In January we worked hard to stabilize the MVP, making improvements and optimizing its functionality for the next release. We also had a Q&A session with some very profound questions. The first official SONM meetup took place, starting a global series of meetups with the community. And, at last, but not least, some amazing team members joined SONM team.

Let’s look at the details.

Development News

MVP. We have released the MVP and received an incredible amount of useful data, finding 33 bugs that we are resolving. Soon, you’ll get access to the new and improved version of MVP.

Windows client. We have successfully run and tested the Windows version of SONM client software. Integration testing is in full swing, and we are fixing the bugs.

Order management. We have simplified command line interface to manipulate orders. Now for placing orders users have to enter price in command line.

Previously, the user had to search through the marketplace using slot.yaml file, and then to purchase resources using order.yaml file. Both files got rather similar structure, the only difference was that order.yaml had the price and slot.yaml had not. We have now simplified this process, now just a slot.yaml file is required.

The marketplace. We have optimised the marketplace in handling ASK requests.

The marketplace was collecting a bunch of ASK requests, which was irrelevant because Hubs were already off. We have added the ability for each ASK order to be removed automatically, if a Hub disappears from the network, and doesn’t confirm the relevance of ASK orders.

Locator service. The mechanism of Locator service was changed to assure stability.

Now a Hub must have a public IP address to connect to the SONM network — we have decided to exclude the possibility of using private IP addresses for Hubs to avoid problems with routing with NAT. If the IP address is private, the Hub is not starting and is not entering in its operating mode.

Machine Learning test. The team successfully tested ML tasks on SONM suppliers equipment. Read the full report on this test in SONM CTO Igor Lebedev’s blog.

Video rendering test. We have successfully tested commercial video rendering with RedShift on a 6 GPU Ethereum mining rig, which proves the ability of SONM to handle this type of tasks. You can read a report on this case here.

Mining test. We have successfully tested mining coins using Claymore miner on a 6 GPU mining rig connected to SONM testnet. Details here.

Product Vision Updates

We noticed problems with the bandwidth of Ethereum, with periodic delays in the transactions and the size of the commission fee. The commission fee is now almost $10 totally for a full cycle of SONM marketplace deal and it’s not a good thing for our Customers and Suppliers.

Therefore, we have begun to to take actions according to our “Plan B”, which we mentioned earlier when asked about Ethereum. We will now establish a private Ethereum chain connected with livenet using gateways. Soon you will know more details, stay tuned.

We also introduced the requirement for the Hubs to have a public IP address as a temporary solution. However, we understand that this is not the perfect option. We are going to find a more convenient solution for the Mainnet release.

Marketing

Partnerships

OpenFog Consortium. SONM has become a member of the OpenFog Consortium, a global fog computing organization founded by Cisco, Dell, Intel, Microsoft, ARM, and Princeton University. SONM’s membership in OpenFog allows us to play an active role in shaping the ecosystem’s technical foundation, testing new concepts and ultimately creating new business opportunities through fog computing technologies and solutions.

In continuation of our membership in the OpenFog Consortium we were invited to the consortium member meeting in Hong Kong to hear the latest news, and meet other participants in the industry. SONM was represented at the event by the CTO of the company, Igor Lebedev. We will be releasing a report shortly, in the meantime, you can see photos on Twitter:

Coffee with @CavalliBlaise from @iEx_ec. Let the Fog be with you)) ...a slogan form an @OpenFog t-shirts.

Igor Lebedev (@iolebedev) 31 January 2018

Events

January Q&A session

Our CTO, Igor Lebedev, and Eugene Manaev have been answering a wide range of questions during a Youtube stream. We have received some really interesting questions about the MVP and our technology. You can check the video here:

Join us on Twitter and in Telegram, subscribe to our YouTube channel for not missing the next Q&A session!

First official SONM Meetup

The first official SONM Meetup took place in London and was a great success. All the tickets were sold out in two days. We chose WeWork’s coworking space as a venue, and were glad to see all of you who managed to join us there. The crowd consisted of a mixture of miners, investors, community members and also those curious about what’s ahead for SONM. We were also joined by some media, most notably from the Telegraph and Express newspapers, and Disruptive TV wanted to understand SONM’s technology ahead of our launch this summer.

The meetup commenced with a short presentation from SONM CMO, Olga Kazmina. Our CTO, Igor Lebedev, then took to the floor to discuss the future of fog computing and his perspectives on technology, explaining how SONM’s technology will greatly benefit end users and hardware suppliers.

“What a great event!” commented Olga Kazmina. “Our community is so important to us and I was excited to see so many investors come tonight and support us and to meet new members of our growing community. It means so much to us. We are looking forward to seeing more of you at our events as we roll out more meetups across the world.”

Community

The SONM community has grown a lot for a month! At the end of December, our Twitter account had 15,930 followers, now we are at 24,466. Thats 8,536 new followers. Telegram community has also got almost 2,000 newcomers. We have doubled our Reddit and got 1,407 more likes on Facebook. We are pleased to see that people are interested in what we’re doing!

Team News

This month we have successfully strengthened SONM team:

Eugeny Safronov — Core Development Team Lead. He is the former team lead of development of Yandex Cocaine and also open-source activist & Rust lang core contributor. He was excited about SONM technology a long time ago and became one of our top contributors. Evgeny has already proven himself as a Team Leader and now he is officially on the team.

Alexander Sigaev — Analyst Team Lead. Alexander joined our team in December. He has 7 years experience as a system analyst, has worked in an e-government services projects in the field of cryptography, automation planning and execution of the budget. In his portfolio are projects such as the development of the e-voting system for securities owners.

Camilla Shin — Marketing Team Lead. Camilla is experienced marketing and communications professional with a demonstrated history of working in the hi-tech industry. Skilled in media relations, content management, and corporate communications, she brings her expertise to lead SONM marketing team. Camilla speaks 4 languages and graduated in Journalism at Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU).

Conclusion

Another month of hard work has passed in a glance! This journey becomes even more interesting with every step we forward. Not to mention how thousands of work hours bring you to picture-perfect results. We’ll keep moving forward and keep you informed, stay tuned!

Btw, here are links to our social media channels you might be interested to join:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/sonmdevelopment
Telegram: https://t.me/sonm_eng
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SONMproject/
Website: https://sonm.com
MVP page: https://mvp.sonm.com

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