Blacklusion — Announcing candidacy for the WAX Blockchain
What makes blacklusion an outstanding candidate for the WAX blockchain? All guilds bring excellent software development skills to the table. However, I believe that the current implementations of blockchain technology are mostly targeted to a niche market. Although we have come very far in the past years, they are not always very user-friendly, to begin with.
Relevant background qualifications
With years of experience in not only software development but also in content creation and digital marketing, my goal is to make blockchain more userfriendly and mainstream. When developing software products, only good functionality won’t cut it. My high expectations for the design and user experience result in easy to use products.
User-experience is especially important for an eCommerce blockchain such as WAX.
Employees
Leonard Scheidemantel, 20, CEO: Background in content creation, digital marketing and software development. Currently studying Information Systems at the technical university of Munich.
Server Infrastructure
As of writing this article, I am operating two bare-metal servers. The servers are distributed across two data centers in Finland and Germany. One server is dedicated to hosting publicly available services such as APIs and websites. The other server is solely dedicated to the purpose of producing.
Scaling
All services other than the producer nodes are deployed in docker-containers. This ensures a high degree of freedom when scaling the software side of blacklusion’s infrastructure. The current servers should be sufficient hardware-wise to host the first producer-nodes and other services such as APIs and histories. However, since tasks will probably become more and more demanding in the future, I am planning to expand the current server setup with additional bare-metal servers in different data centers.
Thoughts on governance
Although blockchain technology enables us to execute transactions without the need for a central governing institution, this does not mean that the topic governance should be avoided. The user should always feel safe when performing transactions on the blockchain. Therefore, block producers should actively participate in voting on governance in order to guarantee every user the best possible experience.
Thoughts on transparency and accountability
Transparency is deeply anchored in the values of blacklusion. I am happy to contribute to the EOSIO / WAX community: If not otherwise required, I am planning to make the software projects for the EOSIO ecosystem open source.
One of the benefits of being a small company is the ability to easily find the responsible employee. Since my company only consists of myself, it is easy to hold the right person accountable for the company's actions. If something should ever be not working correctly, there is a 1/1 chance to hit up the right person on Telegram (my account details at the bottom).
Thoughts on security & infrastructure
When operating nodes, security should be the highest priority, besides performance. A possible breach has an impact on the complete network.
Because of that, my producer nodes are running on an isolated server. Additionally, I have taken a couple of steps to further increase the security of my servers. Besides the fundamentals of using SSH-Keys instead of passwords, I have made two-factor-authentication mandatory for all servers. I also tweaked system settings, such as blocking all not mandatory ports and securing the shared memory.
Community benefit project outline
Blacklusions projects always revolve around the effort to make blockchain more user friendly and ultimately more mainstream. This includes developing advanced guides and info material to make the start for new users easier.
Currently, I am investigating how the launch of an IOS /Android App could benefit the user with useful functions (not just displaying stats and graphs).
General information
- Website: blacklusion.io
- Social Media: Twitter, Telegram
- Official WAX Guild candidate name: Blacklusion
- Telos-Testnet node: blacklusionx
- Location of company headquarters: Stuttgart, Germany
