EOS Hot Sauce #44 – Mainnet Update, Voice Beta Release, WAX Excitement, BOS VM 2.0 and more!

EOS Hot Sauce is a weekly digest of all the hottest news from around the EOSIO ecosystem. The space is evolving so rapidly it can be hard to keep up! We keep on top of it so you don’t have to.

This week's spicy topics:

Sauce in every format:

EOS Nation’s EOS Hot Sauce is also available in video and audio formats shortly after the article is published.

EOS Mainnet Update

In our previous blog posts and recent EOS Hot Sauce, we took a look behind the scenes at the collaborative work that’s been happening in the last few weeks between Block.one and the key block producers of the EOS Mainnet. A few days ago, we published our latest EOS Mainnet Update that took a more technical look at the details of the architectural changes recently deployed by block producers. In this article, we explain the troubleshooting process as well as the new node architecture that is now in place. 

The amount of work and collaboration that we have seen so far in 2020 between Block.one and key block producers has been significant.  Here is a quote from our article:

Figuring out the problem and coming up with a solution was a very collaborative effort between the Top 21 and Block.one. This took a tremendous amount of work and coordination on the part of many teams located all around the world. For example, at one point several adjacent block producers sent in their logs to Block.one so issues could be traced going from one block producer to the next. It’s normal that some teams were more involved than others, but all the teams contributed what they had to. We also want to give a special shout out to WhaleEx who provided great leadership by coming up with the solution, as well as offering a lot of help implementing it.

We highly recommend our readers to take the time to read our latest EOS Mainnet Update in full as it contains tons of valuable information for all stakeholders in the network.

Voice Beta Release

Announced on June 1st, 2019 there was much speculation around Block.one’s new social media platform. And since the 14th of February was set as the launch of the public beta, the community was buzzing with excitement. 

Finally, Voice had its “Hello World” moment.

Shortly after Voice CEO Salah Zalatino published an open letter headlined “Why we are here,” the first beta testers were welcomed to the platform and screenshots were in high demand. 

It’s been a couple of days now since the launch of Voice Beta, and several beta testers have shared their experience. You’ll find an in-depth video analysis on the latest Everything EOS Episode where Zack Gall invited EOS Nation’s CEO, Yves La Rose.

Here’s a quick summary of findings and reactions so far:

User interface and user experience (UI/UX)

First, let’s dive into the onboarding process and some of the UI/UX features.

Users that previously signed up for the Beta received an invitation email, which in some cases could end up in the spam folder.

For the account creation, you’ll need to take a picture and verify your identity with either a passport or a driver’s license. Once verified, you’ll find a very clean and crisp interface and 3000 Voice tokens for you to claim as a reward.

You’ll find a feed of different categories such as travel, wellness, philosophy, and humour. And a filter lets you sort the content by most recent, most voiced, most commented, and most active. Users can like, comment, and voice posts. They can also follow their favourite content creators by clicking the “listen” button next to their name. 

Posts must contain a minimum of 160 characters and can include images, video, or hyperlinks. A character minimum is an interesting approach, as it hints already at the intention of the platform to be the place for valuable content, with time and effort invested.

For the text portion, Voice offers several formatting options, ensuring that everything looks slick and easy to read. 

Voice posts are timestamped on the blockchain through hashes. Users have the option to delete previous posts, however, this action would be visible on the public record.

If you want to take a look at Voice before testing it out, Peter Keay, aka Bittgenstein, shared a couple of screen recordings on Twitter, and a beta tester named Samantha documented her whole first Voice experience in a great Youtube video.

The overall feel of post creation is similar to Medium, but it’s combined with a better sharing experience through a multitude of options for interaction, driven by the Voice token.

The Voice token

The Voice Token is at the heart of the Voice platform, creating unique incentive structures to drive back the value of the platform to the users, instead of extracting it. 

First of all, each user earns 100 Voice tokens each day they login. And they can earn more by creating popular content. Yet another, and probably most unique, option to earn tokens is by “voicing” a post.

Voicing an article will showcase your profile in prominent banner at the top of the post. To voice an article, you’ll need to spend some of your Voice tokens and outbid the previous user that voiced the article. If another user outbids you, you’ll get all of your tokens back plus a 10% profit. 

The “Voicing” is final once no one outbids the top bidder for 24 hrs, which secures public exposure for the winning bidder, and earns the creator of the article 33% of the final bid. 

Win/Win!

The “Voice it” function brings a fun gamification aspect to Voice, allowing users to claim some of the content’s value. We can’t wait to see what kind of strategies users will come up with to maximize their earnings and popularity.

KYC –  verified users

As previously mentioned, you need to verify your identity before you can join Voice, produce content, and earn tokens. The reasons why were addressed on the Voice Blog Post, “Why KYC matters.”

For the verification process, Block.one partnered with the KYC Provider HooYu, who have ensured that provided information is only used to check the identity.

Copies of the ID documents will be automatically deleted once verified.

The value of the public conversation and opinions shared on Voice are backed by real people vouching for the integrity of the information with their name and real-life reputation. 

Voice is not a place for manipulation through bots and fake users, or the noise and deception of trolls. 

As CEO Salah Zalatimo put it: 

Voice is a platform for “people who are for the collective pursuit of truth.”

While not everyone in the community is a big fan of KYC, it’s nice to know upfront that users of Voice are giving up their anonymity and will act accordingly. Since most of our email accounts, mobile devices or applications are already verified through a phone number, which are in most cases connected to an ID, this doesn’t seem like such a far stretch.

This point of view was summarized in a great meme by Binaural Beats (@beats_io).

Soon content on Voice will be accessible to the public, and only those who want to actively participate in Voice are required to verify.

Ground Rules and Moderation

“We have never seen what moderation looks like when you remove fake accounts. We believe accountability will dramatically reduce the need for human intervention” – Salah Zalatimo responding to Colin Talks Crypto, who did a great review on Voice on his Youtube channel.

Yes, Voice came with a set of ground rules and there will be moderation. Society and culture defines itself through a framework of rules that state what is acceptable and what is not. 

Voice is taking a stance against hate speech, abuse, threats, and violence, and users can refer to a clear set of guidelines in the process of self-moderation.

As we’ve learned in a presentation Block.one shared a couple of weeks back, users that help to keep the platform clean will also be rewarded with tokens, so the goal is not top-down censorship, but more so a self-regulating consensus on civilized behaviour and respectful co-existence.

Values that real people across the globe already agree upon.

Conclusion

Voice doesn’t aim to replace all existing social media platforms, and those more comfortable “surfing the web” under a pseudonym already have plenty of places to chose from.

Voice fills a vacuum in a time lacking reliable representation of public opinion.

With innovative design elements, Voice creates incentives for users to cultivate an environment for quality discussion on a variety of topics.

Content producers can take a professional approach, as they can reap all the profits from the popularity of their work and build up a reputation attached to their proven identity.

Nowadays, most media outlets are owned by a few individuals and more and more information is hidden behind paywalls or walled gardens. Voice creates a counterbalance to the traditional publishing industry and creates a forum for independent journalism.

EOSIO Networks

The WAX community has seen an explosion of interest this week as WAX shared some hints about an upcoming partnership. We saw the silhouette of what looked like Mickey Mouse, and also a Major League Baseball (MLB) World Series trophy. Many community members have speculated that this might be a partnership with Topps, a tradable sports card company that has been recently expanding their products to offer tradable NFTs as well. They have licensing deals with both Disney and MLB. Sign up to be notified when the announcement is revealed and get a chance to win 10,000 WAX tokens!

This excitement has led to significant trading action, and WAX is now the 2nd largest EOSIO network as measured by marketcap! Congratulations to entire WAX community!

As usual, WAX continues to deliver tools that make it easier for developers and users to interact with the network.

Their latest release, WAX Greeny Bot (@waxgreenybot on Telegram), helps you monitor your WAX accounts, provides live prices, links to wax guides, account management, and feedback management, with more functionalities coming soon. 

The other significant release is the new NFT standard called AtomicAssets. Developed by the Pink.Network WAX Guild, this new standard looks to address some of the limitations of the dGoods and SimpleAssets standard developed approximately 1 year ago. AtomicAssets offers more RAM efficiency, notifications for smart contracts, powerful trade offers, and the ability to back assets with core tokens. There’s a lot more to come and the roadmap includes many tools needed for AtomicAssets to be as user-friendly and developer-friendly as possible. These tools include: an explorer API, NFT creator, trading interface and marketplace.

And the last item we want to share this week is the updated guidelines for the Office of Inspector General and the February 2020 OIG Report. Congratulations to waxswedenorg, pink.network and Aloha EOS for finishing in the top 3 this month!

The BOSCore technical team is led by a passion for building and innovating. Their latest article explains their approach and upgrade process in order to implement BOS VM 2.0. The main technical features of BOS VM 2.0 are:

  • Extremely Fast Execution
  • Extremely Fast Parsing/Loading
  • Efficient Time-Bound Execution
  • Deterministic Execution
  • C++ / Header Only Integration
  • Highly Extensible Design

Are you new to BOS or not familiar with the advantages that BOS offers? Tojukaka, an EOS Nation Ambassador and BOS Community Manager, published a great list of the top 10 reasons why developers should be building on BOS.

We all know Rami James from his work at Scatter, and just recently he started to work for the Ultra Platform. One can tell that he’s very excited about his new job, and we really enjoyed reading his article, where he summarizes “What makes Ultra special.” For anyone that still needs an intro to Ultra, this piece is definitely a good entry point, as it clearly outlines all the advantages that position Ultra to compete with traditional game distributors over a rapidly growing market that was valued $151.9 billion in 2019.

Besides leveraging all the benefits of EOSIO Blockchain technology, the magic of Ultra lies in the alignment of interests for gamers and developers, creating an ecosystem of opportunities to earn UOS just by sharing the passion for games.

In the second video sneak peek of the platform, which is currently in closed beta testing, you can take a closer look at the Ultra GameDev Center, where Developers can easily adjust the metadata of their games, issue tokens via the Token Factory, and create limited editions.

Decentralized Blockchain Applications

In a video interview by MBlu Crypto, Roman from the Cryptolions had some exciting news to share, as he introduced and demonstrated live an already working solution for file storage on EOSIO blockchains. It currently supports EOS Jungle Test Net, MeetONE and TELOS. Via Prometheus, users can log in with Scatter, upload a file and generate a download link for sharing.

Larger files are automatically spread across many transactions or blocks and even video files the size of 800 MB have been successfully uploaded to the JungleTestnet. Each upload is shown in the Pupshare Gallery and sorted in categories allowing a good browsing experience. 

There you’ll also find the Prometheus white paper saved as a PDF on the EOS Blockchain. 

Go try it out yourself. But remember that the usage of NET needs to be considered when uploading.

For more information watch the full video interview or join the Prometheus Telegram Chat.

What’s up in Upland?  Quite a lot it seems! 

Soon Uplanders will be able to take off, as the San Francisco Airport (SFO) is about to be opened for business, allowing users to travel to other cities. 

If you’re familiar with the game, you already know that a much-frequented location like an airport is a very lucrative piece of real estate. Each user that wants to travel needs to pass through one of the airport parcels, meaning that the owner of the parcel will earn plenty, just like in monopoly. 

It goes without saying that those parcels will be in high demand and once again the creators of Upland came up with an interesting promotion by announcing the FlySFO drawing!

The Upland team will be selecting the first lucky winner on the 20th of February on a live stream with the Bad Crypto Podcast during NFT.nyc, the leading annual conference for NFTs and digital/crypto collectibles.

EOS Locally, the p2p OTC trading platform, is constantly expanding their offering. After adding EOSDT and USDT (EOS) stable coins as payment options, they’ve just added Paypal.

They’ve also recently opened trading for the popular EOSIO Networks WAX, BOS, and TELOS

Good news for the whole ecosystem, and especially good for WAX traders since they had the chance to earn some extra tokens through the WAX trading give away

You’ll find instructions on how to use EOS Locally in the announcements.

The Vibrant EOSIO Community

As we see movement in the markets and more traditional industries warming up to the concept and potential of blockchains, the underlying technology is still a complex topic and most people are still hesitant to dive in, create accounts and just learn by using wallets and applications.

EOS Nation has always been at the forefront of user education on all knowledge levels, online via multiple social media channels or offline via meetups and events. Tik Tok is gaining popularity and defining a new format, and we’re happy to announce that we started producing educational content there as well.

On our EOS Nation’s Tik Tok account you’ll already find several EOSIO topics and features covered in short and practical video clips. If you’re active on Tik Tok, come visit us, learn more about EOSIO and show us some love. ❤️

EOS Nation is a top 21 Block Producer on the EOS public network. We earn inflation rewards based on the percentage of tokens staked towards us. Those rewards are reinvested into EOSIO community, tools, and infrastructure. Help grow the ecosystem by staking your vote to eosnationftw for BP or proxying to proxy4nation. Visit proxy.eosnation.io for more information.

Remember, we never accept compensation in exchange for featuring projects in the EOS Hot Sauce. That means if a project is included in the EOS Hot Sauce, it’s because we believe that project brings value to the EOSIO ecosystem and we want our community to know about it!

Are you building an interesting project on EOSIO? We want to hear from you! Reach out to us on social media or email info@eosnation.io. 

Thanks for supporting EOS Nation and for reading this week’s edition of EOS Hot Sauce! Want more spicy updates? Check out some of our recent EOS Hot Sauce episodes!

Ocean Defenders NFT Launch

In the spirit of the emerging SOLARPUNK movement, The Ocean Defenders are determined to build a platform for a synergistic lifestyle. Here we come together to use our individual powers to preserve the cradle of life, our oceans.

Everyone can become an Ocean Defender, each in their own individual way. We welcome you.

Read More »

Heidi Taillefert presents: Vintage Valentines

The Vintage Valentine series was conceived to mimic turn of the century valentine’s day cards, reflecting an era when society pretended to hide the more salacious habits of so many people during that time. On top of the physical pieces, this collection also features digital copies, published as Vintage Valentine Card NFTs on the carbon-neutral WAX blockchain.

Read More »

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Disclaimer: The information provided above does not constitute investment advice, financial advice, trading advice, or any other type of advice whatsoever, and the information on our website should not be trusted as such. We present this information to you as general market commentary. The information does not constitute investment advice or any professional financial advice of any sort whatsoever. We do not advise or recommend that you buy, sell, or hold any cryptocurrency, digital token, ICO, or digital asset whatsoever. We advise users to conduct their own due diligence and consult with a qualified financial advisor before buying, selling, or holding any type of digital asset or cryptocurrency. We will not be held responsible for any investment decisions made based on the information provided on the website.

Daniel Keyes

Chief Operating Officer (COO)
Responsibilities include: product management, operations, community
Location: Toronto, Canada

Prior to founding the first EOS community in Toronto and co-founding EOS Nation, Daniel spent a decade in the financial technology industry working several diverse roles. His extensive experience in customer service, sales, sales coaching, agent training, digital marketing, digital process management (lean green belt), and product management (certified scrum master, certified product owner) eventually lead him to consulting for a blockchain dev shop.

Daniel earned a Bachelor of Journalism from Ryerson University in 2009 and worked as a chase producer intern at Global TV.

Daniel lives by the principles of Truth, Love, and Freedom.