The month of March has been extremely productive for the entire technology team. Most of the activities are a continuation of existing development work with some significant highlights for the core platform, infrastructure, and our applications.

Core Development

This month we performed further research and design on how the storage life cycle will work.

Storage Drive Life Cycle

One new concept is the drive life cycle, which will allow participants to contribute to the network with either a dynamic or a fixed drive storage. We had to consider multiple business use-cases to establish a reliable, secure and economically fair process for our decentralised market place.

When someone wants to join the network as a participant, he/she will need to install the required software and commence the storage drive life cycle. This life cycle is essentially a process for onboarding a node, which includes validation checks, and the set-up of an initial default reputation score.

Users/consumers can then announce a “Drive Contract” to initiate an upload to an acceptor node. A market selection process occurs to select the replicators that will agree to providing a file replication service.

From a user’s perspective, there will be several operations that can be initiated which will be used to assist with file uploads.

PrepareDrive Process

• PrepareDrive() – Initiated by a consumer to establish the set of node-replicators that agree to handling drive storage.
• Upload – Upload of file to the decentralised drive.
• Delete() – Deletion of file using the given hash.
• Modify() – Modification of file, which is essentially a combination of Delete() and Upload().
• Directory() – Initiated by a node participant that wants to join a Drive Contract and store files.

The above functions are quite self-explanatory. Basically the operations can be called upon to initiate storage drive operations. A more detailed deep dive explanation of the storage drive life cycle will be available in the technical whitepaper update.

Cross Verification Protocol

The new design also includes cross-verification protocol for replicators. In our ecosystem, the replicators also play the part of verifiers, but replicators cannot verify their own replications. For this, we designed the verification scheme to ensure that participants are adequately validated, file replication is intact and secure, and verifiers challenge replicators accordingly.

With the cross-verification protocol, files are split into several replicators. Split data parts are then encoded with a secret key plus metadata for verification. These are then sent to the replicators. With the data parts stored in the replicators, replicators will then verify each other. This mechanism enables further validation to check the number of copies produced and decrease the chances of cheating or gaming.

We will have more information on this once we have finalised our technical whitepaper update.

PoCA/Free Market

We came up with a new version of the market selection process that we are calling Free Market. This is essentially an improvement to PoCA Market. It is a simpler and more evenly distributed decentralised market selection process for storage nodes. An in-depth explanation of this new market selection concept will be included in the upcoming technical whitepaper update.

More Tech Papers are Coming Soon

The more we dive into development, the more opportunity there is to publish research documentation. Our team is now preparing a few papers that will be made available soon.

• Updated High-Level Technical Whitepaper
  • Includes drive storage, storage streaming, and live streaming
• Updated token economy model
• Staking/vesting

Application Development

Progressing equally well is the development of our applications and engineering projects. We released a few applications in March as well as upgraded some of our existing ones.

Beta Testing for ProximaX File It!, ProximaX Notes and ProximaX Vault

We have launched the initial beta builds for File It!, Notes and Vault which use the ProximaX Sirius test network.

At the time of writing, the following are the current release versions:

• ProximaX File It! 2.0.1-beta.7
• ProximaX Notes 2.0.1-beta.4
• ProximaX Vault 2.0.1-beta.4

Download link: https://suite-app.proximax.io/s/WtNa7QQ2DsGPQKe Password: ProximaX@1

The team would appreciate any feedback via the below Trello board links:

• Notes: https://tinyurl.com/y6sdog8z
• Vault: https://tinyurl.com/y4pk4v5o
• File It!: https://tinyurl.com/y4xd49c7

Office Suite + Collabora is Live

We have been working on a partnership with Collabora and it has paid off. In March, we announced our combined partnership. We believe that their technology alongside our platform will bring a better and more secure end-to-end office productivity suite.

Proof of Concept Solution: Identity System

We have also launched and showcased the ProximaX Identity system that was built in collaboration with 482.solutions. This system was heavily showcased during ProximaX’s participation at BlockchainUA in Ukraine and IoT Asia 2019 in Singapore.

What is ProximaX Identity?

ProximaX identity is a national identity system that uses the ProximaX Sirius platform as a data store. The blockchain stores the identifiers and the storage layer stores the extended national identity data.

ProximaX Identity Splash

ProximaX Identity Basic Process

We have built a proof of concept/working solution. Layered into several components, the solution has both software and hardware which can be extended via a Software Development Kit.

Coming Soon – a NIS1 Wallet

We redesigned and rebuilt the ProximaX Wallet from scratch and we are now almost ready for launch. Our development focused on security, performance, simplicity, and intuitiveness. The new wallet will have a plain design and an easy-to-use scrollable wallet card pane for simple navigation. The new PIN registration and verification enhances security.

Random PIN Shuffle to add more security

Multisignature Support

Easy Wallet Pane Access

Summary

Below is a summary of the progress made in March:

• Research and development of the drive functionality.
• Token economy for storage drive and live streaming.
• Introduction of Free Market.
• Introduction of cross-verification technique.
• Further additions to the public plaform’s knowledge base.
• Beta Testing for ProximaX File It!, ProximaX Vault and ProximaX Notes.
• Proof of concept for Identity Workflow Engine.
• New NIS1 ProximaX Wallet.