One of the goals of EOS Asia is dedicating our technical strengths to maintain a highly available and robust network for the EOS community.  So we have Y-combinator backed engineers with an extensive experience running multi-region, high available, recovering applications that are used by tens of millions of people.  I think these are the real technical challenges that the BPs will face when the EOS main net goes live.

EOS right now is at the center of tension for the blockchain world.  The stakes are actually quite high here.  There will for sure be malicious actors trying to launch all kinds of technical attacks.  Technical attacks such as DDoS to the system for their benefit.  If BPs fail to address and recover from these attacks people will lose faith in the technology.  Then, no dApp developer will want to build on the platform that constantly fails because BPs won’t be able to do their job.  I think we collectively as a BP community have a huge stake to maintain a highly available network for the EOS ecosystem.

Beware of Unqualified BPs

I feel like right now a lot of BPs are not paying enough attention to the technical challenges of running EPs.  They are doing PR and a lot of marketing in trying to get people to vote for them.  However, they are not prioritizing the most fundamental thing which is whether or not they have the right technical people can run the BP nodes.  This problem is particularly problematic in the Asian region in my opinion.  A few of them that are listed online never really participated in a textnet, or some have participated but never really maintained or kept it updated.  Time is running out as we have just about a month to go so it is time to take this seriously.

Helping Other BPs through Our Technical Experience

EOS Asia really wants to help other BPs to polish up their technical plans and contribute our technical experience to help the community as a whole to have really high technical standards.  We think that is the fundamental of running a BP node.  Furthermore, we help translate those materials to the BP community to make sure we have a more robust network to withstand all kinds of malicious attack.  Bridging the technical gap will be key for EOS Asia.

The post EOS Asia Brings Technical Strengths to the EOS Community appeared first on Startup Radar.

EOS Asia is one of the few EOS Block Producer Candidates that have the technical ability to create their own dApps.  One of those is called EOS Gems.

The inspiration for EOS Gems came from when we were building the EOS Asia site which features a huge rotating 3D Chestahedron of the EOS logo.  When you run your mouse over it, it moves around and follows the mouse.  It was really fun for us to build the website and play with the logo, but after we built it we couldn’t stop playing with it.  So we thought why not just give every EOS lover a chance to own a gem like this.

EOS Gem characteristics

The EOS gems will come in different shapes and colors.  They will also have different properties.  They can even be mined or fused to create new gems and these new gems will have totally new characteristics.  The EOS community will be able to trade these gems or give it away as a gift.  Every single gem will have a very nice showcase so you can showcase your gem to the world.

The website will be used as the interface for the EOS Gems.  It would awesome for every EOS site to have these specialized EOS gems.  It is unique and could be a symbol to bring the community together.

dApps will take EOS Mainstream

I have a strong passion for EOS and will strive to make the EOS community better.  Myself, as well as all of the EOS Asia team, believe that in order to make Blockchain technology mainstream so that everyone can use it the platform really needs to have killer dApps.

The reason Vitalik created Ethereum was that he was playing World of Warcraft and one of the characters he really liked significantly got reduced.  Blizzard decided that that particular character didn’t need to have so much power anymore.  Vitalik was very frustrated because that was the only character he was able to play at a high level.  He felt there needed to be a game that was more maintained by the community and that if I have a particular character it will always be there.

The same can be applied with the gems.  If anyone owns a gem, it should be theirs forever.  It is a contract between the gamer and the game.  If the game decided to break the contract the gamers lose trust in the game.  With gems and cryptoKittes, one big thing is immutability.  This thing becomes an asset.  If a gem is really rare and it’s proven to be rare because the math behind it is there in the contract and nobody can change it.  We will restrict the number of gems that can come out at a given period of time.

Therefore we are bringing in a lot of people who have a lot of gaming experience than ourselves.  We have an advisor who has already built a mobile game with over 60 million downloads.  We need to start somewhere for blockchain gaming and gems and cryptoKittes are a great way to start and get the mainstream involved.

The post EOS Gems Coming Soon! appeared first on Startup Radar.

TXT Traffic Exchange Token

TXT rewards users for viewing and engaging with ads.  They will be tokenizing advertising value of digital activities, across all devices and browsers.  Therefore simply put they are going to incentivize viewers for viewing ads and they are going to have a mobile app and a plug-in to connect to the TXT ecosystem.  The main mission of the dApp is to remove the middleman man.  TXT will be focused on websites, news websites, blogs, and etc.

How it Works

Users will need to install a browser plugin or a mobile app.  Once they do that they can start earning tokens just by viewing the ads on their network.  The views will be validated by miners.  Users with higher authenticity values will earn more tokens over time.

Current problems with digital advertising.

• End users are blocking more and more ads.
• Bots eat 20% of ad spend.
• Middlemen take 60% of ad revenue.
• Middlemen and advertisers monopolize governance.

Google currently makes the biggest share of the ad revenue but by using TXT publishers will be able to publish their ads and viewers if they view the ad using the TXT mobile app or browser plug-in, viewers of the ad will get a small percentage of the TXT tokens which the publisher pays and also as a cool edit feature users will be able to tip a website similar to the way brave browser is doing it at the moment.  Therefore TXT will put the power back in the hands of the users.

Great for Advertisers and Publishers!

Cutting out the middleman is the key with TXT.  Advertisers and publishers will save money from crowd-validated impressions.  Also, publishers can earn tokens directly from viewers through the tip system.  They will also be able to get crucial data regarding ad impressions and clicks that are confirmed by validator nodes.  Furthermore, these validator nodes will use machine learning-based algorithms to reject fraudulent events.  The data is encrypted so that only the authorized parties may view it.  There will also be an in-browser engagement metrics to filter out the fake traffic.

EARLY ADOPTERS:  BRANDS AND PUBLISHERS

The post EOS DAPP TXT Traffic Exchange Token Explained appeared first on Startup Radar.

EOS Gems

We will create dApps ourselves. We are working on two dApps at the moment. The first one is EOSGems.io. The inspiration came when we were building the EOS Asia site. On our site, we will have this giant rotating 3D Chestahedron, which is the EOS logo shape, that moves when you move your mouse. It’s really fun to see and poke around with. If you haven’t seen our site, I highly recommend you to check it out.  The dApps of EOS Asia will be truly unique.  

So we thought, why not give every EOS lover a chance to own a gem like this. Gems will come in different shapes and color. They can be mined and fused together to create new gems that have different characteristics. You can also, obviously, trade your gem. And most importantly, you can showcase your rare gem to the world in 3D.

We are also providing technical consultation to the second dApp that we are working on called TXT. It stands for Traffic Exchange Token. The website is at txtnet.io. It’s the first EOS-based advertisement protocol that pays the viewers. With the TXT browser plugin installed, viewers will only see ads that give them rewards. Any other ads will be blocked.

The amount of TXT viewers made can be used to purchase premium content or tip for websites. So if say I really enjoyed watching some youtube channel, I can tip the channel owner with some TXT. TXT also prevents user privacy from leaking because no user privacy data is stored anywhere.

This is especially something that a lot of people pay attention to now after the Facebook privacy scandal. All user privacy data is stored only locally and can be tweaked/removed by the user. You know exactly what is being sent and it can be changed at any time. We believe TXT is a revolutionary innovation in the Internet advertising industry.

Tech Sharing

We will not only create dApps ourselves. We are going to teach other devs to create EOS DApps. Doing tech sharing is also something we have a lot of experience with. Our team has done tech sharings in major tech conferences such as QCon, Ruby Conf, JS Conf and AWS Summit. I have personally helped to grow the React China community, which is a frontend framework, to grow from just a few dozens of people to more than 15 thousand developers.

We will be creating tutorials to teach other people to create DApps. In fact, we are thinking about doing a tutorial on how we build EOS Gems step by step, so people can follow us and see how EOS Gems come to life. We will also be hosting hackathons with one the biggest developers community in China – SegmentFault – to host 4 hackathons in 4 different cities around Asia.

So really, the first goal of EOS Asia is really to do everything we can to create and teach and fund dApps that will take EOS mainstream and thus take Blockchain mainstream.

The post The dApps of EOS Asia appeared first on Startup Radar.

It’s important to me that an organization like EOS Go exists and thrive.  This is because this is where all the beginners will come to find each other and learn more about EOS.  I think every BP should find a way to contribute to EOS GO in the future as well.

I actually want to list some other candidates besides ourselves that I found is really helpful to the EOS BP community.  

EOS Sweden

EOS Sweden is doing great work educating and organizing most of the BP community.  While at the same time leading to it’s technical knowledge in the area.  They bring together all kinds of people wanting to join the EOS community, have great discussions about blockchain, and developing new dApps.

EOS 42 London

EOS 42 London have similar values to ours.  They focus deeply on the technical importance that running as BP brings but at the same time they want to offer more options to the token holders through dApp development.  They aim to protect the EOS network through high performance, reliable network support, investing to enable it to scale, protecting precious EOS token resources and value, and empowering the community to create a healthy and sustainable ecosystem.  Furthermore, they have pledged a proportion of profits to blockchain education charitable causes.  

EOS Canada

EOS Canada is another great candidate that’s trying it’s best to make the BIOS process as seamless as possible.  They have been active in running and testing the community testnet.  As well as in the creation of the BIOS Boot sequence.  In addition, they have also been building various community tools to help the EOS ecosystem grow.  They want to become the hub for companies, entrepreneurs, and dApp developers for the EOS.IO network. 

EOS NY 

EOS NY not only educates token holders but also giving a good point of view to BPs on how the network should be run.  They are co-founded by two blockchain enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, and strong believers of the vision EOS seeks to make into a reality. 

The post 4 EOS Block Producer Candidates To Know appeared first on Startup Radar.

We call ourselves the Avengers of the EOS community. EOS Asia has an all-star international founding team that brings together talents of China, Europe, United States and South Korea.

We are a very technical team. Our core technical members are backed by Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator.  We have built applications used by 10s of millions of users.

A little bit of background about myself.

My name is Dafeng. I’m the co-founder of EOS Asia. I also co-founded Strikingly.com, which is one of the largest website publishing platforms. We have more than 2 million people who published websites through Strikingly, backed by Silicon Valley incubator – Y Combinator. I started coding when I was 14 years old and during college, I created 3 Facebook apps that have 20 million users. So I have quite a bit of experience running distributed high transaction systems.

I co-founded EOS Asia with Joseph Fanelli.  He is the founder of EOS Link, EOS Go China ambassador, and the co-founder of webao.co.  Joe and I met through a mutual friend. We are both like the biggest EOS fans around, so our common friend decided to connect us both. And when we met each other, we immediately bonded together very well. We both share the passion for EOS and want to make EOS community better. Joe was already quite involved in the EOS community at that time, helping EOS Go and also helping BPs in China to set up their tech infrastructure. I was working on EOS-based DApps games.

Making Blockchain Technology Mainstream

Both of us are very passionate about EOS because we believe in order to make blockchain technology a mainstream technology that everyday people can use, the EOS platform needs to have killer DApps that have widespread adoption. That is if we want to make blockchain technology, not just a technology that geeks use, but also allow everyday people, like my parent and my friends, to use. We can only achieve it through DApps.

EOS is the only platform at the moment, but we see great possibilities.

The post EOS Asia the Avengers of the EOS Community appeared first on Startup Radar.

EOS is a blockchain technology by Dan Larrimer the creator of Steem and BitShares.  They’ve raised over $2.6 billion so far in their 350-day ICO.  EOS is a platform for decentralized applications.  They promise faster transaction speeds and more scalability.  In addition, developers can build applications on EOS but they will need to have EOS coins to use the EOS blockchain.

EOS works off of DPOS which stands for deligated proof of stake.  Therefore, basically how that works is that anyone who is an EOS token holder will have the ability to vote.  Vote for what?  Block Producers.  The problem with Ethereum and Bitcoin is that the mining power is with only 2-3 mining pools.  Therefore, they have more than 51% of the actual mining power.

There are not only 21 block producers for EOS.  However, there will be over a hundred that can still receive votes, get paid, and have some incentive to be a block producer.  They will act as backups in case the 21 producers need to be replaced.

Introducing EOS Asia

I am happy to showcase EOS Asia, a Block Producer candidate Startup Radar will be teaming up with.  EOS Asia is a world-class technical team and are seasoned blockchain DApp developers.  Therefore, as Asia’s most international and technical Block Producer candidate, we’re bringing together EOS super fans from China, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and more.

This article will introduce EOS Asia’s team, core values, current progress, future development, and contributions to the community. Furthermore, we will also share our understanding and beliefs about the future of the EOS ecosystem.

Highlights of EOS Asia:

• World-class technical team (Y Combinator, Alibaba Cloud MVP, speaker at various technical conferences)
• Most international team (China, Europe, USA and Korea)
• Dedicated to creating mainstream EOS DApps

We are the Avengers of the EOS community. EOS Asia has an all-star founding team that brings together wizards of China, Europe, United States and South Korea. Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator has backed our core technical members.  As well as recognized by well-known industry veterans. With 15 years of experience in server and cloud technology, handling applications for tens of millions of users, we’ll bring the best off of technology and international representation.  We will make EOS the blockchain infrastructure for mainstream applications.

Our team has previously built games and applications that are used by tens of millions of people.  Furthermore, we are committed to building DApps that will take EOS technology to mainstream adoption.  In addition, our goal is to ensure EOS continues its success as a healthy, community-driven decentralized protocol.  We will fight anyone who wants to privatize the ecosystem for their own benefit.

Dafeng Guo – Cofounder

Dafeng is co-founder and CTO of Strikingly.  He graduated from Y Combinator in 2013. A successful serial entrepreneur, he previously has created Facebook apps with more than 20 million users. Dafeng has been coding since he was 14 years old.  In addition, he has been deeply involved in the technical community. He has spoken at various technical conferences including QCon, SDCC, Computing Conference, RubyConf, and JSConf. Furthermore, in 2017, Dafeng was awarded as Alibaba Cloud Tech MVP for his contribution to the cloud computing community in China. As a blockchain and EOS enthusiast, Dafeng is committed to contributing his technical insight and passion to the EOS community.

Joseph Fanelli – Cofounder

Joseph is the founder of EOS Link, EOS Go China ambassador, a guest writer for NEO City of Zion, and co-founder of webao.co. Over the years he has cooperated with many large corporations including China’s Tencent QQ Music, overseeing large projects and taking the helm of NIO Capital’s online presence, all while managing multiple companies throughout Asia. With EOS Link, Joseph seeks to bridge the gap between Block Producer candidates around the world.  Especially between East and West. Through EOS Link, he has coordinated efforts and provided technical support to multiple Block Producer applicants. With a love for EOS and a relentless drive to push the EOS community forward, he teamed up with Dafeng to create EOS Asia. He offers not only milestone contributions at the technical level but also valuable perspective for our communities.

Jinma Li – Head of Operations in China

Jinma is the founder of Xiaoma Capital (笑马资本) and creator of the brand “Crypto Golden Horse Award” (币圈金马奖). He is a senior developer with five years of experience and has architected and implemented applications with more than two million users. As a crypto KOL and enthusiastic writer, Jinma has produced a wide range of articles covering blockchain technology, investment, and technical analysis. His writings have received significant attention and have attracted over hundred thousand followers. Jinma believes strongly in the potential of the EOS blockchain and shares all of our core values at EOS Asia. At EOS Asia, Jinma will lead operations in China.

John Yoon – Head of Operations in Korea

John Yoon is the head editor of Startup Radar, a startup tech media platform that helps Korean startups go global. Furthermore, he has been writing about the Korean startup and blockchain ecosystem for over 4 years with over 600 online articles. Before Startup Radar, he was the head editor at Seoul Space, Korea’s first tech incubator, and co-working space. In addition, he has worked closely with The Ministry of SMEs and Startups as well as KOFAC (Korea Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Creativity). Currently, he is the International BD Manager at 500v2. John will lead the operations of EOS Asia in Korea.

Tyler Diaz – Blockchain Developer & Evangelist

Tyler has the distinction of being the youngest person accepted into Y Combinator. He started coding at the age of 12 and sold his first company when he was 16 years old. With experience at Teespring, MojoTech, and Strikingly, Tyler has been responsible for developing technical infrastructure for millions of users and hundreds of millions of dollars in transactional volume. At EOS Asia, Tyler will be contributing his broad technical skills to teach and inspire more developers to create EOS DApps that reach the masses.

DApp Projects

What sets EOS Asia apart from many other block producer candidates is our world-class application design and development capability. Our team has built and scaled products from zero to millions of users.  Therefore we know what it takes to achieve massive growth by covering all angles from design to tech to business. We ’re dedicated to creating EOS DApps that everyone can use and love. EOS Gems and TXT are currently in development. We aim to be leaders in the EOS DApp community, serving as the premier example of the possibilities of building on the EOS platform and continuously shepherding talented developers worldwide to EOS.

EOS Gems

Every EOS fan needs a gem. EOS Gems is an EOS-based DApp and blockchain game that EOS Asia will produce, allowing players to trade, fuse, and collect gems. Inspired by Cryptokitties, EOS Gems brings EOS to the masses. Players cultivate and showcase their gem collection.  They can fuse gems to create new and unique shapes and effects. To bring the beauty and wonder of EOS Gems to life, the rendering engine and user interface will be custom-built with three.js. Following the launch of EOS Mainnet, we will airdrop EOS Gems to EOS holders, including a number of rare and mysterious gem forms. Stay tuned!

Website: https://www.eosgems.io

Traffic Exchange Token – TXT

TXT (Traffic Exchange Token) is a revolutionary innovation in the Internet advertising industry. TXT targets the $335 billion market of digital advertising, which currently operates in a black box. Through the deployment of event tracking and validation mechanisms on the EOS blockchain, TXT aims to put the power of advertising data back in the hands of the user, remove massive middlemen who take a majority of ad spend, and eliminate fraudulent traffic reporting. The high transaction volume requirements of TXT can only be accomplished with EOS. EOS Asia will provide technical support and advice to TXT.

Website: https://www.txtnet.io

EOS Go BP Portal  

The EOS Go BP Portal is EOS Go’s official hub for Block Producers and Block Producer candidates. With all the new BP candidates popping up around the world, the Portal has a responsibility to organize, showcase, and evaluate the candidates. BPs will come together on the Portal to learn from and communicate with each other.  They will also help organize or participate in offline events. The goal is to achieve mutual understanding between BPs and the community.

Website: http://bp.eosgo.io/

EOS Code Academy

EOS Code Academy will provide online training for developers to create DApps and take EOS mainstream.

1. Live Streaming Tutorial Sessions – EOS Asia will invite blockchain developers and industry experts to stream video tutorials through our official website. We will discuss the core concepts of EOS, walk through the EOS codebase, and invite everyone interested in building EOS DApps.
2. Online Courses and Tutorials – EOS Asia will open-source our technical knowledge of EOS and compile them into online courses such as “Building EOS DApps 101” and “How to Run an EOS Block Producer Node”. In addition, these courses will be available to everyone for free. Therefore, as one of the most technically savvy Block Producer candidates, EOS Asia is committed to sharing our depth of knowledge to the community.3.
3. Community Q&A – EOS Asia will organize community Q&A sessions in our Telegram group at 9 p.m. on 10th of every month. In these sessions, our team will answer technical questions and share our DApp development experience.

EOS Hackathons

EOS Asia will promote the adoption of EOS by hosting hackathon events together with our partners at SegmentFault. SegmentFault is one of the largest developer communities in China and has hosted some of the largest hackathons in China since 2012. The hackathons will take place in four different cities: Hangzhou, Beijing, Guangzhou and Hong Kong. Learn more details at the website https://segmentfault.com/hackathon-2018

Conferences & Meetups

EOS Asia will organize and participate in conferences around Asia. We understand that public knowledge and awareness of EOS is still lacking.  Therefore, our goal is to promote EOS technology and values to the general public.  As well as bring all EOS fans together to maximize impact.

EOS Asia will employ enterprise-level cloud servers using Amazon Web Services (AWS). In the launch stage, especially immediately after the Mainnet launch in June 2018, block producers will require a high degree of flexibility in order to respond to the rapidly changing needs of the EOS DApp community. Therefore, building our infrastructure on AWS provides this flexibility by allowing rapid upscaling based on current network requirements.

Cloud servers also provide portability, which allows us to painlessly redeploy servers in the additional region as needed. Therefore, the team behind EOS Asia has extensive experience with running cross region AWS services that served billions of requests and spoke in AWS Summit conference.

We choose not to use bare metal infrastructure for this beginning stage due to the high difficulty of rapid-response scaling. However, we will consider bare metal infrastructure in the future, when the technical requirements for block producer become more apparent and predictable. Furthermore, bare metal servers offer benefits for efficiency and cost reduction in the long term, but only if computing requirements are more stable.

Initial Stage – Tech Specification on the Cloud

We plan to deploy our server instances in AWS Seoul, Singapore and Tokyo regions to best serve the Asia EOS community. In addition, these instances will be optimized for high availability, high memory performance, and strong resiliency against possible attacks.

Our initial setup on AWS are summarised in the points below and may scale depending on demand:

• Primary and Backup Block Producer Node:
  • Network 10 Gbps (up to 25 Gbps)
  • AWS Shield (Managed DDoS Protection)
  • Intel Xeon 8 vCPUs / 256GB RAM / 1TB SSD
• Public Full Node:
  • Network 10 Gbps (up to 25 Gbps)
  • AWS Shield (Managed DDoS Protection)
  • Intel Xeon 4 vCPUs / 256GB RAM / 1TB SSD
• Testnet:
  • Network 1G High Shared Network
  • AWS Shield (Managed DDoS Protection)
  • Intel Xeon 4 vCPUs / 32GB RAM / 128GB SSD

Network Topology

Our high-level cloud infrastructure network topology is designed as illustrated below.

Our infrastructure follows the Well-Architected framework from AWS to provide the most secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient services.

We plan to deploy nodes to multiple AWS region starting in Seoul followed by Singapore and Tokyo to best serve the Asia EOS community. Furthermore, all the incoming requests will be routed to an appropriate region using Route53 based on geolocation proximity, performance, and availability.

Availability Zones separates into two regions

AWS Availability Zones are engineered to be isolated from failures in other Availability Zones. In addition, Availability Zones within a region provide inexpensive, low-latency network connectivity to other zones in the same region. In case of any failure in the node, replicating data synchronously across data centers will be fast. The dual Availability Zones provide active redundancy for the nodes. Therefore, when the nodes of a particular Availability Zone fail their health checks, ELB (Elastic Load Balancing) will stop sending traffic to those nodes and automatically failover to healthy nodes in other Availability Zones with no manual intervention.

We apply high security at all layers: Virtual private cloud (VPC), subnet, load balancer, every instance, operating system, and application. Therefore, all traffic will pass through AWS WAF and AWS Shield services. AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service.  It will safeguards applications. In addition, AWS Shield provides always-on detection and automatic inline mitigations that minimize application downtime and latency.

Mature Stage – Tech Specification on Bare Metal

Once the resource utilization becomes apparent, we will consider moving the cloud infrastructure to dedicated servers to increase efficiency and reduce cost in the long run. Therefore, all the infrastructure we set up on AWS is automated using Terraform and Ansible. Furthermore, we firmly believe in the approach of Infrastructure as Code to automate and codify infrastructure. This makes moving to bare metal IDC set up much easier. In addition, we are still evaluating IDC vendors based in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Seoul and will release more detailed evaluation reports at a later date.

We are also exploring the possibility of using AWS Bare Metal Instance.  The server specification offering is limited at the moment.  However this approach combines the best of cloud and bare metal.  Without the hassle of maintaining the stability, availability, and security of IDC.

Core Values

100% dedicated to the community.

We will never take bribes or kickbacks.

We reject the struggle for power and profit.

Strive for the health of the EOS ecosystem as a whole.

Mainstream

We aim to use our technical ability to create DApps that will push for widespread adoption and take EOS into the mainstream. Furthermore, we will create DApps ourselves, and we will teach, inspire and fund others to do the same.

Collaborative

We believe that a decentralized network requires open collaboration among individual BPs. Therefore, EOS Asia engages in open discussion with other Block Producer candidates.  Furthermore, offers free technical consultations and community support. EOS Asia hopes to join forces with other BPs to fulfill our mission.

Website: www.eosasia.one

Twitter: https://twitter.com/eosasia_one

Steemit: https://steemit.com/@eos-asia

Medium: eosasia

Business: [email protected]

Tech: [email protected]

The post EOS Block Producer Candidate – EOS Asia appeared first on Startup Radar.