iExec Project Update #07 — January 2019
Published in
7 min readJan 31, 2019
Recent weeks have been extremely productive for iExec in terms of product development, business development, and brand-building both in Europe and Asia. This monthly wrap-up is packed with exciting news. iExec Core Alpha is released, private repos are now public, brand-new friendly documentation is available, and much more — enjoy the reads!
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iExec V3: Enterprise Edition
The next major milestone release is iExec V3. Read about the new features and what this means for enterprise adoption of blockchain solutions. ⤵️
Technical Update
- On December 18th, 2018, iExec organized its 3rd ‘Workerdrop’ event, inviting the community to participate in testing the network’s infrastructure. People worldwide connected their computers, renting computing power as iExec Workers and earning RLC in the process.
- The iExec dev team has written new middleware (iExec Core), based on the previous (XtremWeb-HEP), as results observed our series of Worker Drops. iExec Core is a major improvement because this new piece of software is faster, more powerful as well as more resilient than its predecessor.
- So far, infrastructure testing initiatives were carried out on the old middleware. From now on, iExec Core will be the bridge between OS and applications. Expect much larger improvements during Worker Drop 4, before opening the floodgates for public worker pools. This is essential prior to the release of an enterprise-ready version of iExec that can support the most challenging projects.
- The iExec Core Alpha Release that introduced our new middleware earlier this week also came with several repositories made available to the public. Those with a technical eye can a take a sneak peek at some of the upcoming features in V3.
- January has also been a month of hard work on easy-to-read documentation. There is now a central knowledge repository with everything you need to enjoy a developer-friendly product. How to become a worker? How to execute a task? How to deploy an application? How does PoCo work? All the answers are now only a click away in the iExec Docs.
- Gitcoin recently introduced Kudos to send sincere compliments and show appreciation for a community. We instantly loved the idea and created limited edition non-fungible tokens (NFT) to thank our community. The first one, the iExec Pionner kudo, has been sent to all the addresses that participated to Worker Drop 3, as a sign of our acknowledgment. The second one, the iExec Supporter kudo, is available for sale and will be gifted to all those helping us make decentralized cloud computing a reality. Kudos can be seen on your Gitcoin profile or any ERC 721 wallet.
- Dev Letter 27 is on its way and will address the technical roadmap that will lead us to V3.
Noteworthy Releases
- Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the ability of machines to understand and interpret human language the way it is written and spoken. Our 6th issue of Dapp of the Week explores how we are already bridging this gap by introducing Troubadour, a dapp developed by Daan Helsoot and powered by iExec.
- With iExec, any application can benefit from the advantages of decentralization. Read about a series of dapps already powered by iExec’s decentralized cloud network, and get inspired to build yours!
- With a little help from Lumi Wallet, you can easily buy, sell, and store RLC. The team at Lumi also published an article about iExec’s global market for cloud resources, along with a little guide on how to get RLC.
- iExec was in the jury of the Ubisoft Startup Program, selecting the handful of projects that will participate in the 3rd season of this acceleration journey.
- iExec joined Binance Info’s transparency initiative and got verified with a V label for our regularly updating information and communications.
Business Development and Events
- Business development is currently focused on the release of V3, which is planned for May. Our goal for this release is to have it organize multiple market networks, forming the very first constellations of the iExec ecosystem.
- Networks are made of different typologies of actors, each one either selling its cloud resources, buying resources from others or both. In this setting, iExec acts as the backbone of the flow of resources between these actors.
- As an example, you may imagine a specific network in which:
- An enterprise is selling huge feeds of data (e.g. sets of driveway images that are labeled “car”, “truck” or “bike”, according to the presence of one of these vehicles on the image),
- A research lab is providing an application (e.g. a free deep learning algorithm that is able to identify the typology of vehicles on driveways)
- A datacenter renting the use of its machines (e.g. a green IT provider with a pay-per-task model),
- An autonomous vehicle software company making use of all these resources, allowing the identification algorithm to slurp up valuable data in order to become sharper at its job and reduce errors to a minimum.
- One provider is feeding the other in a full story, creating positive feedback loops and virtuous network effects. - CEO Gilles Fedak presented the iExec solution to the research team at Huawei in China. The private conference, titled ‘Foundations of Software’, gathered high-profile European researchers on the topics of formal methods, blockchain, programming models and software.
- iExec’s co-founders Haiwu HE, Gilles Fedak and Head of Security Lei Zhang spent 3 days in Shanghai Tech University, working with local researchers on fog computing and 5G scenarios.
- Lei, iExec’s Head of Security, met again with engineers from the blockchain team of the fintech giant Ant Financial, an affiliate company of the Chinese Alibaba Group. We’re looking forward to seeing where discussions around ambitious projects will take us in 2019.
Team Members Update
- Charles de Mauroy joined Lei Zhang in the Security Team, to help streamline the integration of trusted computing technologies (Intel SGX) in our platform.
- Baptiste Castiglione joined the Business Team as an intern. He will carry growth hacking initiatives, and help in clustering our users and prospects into meaningful segments.
- We’ve released a new video in the Team Members Series, where you get to know more about the talents behind iExec. In the spotlight today, we have Hadrien Croubois, PhD research engineer at iExec and designer of ‘PoCo’, the iExec consensus protocol.
- As iExec grows, we need support from all corners of the globe. We are looking for someone in Japan to work remotely and help expand the iExec community locally. Do you feel that’s a mission for you? Apply right here.
Recent Press Mentions
- Distributed systems expert Eric Elliott included iExec in the top blockchain platforms and tech to watch in 2019.
- “We’re moving towards decentralized big data”, says CEO Gilles Fedak in this interview (in French) for Guide du Big Data.
- The limits of secure computation are constantly pushed forward. So what can SGX and TEEs be used for beyond the obvious cases? Discover other common and uncommon uses in this post by Leland Lee.
Upcoming Agenda
- 25 January: iExec Core Alpha Release
- 4 February: iExec workshop at Exoflow, (Lyon, France)
- 25 February: iExec & Lyon-iS-Ai Meetup (Lyon, France)
- 25–28 February: Mobile World Congress 2019 (Barcelona, Spain)
- 5 March: iExec V3 Dev Release
- 5–7 March: Ethereum Community Conference — EthCC (Paris, France)
- 8–10 March: ETH Paris Hackathon (Paris, France)
- 15 May: iExec V3 Release
