It has been around two and a half months since we initially announced our candidacy as a WAX guild. Today, as the first Inspector General Guild Ratings Report has been published, confirming pink.network as one of the top guild candidates in the WAX ecosystem, we get ready to enter a new chapter as an active block producer.
The past couple of months have been a very intense and exciting time for our team, and we would like to take this as an occasion to look back at what we achieved since we announced our candidacy, and also give an outlook on what we will be working on in the future.
wax.gg - Suite of microservices
Two and a half months ago, we started working on our first microservice: A photo service that would allow users to upload a photo to be linked with their WAX account. This service now integrates seamlessly with the chat service, using the photos as avatars. We have not stopped there though, and now feature 5 microservices on wax.gg:
Snapshots
4 times a day, a snapshot of the WAX blockchain is automatically created by one of our nodes and made available to download. This is especially useful for developers and other potential block producers that want to significantly speed up the process of getting their own WAX node up to date.
Account Creator
With our account creator, everyone can create new WAX accounts within minutes. We only require users to pay for the fees related to the creation and do not make any profits with this service. Payment is available either with EOS or ETH, making anonymous account creation possible, which previously wasn’t available.
Stats
The stats service is by far the most used microservice we offer. It shows all the important WAX specific statistics on a single page. Especially GBM related stats were very difficult to find before our service launched, which is one of the reasons why it is so popular now. We also display a list of the richest accounts and will soon expand functionality to also display network activity statistics as well as dapp related information.
Warrant Canary
This is a very niche service, mostly useful for block producers that want to utilize a warrant canary to add an additional layer of security to their operations. It is already being used by 11 other WAX guild candidates.
Block producer setup
We wanted to make sure we would be prepared as possible for when we start producing blocks on the WAX blockchain. Firstly, we added a 3rd server optimized for single core performance to our setup. This is to ensure we will be able to execute transactions as quickly as possible, which will in turn keep the congestion of the network as low as possible.
We then registered as a producer on the TELOS testnet. We chose this network because it also runs on eosio 1.8 like WAX does at the moment, which meant that performance would be very comparable. It also has a system in place that allows new producers to quickly start producing blocks, which was ideal for our testing purposes.
After starting with EOS Mechanics execution times of 1.1–1.4 ms, we made several tweaks to our block production setup and ended up with very stable execution times of 1.0–1.1 ms. This puts us way below the 2ms requirement set by the Inspector General and makes us confident that we will be able to live up to the expectations of providing a fast and reliable block producer for the WAX blockchain.
Two more things
Firstly, we made significant improvements to our WAX node setup. Our nodes offer full history access, both via the v1 history as well as the v2 Hyperion history. To ensure a stable performance, we have nodes running on multiple servers and use a load balancer to make sure that they both get utilized ideally. In the last 30 days, our nodes have handled more than 40 million requests without any issues.
Secondly, we recently added an open source licence to the majority of our code on Github. By being able to utilize parts of our code, other developers will have an easier time when building their own WAX applications. Also, we know that multiple other guilds have already used the Hyperion Docker setup we uploaded to Github.
What’s next?
We are very happy with what we have achieved in the last couple of months, and we certainly won’t stop here. In the near future, you can expect to see a redesign of stats.wax.gg, which will also add more features as we already outlined. We will further be publishing multiple educational articles with the goal of making it as simple as possible for new people to enter the WAX blockchain ecosystem.
Apart from that, you can expect us to continually add new microservices to wax.gg and to improve the already existent ones. And lastly, we will of course closely monitor the performance of our block producer setup and make changes if required.
If you share our vision and want to keep up to date with what we’re working on, follow us on Twitter @pinknetworkx.
