Announcements

Fleek Network Update

We’ve been a bit quiet lately, so we wanted to provide a quick explanation/update and get back into the groove of consistent updates again (starting now). The good news is, as the team likes to say internally, the devs have been cooking, and we’ve got some exciting things to share.

TLDR: The past few months were largely spent on expanding our initial CDN research into a full decentralized Edge Network. Most of that work is now done, and we have a new draft whitepaper and github repo that we will release publicly in the coming weeks, and a testnet for the decentralized edge network that will launch in August.

Below is a more detailed update on what we’ve been working on and some revised roadmap timelines.

What have we been working on?

  • Re-architecting Fleek Network to be an Edge Network rather than just a CDN.
  • New Protocol Design (explained in the whitepaper)
  • New Whitepaper (draft complete; public release in July)
  • New Github Repo (New repo will be open sourced in July; URSA will be archived)
  • New Verifiable Streaming Library in Rust on top of Blake3 (similar to Bao)
  • New service Delivery Acknowledgements SNARKs
  • Atomo Lock-free Execution engine

It took a little while because while we leveraged the initial CDN research we did, from a network design and code perspective, we started the edge network from scratch. But now we’re approaching the point where the new repo is almost ready to share publicly (July for sure), so after being heads down for the past month we are ready to resume regular updates, starting with what milestones are on the roadmap for this summer:

Summer Milestones & Timelines

Here are the Fleek Network milestones coming this summer to look forward to! These pave the road to bring the decentralized edge network to testnet in August.

July

  • New Whitepaper (public release).
  • New Repo (open sourcing)
  • Node Operators (communications & upgrading).
  • Educational Content & Breakdowns (explaining the edge network, Atomo Engine, Delivery Acknowledgements, Blake3/BAO implementation, and more.)
  • Initial Performance Benchmarks (ex. latency/throughput from internal testing)

August

  • Economics Paper (public release)
  • Testnet Launch (initial phase of a multi-phased path to Mainnet)
  • Initial Edge Services (CDN and JS VM PoC services)
  • Service Development Kit (initial release)

What are the highlights of this new Edge Network direction?

Instead of restricting our network architecture/capabilities to a CDN service, we were able to rethink/redesign Fleek Network’s core to support a full decentralized edge platform upon which many edge services (ex. CDN, serverless functions, etc.) can be built. The new architecture separates each aspect of the network (blockchain <> edge infrastructure <> services) so that anyone can build new edge services on Fleek Network.

What will be different in the new github repo?

It’s a brand new codebase, and we’ve redesigned the layout of the repo to provide more clarity and better understanding of the core protocol, as well as making it super easy to onboard as a node operator!

As a node operator on the current devnet, what should I expect?

Just stay tuned to our Discord so you’ll be first to hear about updates/timelines for upgrading to the new node software once the new github repo is released (in July). Our DevEx team is already preparing some tooling and guides to help make it easy when the time comes. Your work, feedback, and help in the devnet has been much appreciated and we’re excited to share some more info in the coming weeks regarding the official testnet launch in August.

What will the initial testnet in August look like?

The initial phase of testnet will have two main purposes. First, to stress test the network’s general performance and operation with a decentralized network of node operators; Second is to test the first two POC services, which are the CDN (static and dynamic content acceleration) and a simple edge compute POC (Javascript VM).

The second phase of the testnet which will happen either late August or early September (depending on when exactly the first testnet phase starts), will be to introduce the Service Development Kit (SDK) and test out people building new edge services on the test network. We expect to prepare a dope hackathon in tandem with the second phase of the testnet to get the ball rolling and help the community start building awesome edge services!

That’s all for this update! We’re signing out, but stay tuned as we follow up next week with more details on these milestones, and the core definitions of this new network architecture.