They say bear markets are for building and that’s precisely what the team focused on this past month. Let’s all get our bearings, and jump in.
We expanded the networks available on our testnet, open-sourced our demo application, increased the robustness of the network, added new testing and monitoring, developed our beta program, and had some candid conversations. Let’s jump into a quick recap and then talk about what’s on deck.
Testnet Expanded to 6 Networks
This month we expanded our testnet to six networks! The testnet now supports deployability of Spanning Contracts on both Rinkeby and Mumbai and three new outbound-only networks — BSC Testnet, Arbitrum, and Ropsten. These new networks allow our partners to develop on the testnets for their eventual mainnet deployment and allow the Spanning team to continue our testing with a more robust testnet.
Open-Sourced the Demo Application
To show just how easy it is to build a dapp with the Spanning Network, the team open-sourced our Demo App along with step-by-step tutorials complete with videos to build your own version. These tutorials walk anyone through deploying their first Spanning Application. We promise it’s so simple, that even non-devs can follow these to deploy spanning contracts (verified and tested in-house).
Tutorials here: Your first token, Your first NFT, & Your First Spanning Web App
Github Link: https://github.com/spanninglabs/app-showcase
Increased Robustness of the Network
Audits, additional node support, and internal tracking, oh my. We focused on adding more robustness to the network. This means more validation and a strong foundation that the network is ready to support our customers.
- Secured an audit partner for our smart contracts — Certik. We are actively in the review stage. Follow our results here
- Added Figment and public RPCs as redundant node providers in addition to Ankr for both listening to and settling transaction requests
- Added an internal system for tracking transactions and submitting auto retries for spurious failures (like dropped network connections)
Network Testing & Monitoring
This month we made the following updates to our network testing & monitoring to help show you how serious we are about our uptime.
- Added a watchdog that cycles through all of our network paths and automatically alerts the team when there is a failure or network slowdown
- Fixed a bug in our metrics reporting that caused our metrics to go silent if there was an Ankr node provider outage
- Setup a developer-specific testing environment for load testing and experimental testing without affecting the production deployment
- Achieved 100% unit test coverage on our Spanning Protocol smart contracts!
Developed our Beta Program
The Mainnet Beta program is now official! We have some sweet deals for these initial beta partners and we’re excited to work with them to expand our network tooling.
Beta Program Goals:
- Onboard early access customers to mainnet with the right support
- Intentionally begin to scale the network
- Build out supporting developer tooling — i.e. how can we make it as easy as possible for developers to integrate their apps with the network
- Strengthen our roadmap through validation
Our program is almost completely filled for phase one (through November), but if you are interested in the next phase reach out to us by filling out this partnership form.
Media Features
And last but not least, we were able to participate in some fun AMAs this month. If you’re interested in hearing directly from our founders about these updates, these links are the perfect listen.
Alright! What’s next?
Over the next 1–2 months, it’s “build build build”. We have the following projects in our pipeline:
- Beta Program will kick off and bring multiple partners to Spanning Labs Mainnet through the end of this year
- Increase network tooling — including a frontend for testing crosschain transactions and a crosschain explorer to view Spanning Network transactions
- Internal architecture updates — Better load balancing across various nodes and zones, better distribution across various cloud providers and geographic regions, and more transparent transaction status monitoring for the public after the initial request is submitted
- Additional support resources for our developer community — including more videos, tutorials, and demo applications