From 2022 on, we will resume the monthly highlights newsletter for all languages, so you will always see the English version and Chinese version, and maybe we will add some more languages in the future.

On Sep 2021, we changed our writing style of the monthly newsletter, in the past it was a collection of links to our product change logs, product releases etc., we change to a simpler version with editorial highlights of the research and development, products and marketing. It seems this style is a better format, since those who care about our development do read our websites, blogs and social media often, they don’t need us to repeat old news.

Our monthly newsletter will only focus on certain “highlights” rather like a press release – maybe a small new feature we developed, or a use case we think might make sense to more people. We also plan to include social media updates, worthwhile articles or 3rd party products we think relevant to ArcBlock and shared within our team in the newsletter, so you know what we have discovered and learned during the month.

Product releases and feature highlights

We’ll highlight our products from 3 major pillars:

(1) Blockchain Infrastructure, this includes ArcBlock’s Asset Chain, Block Explorers, and newly joined family member ArcBridge;

(2) Blocklet, this is the foundation for ArcBlock’s own services and components, and also the exact same framework for any developers; Blocklet framework itself is chain-agnostics, it works with any Blockchain, e.g. Ethereum and any EVM compatible blockchains or Layer 2s.

(3) DID, this includes the DID Wallet, our wallet product family, and DID Connect, the application framework to enable Decentralized Identity and Verifiable Credentials.

Blockchain Infrastructure

ArcBridge public beta is live. ArcBridge is the service name and the DID Rollup is the technology under the hood. We’ll publish a series of articles, documents and open source the code of the smart-contract, the Blocklet implementing ArcBridge Node later this year.

ArcBridge itself is a Blocklet, actually almost everything in ArcBlock is Blocklet, including the website content you are reading right now, is powered by Blocklet. This makes it possible for everyone, even the one without any technical skills to run a node by himself/herself simply from the DID Wallet. This will dramatically increase the decentralization of the system as a whole.

At the current stage, since our Blocklet Launcher hasn’t officially launched yet, the only way you can run it is to set up your own Blocklet Service, this requires technical skills. However this will end soon once Blocklet Launcher is live. We will post guides to help everyone on board.

The benefit of running an ArcBridge Node is participating in the bridge operation and as a result the protocol fee is shared across the participants. ArcBridge Node operators will need to pay the cost of keeping the node running, and also pay Ethereum gas fee if they choose to be a “block publisher” which will get a major protocol fee cut in each round. Node operators can still benefit by only verifying transactions without publishing blocks (which will not cost any ETH gas) though the cut will be minor.

ArcBridge Node operator will need to stake native ABT Tokens in order to join the bridge, the stake is a safety guarantee for any transactions initialized or verified by the node, and there is a possible slashing if the node is proven to have evil behaviors. Anyone can verify transactions and anyone can provide fraud proof for evil behaviors.

Blocklet Ecosystem

There is tremendous development around the Blocklet ecosystem, we released two minor updates for Blocklet Server and Blocklet Store, but there are a lot more we have worked under the hood.

Our engineering team improved the experience of Blocklet Launcher, now it supports both crypto payment and credit card payment, this opened up to those who are new to blockchain and crypto.

Stay tuned for a series of product releases in the whole upcoming months, the hard work we have put in this month will pay off in the long run.

DID Wallet

We have focused on working on the next major release of DID Wallet recently. The upcoming DID Wallet 4.0 will have a major facelift from current design, and more importantly we focus on improving the user experiences and aiming on making DID Wallet the most powerful while user friendly wallet in the market. DID Wallet 4.0 will also support many more blockchain and Layer 2 services, and will integrate the decentralized exchanges and cross-chain bridges in the wallet to make sure user’s assets are secure and easy to move around.

Community Building

ArcBlock community is growing. In the last couple of months, our community provided tremendous help by participating in various product tests. Our community leaders helped take back and manage other social network channels like Telegram, and have more engagement on Twitter.

We’d like to highlight this monthly newsletter communication as well. Every newsletter will be written and edited by our leadership team and products team to ensure the personal touch of it (Actually the recent few, including this one you are reading, are all written by our founder Robert Mao himself). We wish it’s a piece of content that is worth your time to read and digest, not some marketing material or links collection.

In the upcoming website update, we might also introduce some cool decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) features such as “member only” sections to provide exclusive insight for ABT token holders and developers. We also plan to integrate community Q&A, make it routine and accessible for every community member. Our goal is to make sure this newsletter can increasingly become a useful information source for people to learn more about what’s going on inside ArcBlock.

ArcBlock In the News

“The Week” magazine mentioned ArcBlock in an in-depth report [“The rise and rise of blockchain and DeFi, and what it means to India”] (https://www.theweek.in/news/biz-tech/2022/01/21/the-rise-and-rise-of-blockchain-defi-what-it-means-india.html)

A recent marketing research “Self-Sovereign Identity Market Outlook: Post Covid-19 Scenario by 2029 | 1Kosmos BlockID, ArcBlock, BanQu” mentioned ArcBlock as one of the “Top companies Influencing in this Market”.