Blacklusion January/February Update

Major NFT Game changes, Validationcore Maps and OneApi rewrite

Validationcore

This month we have been bringing exciting new Features to Validationcore, all revolving around one topic:

Maps

On the Reports page an overview Map was added that shows an overview of all Endpoints of that category and their geographical distribution.

Additionally we added a new page called the “Node Finder”. This new Feature allows the user to place a marker on the map and select a maximum radius, in which Endpoints should be selected. A single list that contains all working endpoints within that radius is also created allowing to easily copy a list of working endpoints close to your servers etc.

Speed Improvements

The past weeks certain queries could take up to 6–8seconds. This is of course unacceptable. This month we have been doing a LOT of changes in the SQL queries and added more Indices to the Database. The result are much faster queries and less hardware requirements to the run the Validationcore API

Whats next?

• Currently we are investigating if a deployment in a dedicated Kubernetes cluster makes sense
• We are working on a Network Info page, that not only shows simple information about the Blockchain, such as ChainId and genesis.json. We are also planning to show stats about the size of the node db_size, atomic database size etc. That way newcomers can more easily understand server requirements
• We are planning to host our own Snapshots directly from the Validationcore, to have a single place for snapshots and config.ini settings etc.
• Now that we have implemented most of the base functionality any validation website should offer, we can move on to more sophisticated features: Heatmaps showing the amount of specific HTTP Codes; Chainwide statistics (e.g. showing availability for endpoint types in a single chart to have easier insights into OVH network outage a couple of weeks ago)

OneApi

The ultimate Plan is to have a tight integration between our products, in particular between the Validationcore, OneApi and our own Infrastructure. To archieve this, we have been doing a lot of internal testing with OneApi. We tested a setup that as a private connection between the Cloudflare Workers and our own Infrastructure. This setup also resolves the original IP on our Infrastructure level, allowing for custom rules and rate limitations.

Rewrite to Typescript

Initially the OneApi codebase was completely written in javascript. This month we rewrote everything into Typescript.

Whats next?

• Rebranding: There is another trademark called OneApi.
• Landing Page: A landing page outlining the features and benefits of OneApi is planned
• Paid Tier: We will offer a paid tier featuring the same single endpoint technology. This will only be handled by our own infrastructure

NFT Game

This month we made BIG changes to our NFT game. In the past we have been pretty silent about the specifics of our game. Basically the initial idea was to have a breeding game, featuring the combination of two different animals species. We already started designing the game assets, landing page etc.

However, the more we were progressing with the game idea, the more cool ideas we got with things we could do with a character-based breeding game. This led us into discarding most of the old concept:

https://blacklusion.gitbook.io/alchemytribe/

We kept the breeding mechanics but applied a much more general approach for the breeding aspects. Now characters can be anything, not only animals. Stay tuned for more announcements soon!

Whats next?

• Launch of the Landing Page (currently already active development)
• Launch of Discord server. We are planning to have the community involved and updated on the development of the game
• Launch of the Game (first half of 2022)

Infrastructure

We are still in the process of updated our infrastructure. As of today all major API types have been online. Unfortunately chip shortages are also affecting us and slowing down the whole process. However, this month we have been canceling old servers and setting up new servers including History / Hyperion and Atomic servers.

Additionally, we are working on a High Availability Prometheus instance deployed on an independent Kubernetes cluster dedicated solely to the monitoring of our infrastructure. Before we have been using Netdata for the monitoring of our servers. With the switch to Prometheus we hope to have a more fine grained control over the metrics and alerts.

Besides the API infrastructure, we’ve been also working on the improvement of our CI/CD pipelines. We have setup multiple pipelines linting code, building Docker images and pushing them to private Repositories.

Whats next?

• We are expecting multiple servers to be delivered soon, allowing us to offer a single endpoint for Chain, Wallet, History, Hyperion and Atomic instead of 3 currently
• Deploying the Production Monitoring Cluster