Utilities

On top of functionality specific to staking with LinkPool, we’d also like to add in some useful crypto utilities such as price charts, crypto to fiat calculators and anything else we feel would bring some additional value to the platform and create a helpful user experience. If you have any feedback or suggestions of things you’d like to see in the app, please email mat@linkpool.io or leave a comment/tweet!

Infrastructure Developments

As per section 6.4.1 in the whitepaper, we detailed how we was going to take our existing infrastructure configuration and re-create it all in a tooling called Terraform. By using Terraform, it allows us to define all our infrastructure in code, so there’s no manual changes within AWS’ management console, everything is kept within the same repository and there is one source of truth to our running infrastructure at any point in time.

To expand on that further, it also supports modularisation of sections of our system. In practise, our nodes, geth instances, external adaptors and management services are all plug-and-play chunks of code; allowing us to spin up carbon copies of each very quickly with the total determinism that each one that is created is the exact same as the others.

To detail some of the real-world benefits that Terraform gives us:

Create new nodes, full ethereum clients, external adaptors in less than a minute.

Create test environments that are exact replicas of production environments.

Programmatically roll out new updates to production environments, by being able to test new changes on branches, merging and deploying when ready.

Internal reviews and collaboration. As our infrastructure is defined in code, it means it can be subject to the same code review policies as any application code base would be.

As of now, we’ve made incredible progress with doing this. All of our existing infrastructure (apart from our website, although soon to be) is written in modular Terraform code, and can be expanded, upgraded and improved very quickly without much effort.

There’s still more work to be done in this area that mostly involve tweaking our current solution to iron out any kinks, but the large pieces are done and our infrastructure is on the cusp of being production-ready.

Contract Updates

To detail the current progress of our staking contracts, the work that was detailed in section 6.4.2 in the whitepaper is well underway. This work will allow our contract platform to be completely upgradable, allowing us to change and shape our contracts to any future changes; tying in to our long-term vision for LinkPool.

In addition to that, we’re constantly working against the current ChainLink contracts developed for the Ropsten network, integrating our solution with theirs upon development.

We’re also working with the team to allow tokens to be managed by separate wallets from the node, including hardware wallets. Meaning that if your node ever got compromised, your tokens would still be safe. For example, only your Ledger/Trezor would be allowed to withdraw its LINK tokens. This includes using contract wallets like multi-sig.

Our Devotion to the Community

Without a strong network of flourishing node operators, the ChainLink network will not be the only and greatest decentralised network of Oracles that it can be. We see ourselves playing a large part in that, bolstering development of external adaptors, new data sources and best practises.

With that in-mind, as detailed in section 6.4.3 of the whitepaper, we are still committed to providing as much clear information as possible around the following:

Data Source Usages: We want to display clearly what data sources we’re providing and how profitable they are using our monitoring solution. With this, it’ll make it clear for other node operators to be able to expand on what their node can offer, improving decentralisation of more uncommon data sources.

We want to display clearly what data sources we’re providing and how profitable they are using our monitoring solution. With this, it’ll make it clear for other node operators to be able to expand on what their node can offer, improving decentralisation of more uncommon data sources. Node Throughput: As shown in the screenshots of the UI, we will be displaying what the sum of the jobs each one undertakes in graphing. We will be expanding on this in our monitoring solution, providing very clear and user-configurable graphs to aid investigation of node operator incentive.

New Product

We’re also pleased to be to announce that we’re going to offering a new product under the LinkPool brand. This product will be an alternative to staking, a product that we think will be of incredible benefit to the ChainLink network and further reward our crowdsale contributors. Keep an eye out over the next few weeks for a future article which details this product. To give a teaser, it involves the ChainLink node operator GUI: