! Connext Hubs are now available to the general public for local and testnet development. Read our docs to get started!

We’ve added ERC20 support to our state channel hubs — tokens for everyone!

We built a unit testing suite to facilitate faster iteration.

We’re actively iterating on deployment processes to make your development cycles easier.

For more comprehensive information, keep an eye out for our forthcoming Dev Update.

Community Updates

First, we’ll be sponsoring ETHSanFrancisco and running a booth —this is a great chance for hackers to build on Connext! This is the first time we’ve put our hubs in the hands of hackers, and we can’t wait to see what you build. Check out our ETHSF Wishlist for ideas!

In the interest of transparency and community-building, we’ve moved our day-to-day communications to a new community chat. We’ve also started a Connext subreddit for those who prefer longer-form or asynchronous formats!

Finally, we’re revising our documentation for technical and nontechnical folks alike: