Welcome to the #23 of Nebulas Weekly Report! Delivering developments of Nebulas project. Nebulas Weekly Report is maintained by the Nebulas team. Please send feedback to contact@nebulas.io, or @nebulasio on Twitter.

LAST WEEK’S Top Commits

Last week, we launched the Nebulas mainnet, aka “Eagle Nebula.” Our mainnet is named after the interstellar cloud made famous in the stunning photograph, “Pillars of Creation.” This photograph shows the formation of stars inside Eagle Nebula, where its gas and dust create new stars and react to the nearly light of recently-formed stars. As the genesis version of the Nebulas mainnet, “Eagle Nebula” represents the “Pillars of Creation” in our ecosystem.

In the build up to launch, we focused on the final testing and implementation of “Eagle Nebula” to ensure our mainnet was robust upon release.

The genesis version of the Nebulas Mainnet is focused on strengthening the construction of the ecosystem and being developer-friendly. It includes several innovative features:

(1) “Eagle Nebula” supports Javascript and TypeScript for smart contract programming. Javascript is the most widely used programming language, so more developers can start building on Nebulas with ease. (2) “Eagle Nebula” uses Protocol Buffers (protobuf) to do serialization, which optimizes data transition and network transmission performances. it also enhances extendability of application protocols and functions, so that they can be easily upgraded in the future. (3) For data storage, “Eagle Nebula” uses RocksDB by default. Compared to other methods, RocksDB provides higher speed and stable data processing. It also offers a removable storage infrastructure which enables developers to use alternative data storage infrastructures according to their demands and preferences. (4) Considering the limited computational capacity of current blockchains, we added transaction concurrent execution technology in “Eagle Nebula” to enhance throughput. We surpassed 2000 TPS (transactions packed per second) in our test before, and we are continuously optimizing this technology for the future. (5) Nebulas implements chunk-based parallel synchronization: Each chunk contains 32 blocks, and 10 chunks are synchronized in parallel. This increases the speed and ease of joining nodes, enabling the network to expand more quickly. (6) We have optimized address codes in this version. The new address code format starts from “n” and can load greater information with more security.

LAST WEEK’S News and Reports

NAS Center Open& Nebulas Mainnet Launched

Nebulas founder Hitters Xu was giving a keynote speech.

Nebulas founders Hitters Xu and Robin Zhong introduced Nebulas’ Mainnet version 1.0, the public blockchain platform of the Nebulas ecosystem, during the grand opening of its NAS Center in San Francisco on March 29, 2018. Event attendees included Nebulas partners, advisors, and community members, including guests from Facebook, 500 Startups, Google, Dolphin Browser and more. Located at the heart of San Francisco, the NAS Center serves as an international hub for Nebulas for R&D and marketing. NAS Center aims to tap into Silicon Valley’s blockchain community and be a strong supporter and enabler for blockchain.

The Reddit Technical AMA with CTO Robin Zhong

About 2381 people were online

March 26th at 8:00 (UTC-07:00, San Francisco), Robin Zhong, our co-founder and CTO, did a Reddit AMA answering technical questions about Nebulas. The AMA introduced technical features of the Nebulas Mainnet and lasted an hour and a half. Community members participated actively, with 2,381 online for the AMA.

Nebulas Wins Best Performance Award in Innovative District

Huobi Award

On March 30, in Beijing time, Huobi Group held the 2018 Global Partner Appreciation Banquet. During the conference, Huobi awarded Nebulas with “Best Performance Award in Innovative District.” Our team expresses its gratitude to Huobi. As always, we will continue to work hard for dapp developers and our community to build the self-evolving public blockchain of the next generation.

Testnet Upgrade

We reset the testnet and upgraded it to the same version as the new mainnet so that developers can test their developments in the same environment as the mainnet. As a result, our testnet has been upgraded with a new address format and uses RocksDB to store block data for higher performance and speed.