Illusive.gg is in the process of crafting a hub where you can venture into diverse gaming realms, all while wielding the power of your cherished Alien Worlds NFTs. But this isn’t just any ordinary hub — we’re curating an experience that comes complete with a wealth of analytics for each game listing. These insights span both on-chain and off-chain, giving you an unprecedented perspective into the ecosystem.

In-depth Insights

We are developing a bird’s eye view of how NFTs are being utilized across various games. With our platform, you’ll gain clarity on where these prized assets are making waves and discover the trending games that are capturing the hearts of players. This integration isn’t just about the technicalities; it’s about creating a united space that extends beyond the boundaries of the initial game.

Breaking-Down Web2 Walled Gardens in Gaming

Our collaboration with Galactic Hubs is a testament to our commitment to unity and accessibility. We’re breaking down the barriers of the traditional gaming world of walled gardens by creating a seamless entry point into the expansive Alien Worlds metaverse. We’re not just building a platform — we’re building bridges, connecting gaming worlds, and ensuring that everyone, no matter their gaming preference, can find an adventure best suited for them.

As we venture forth, keep an eye out for updates, announcements, and further insights into what’s coming. The future is bright, and together with the Alien Worlds community, we’re set to embark on a journey that promises excitement, exploration, and endless possibilities.

Stay tuned for more, and let’s continue shaping the future of the Alien Worlds metaverse together!

TL;DR

illusive.gg is our WEB3 gaming launcher, specifically built with crosschain in mind. Let us worry about the underlying protocols and enjoy a seamless experience across protocols and standards.

Socials:

Platform: https://illusive.gg
Twitter: https://twitter.com/illusive_app
Discord: https://discord.gg/k8HsANUUSh

What is illusive GG?

Using multiple sites to trade NFTs, and check token prices and stats, all while trying to not get rugged, is not our definition of a great user experience.

We see ourselves as a companion app you want to have open while gaming to find all relevant information about the games you are playing or considering playing.

Use stats to make decisions:

One of the beauties of blockchain gaming is the public data. Smart contract usage and NFT trading history are publicly available. This matters, because, for the first time, it allows us to inspect the statistics of a game, something that is not possible with traditional Web 2.0 technology. Our on- and off-chain analytics help you to find promising projects.

Soo, it’s an NFT Marketplace?

Nope, we are not an NFT marketplace. Our full-fledged NFT browser aggregates listings and data across NFT markets. We believe that many games & game studios will have propitiatory NFT marketplaces in the future. Hence, to create the best possible user experience for our users, we want to integrate the best possible markets, rather than playing an ongoing battle over royalty fees and liquidity. This means integrating different marketplaces for every chain and game.

What sets us apart?

Game launchers have been around for a while. Even in Web3, there are multiple options. However, no launcher has a “true” blockchain integration. Most focus solely on game distribution or NFT trading. Even the sites that offer a great NFT experience lack one of our most important visions: The sharing of NFTs across games.

NFT collection ≠ Blockchain game
On our platform, a game can span across multiple chains and consist of multiple NFT collections. Additionally, other games can use an NFT collection of another game. Opening up assets to third-party games is something that is not possible with Web 2.0 technology and something that is not supported by any launcher currently.

The UI

We could probably do a whole write-up about the UI and some strategic design decisions we have made, but ultimately we took something as complex as blockchain-based games and packaged it in a neat package. We’ve added small animations here and there to let the NFT assets feel more like game items you can collect rather than pngs.

Similarly, how gamers do not care about TCP/IP protocols, but about multiplayer gaming, they shouldn’t care about protocols and NFT standards. We want to move away from the idea of NFTs and protocols and focus on what matters to a gamer: Gaming. Our UI was designed in a way to take out some of the technical fuzz and focus more on the gaming aspect.

What’s up next?

The released version of illusive.gg is just the beginning, we are already working on the next features. The current focus is on the WAX / EOS ecosystem, as this is something we have in our roots and are familiar with. Expansion to other protocols is planned.

Some of the next features we are currently working on include a downloadable client, user inventory, deeper statistics, and more.

About blacklusion

The company behind illusive GG is blacklusion, a Germany-based company. We joined the WAX blockchain ecosystem in 2020 and have been a block producer ever since. We have been developing and providing technical analytics tools such as validationcore.io (stats about blockchain nodes).

Our mission is to create blockchain products that can be used without a computer science degree. With the recent release of illusive.gg we have created a product that focuses less on the technicals and more on a great user experience of an end-consumer.

Socials:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/illusive_app
Discord: https://discord.gg/k8HsANUUSh

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

This month our efforts have been dedicated to our NFT Game, the Validationcore and Infrastructure updates.

Validationcore

New Validationcore Website

Validationcore

We are excited to release the newest version of our Validationcore Website. The whole theme was completely reworked. Major changes include:

• New Navigation sidebar
• Better responsive support
• Filters: Now a filter button appears in the guild list. This can be used to select guilds with certain criteria (Or in the case of the statistics overview: A custom date range can be selected)

Updated Validationcore API

We have updated the schema of our graphql API slightly. The new schema is easier to use. You can explore the APIs in your browser under the following domains:

• GraphQL Playground
• GraphQL Playground

NFT Game

As already teased it in the last months: We are currently working on a NFT based game... Stay tuned for more exciting news in the near future 🚀

Infrastructure Updates

We are excited to announce our new fully indexed hyperion cluster:

https://hyperion.wax.blacklusion.io

This month all of our efforts were focused on our NFT game and on the Validationcore. We also started drastically reworking our infrastructure.

Validationcore

We already released the new code of the Validationcore a couple of months ago. This month we made the following changes:

Add location data to the database

Previously only a boolean was saved to the database stating if the location of an endpoint is correctly described in the bp.json. Now also the Longitude and Latitude will be saved to the database. This will allow us to show the endpoints on a map in the frontend in the future.

New Deployment

Previously the Validationcore was deployed on two of our dedicated servers. This month we move the Validationcore to a total of 5 servers, dedicated solely to the Validationcore:

The master server time coordinates the validations on the other slave servers. The 4 instances all write the data into a single database. The data server also handles the validationcore api and website. By increasing the number of agents we can further limit the request load from a single agent: Previously we would send a request every 10seconds to an endpoint. Now we send a request every 20seconds. The Validationcore is now completely decoupled from our guild’s infrastructure preventing side effects.

New Website

Although not released yet, we are actively working on a new frontend for the validationcore. We believe that we can further improve the experience by adding a new sidemenu and redesigning some of the components such as the api list. The current state of the website refresh can be seen in the following image. The new website is expected to go live within the next weeks:

NFT Game

This month major progress was accomplished in our NFT Game. We added multiple new people to the team and further improved the balancing of the game mechanics. Implementation of the codebase has started as well 🎉

About the game:

In the game you can enter an exciting world of wildlife in which a hybrid between two normal animals can exist — The chimera. The game is based in 1781 and features the practices of alchemy. Alchemists attempted experiments such as trying to create gold from less valuable base metals. In the game you will be able to conduct experiments, breed animals, discover new species and explore the map through expeditions.

Whitepaper:

Introduction

Stay tuned for more information in the following weeks… ! Marketing has not started officially, there is still a lot of great stuff to be revealed.

Infrastructure

Over the past months we gradually added servers to the infrastructure. This month we decided to abandon old servers as well. This means that we started completely replacing old “working” servers for more powerful servers. We started setting them up from scratch and increasing performance and redundancy. This process is still ongoing, since we are still waiting on a couple of servers to be delivered and some nodes are still syncing. Over the next weeks our new servers should be gradually added into our pool. Once the infrastructure refresh is done, all of our API request should only be handled by freshly setup servers.

Currently, the WAX Blockchain is a very busy landscape. 30 Guilds are working on many projects simultaneously. The goal of this write-up is to highlight some of the projects that the guilds are working on. Some of the information was taken from each guilds’ October submission and the according to websites. Note, that this article will only feature a selection of projects, the full-length submissions can be found on the waxguild GitHub:

waxguilds/reports at main · wax-office-of-inspector-general/waxguilds

NFT Collections / NFT Games

• 3dkrenderwax keeps working on the first beta of Rada Quest TCG. It is NFT based game with trading cards and buildings in the adventures of epic sword and sorcery, featuring a real-time strategy system on resource generation, building construction and development of a skill tree
  https://radaquest.net/
  https://gametest.radaquest.net
• R2 and EOS Amsterdam are working together on multiple collectibles. They already released the Mutant Warriors NFTs and are working on a staking system that will be released together with Season 2 sometime in Q1 of 2022
  https://mutant-warriors.com/
• Additionally, R2 and EOS Amsterdam released GeePeeKay on Novemeber 13th. It features art by Rory McQueen and a crafting mechanism
  https://geepeekay.io/
• We (blacklusion) announced in October 2021 that we are currently developing a NFT based game. It will be set in the animal environment and it will feature a breeding system and more
• Dapplica pushed multiple updates to Dark Country including the addition of new vampire cards.
  Their decentralized game hub https://nest.dapplica.io/ allows game developers to plug their games into the WAX blockchain ecosystem and connect to the player base.
• Waxswedenorg & WAX Eastern are actively working on onboarding a game development team named “Doge gogo”, who are building a NFT Doge Racing Game.
• Wizard’s Guild keeps working on their successful NFT collection Bitcoin Origins. They already have released 8 moments and there are still 7 more to come.
  https://www.btcorigins.com

NFT Tools/Markets:

• Pink.gg known for AtomicHub further improves the UX. Especially for users that own and handle a larger number of NFTs some new features were implemented: Multi-select of NFTs in their inventory, bulk listing at the lowest market price and more
  https://wax.atomichub.io/
• Aloha EOS launched a new NFT drop platform on October 19th 2021 called Droppp, featuring the first drop with Funko’s Fantastik Plastik Series 1 part 1 mini-drop
  https://droppp.io
  https://digital.funko.com/drop/6/fantastik-plastik-1/238
• Bountyblokbp continues maintenance and support on their tools including https://bountyblok.io/ as well as a drop-on-demand backend service that larger projects were asking for. Future games that will use this tool include: https://hodlgod.com/ and https://niftyville.net/
• Wizard’s Guild’s Collectabot is already released and allows users to view their inventory from NFT sets on the WAX Blockchain. They are actively working on integrating additional collections into the bot
  https://t.me/collectabot

Technical Tools

Many guilds work on technical products such as monitoring platforms to help guilds run their infrastructures. Besides the already widely used tools such as Aloha’s Reliability tracker and EOS Nations Validator, there are some less known projects as well that are under development or about to be released:

• BlokCrafters is working on their monitoring system that will allow guilds to integrate alerts into their own slack, telegram and more with ease.
  https://github.com/blokcrafters/public-projects/blob/master/waxmon.md
• EOS Arabia is working on data visualization for the AtomicApi allowing users to explore the data in a more user-friendly way. The product is still not released, but a prototype can be found here:
  https://vstate.eosarabia.net
• We (blacklusion) released the new version of the validationcore recently. It is a complete rewrite of the original codebase and allows users to make decisions on their endpoint selection based on statistical data
  https://validationcore.blacklusion.io/
• EOS Authority is working on their product WAX forensics that helps to track the flow of tokens between WAX accounts. Their live beta is already running:
  https://eosauthority.com/account/eosio?network=wax
• EOSphere is developing a monitoring and alerts platform called HeadsUp — more information to be announced
• Ledgerwise released their tools website already a while back, however we thought it would be a worthy mention in this article as well:
  https://tools.ledgerwise.io/
• Liquidstudio keeps working on multiple helpful projects, allowing developers to integrate different API types into their clients:
  HyperionApiClient
  dfuse-enabled-eosio-web-ide
  AtomicAssetsApiClient
• HiveBP launched a beta of waxmarketcap.com:
  https://hivebp.github.io/waxmarketcap/
• Waxswedenorg is developing a tool that allows healthchecks in a haproxy infrastructure setup:
  https://github.com/eosswedenorg/eosio-api-healthcheck

Other Non NFT Products:

• EOS Arabia released the WAX mobile wallet a while back, allowing users to manage their WAX accounts on their Android phones:
  https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.arabialedger.waxwallet
• eosDublin also operates the website www.giftvoucher.online — A voucher solution for restaurants and shops mainly in Ireland. They announced that there are working on bringing this platform to the WAX Blockchain, allowing users to resell their vouchers and gift cards on the secondary market
• WAXUSA keeps providing a handful of tools for the alienworlds ecosystem (in addition to their technical stats site)
  https://aw.eosusa.io/
• Waxswedenorg is working on an educational platform, making knowledge easily accessible. Currently, most of the technical knowledge around node configuration and setup is either outdated or scattered across multiple websites. Unfortunately, the release will likely be delayed a bit, since it takes more time than anticipated.
• Wizard’s Guild already released their Magic DUST Cryptocurrency that rewards all users of a WAX wallet for engaging in the community (e.g. chatting in telegram and discord rooms). The list of DUST enabled rooms now stands at over 100.

In case we missed something, feel free to reach out to us. We are planning to do such write-up on a regular basis to deliver a brief overview over the current guild landscape.

Last month we released the first statistics on the validationcore website. However, with the current traffic on the WAX Blockchain, the validationcore was often hitting the rate limitations of the endpoints and reporting none working endpoints. This month we deployed some major changes to help mitigate this and offer a fair validation. We increased the validation interval from 10mins to 15mins. Under the hood, the validations are not only performed from a single server anymore but from two different servers. The two instances synchronize their validation rounds and store them in a single database. This means that each server only validates every 30mins, sending only 1/3 of the requests as before from a single IP address. Additionally, we added a delay of 10secs between every request. Some validations are now spread across a timeframe of nearly 30mins, preventing spam on the guilds’ endpoints and making the scores representable.

OneApi

We added three dedicated servers to the OneApi ecosystem. These are located in the three load balancing zones: Americas, Europe/Middle East/Africa, Asia Pacific. We use these servers to measure the response times to all endpoints in order to assign them to their appropriate load balancing zone. This will increase the performance of OneApi as servers are less likely to be added to the wrong load balancing zone.

This month we had a total of ~8 million requests. Alone in the last week, we had 2.4 million requests:

As rate limitations of public endpoints are still a concern, we are actively working on bringing up the private infrastructure dedicated solely to OneApi.

NFTs and Animals 🦊🦁

In September we already announced, that we would create our own NFT based game. We can’t reveal quite yet, what exactly we are working on, but this month we made great progress. An additional graphic designer and a game designer joined our team, striving to bring an exciting game to the WAX Blockchain.

For now, we will only reveal that the game will feature not one, but multiple animal species. So get a book about genetics, as we will reveal more in the upcoming weeks and months… 🔍

Technical insights into our guild

Besides adding the three dedicated OneApi servers, we worked on syncing our Hyperion history back to the head block. A couple of days ago this was finally finished and our Hyperion and History API is publicly available:

https://wax.blacklusion.io

https://validationcore.blacklusion.io/

This month our focus has been heavily on our open source project Validationcore. The latest version of the Validationcore offers the validation of Api, Wallet, History, Hyperion and Atomic endpoints.

Our goal with this product is not to compete with the already great existing validators of other guilds. In fact, our focus is more on the technical infrastructure and making historic data available vs. only showing the latest status of the guild. We are using similar checks to those of other validators to make the result of our Validationcore more comparable and prove the accuracy. Additional validations were added as well, especially for the Atomic endpoints.
This month we released Uptime stats on a guild by guild basis. Now you can show a graph for every endpoint of a single guild. The uptime is calculated for every day by dividing the number of working validations by the number of total validations of that day (~144/day).

Our plan for the future months is to add more statistics and insights to a guild’s infrastructure and to make the endpoints of multiple guilds more comparable. Of course, we are open to add more features/graphs based on suggestions. So feel free to shoot us a message.

Please note: The database was reset on the 21. September 2021 before the guild cut off to not punish guilds for “non-working” endpoints when in reality this was due to changing configurations at the beginning of the month. Also, the current version of the website is not optimized for mobile, since we are focused to add more features first.

OneApi — Major fixes and more to come

https://wax.oneapi.dev (use it like any other wax endpoint)

This month OneApi was updated to work with the current version of the Validationcore. Hence, support for Atomic Assets was added as well. However, with increasing traffic across the WAX Blockchain many guilds have reinforced their rate limits, due to bot networks spamming their endpoints. This is a big challenge for OneApi since all requests are forwarded from a handful of IPs. OneApi has built-in protection and will send another request to another endpoint to respond with a valid response. However, the efficiency of OneApi will be decreased, if guilds’ rate limitations block some of these IPs automatically. This means that the stability of OneApi is highly dependent on every guilds’ infrastructure and rate limits. To tackle this problem we will expand the offering of OneApi by adding an additional Plan for more advanced use cases, higher request loads, and production-ready deployment.

The extra OneApi plan for extra reliability

This plan will only forward requests to a set of private infrastructure hosted by blacklusion. By adding an authentication layer to this version of OneApi we can track the number of requests and ensure to our clients that rate limitations and downtimes are a problem from the past.

Our Step into NFTs 🚀

This month we would like to tease our exciting NFT project. In September we already have been working on the concepts behind an engaging NFT based game. Stay tuned to be one of the first to play our game. Currently, development is happening behind closed doors - More details will be released over the course of the next months…

Technical insights into our guild

In the past months, we have been already hosting our Atomic Assets API. This month we experienced a never-ending stream of requests spamming our API. We have applied more strict rate limitations and added additional rules to block IPs temporarily that were misusing our API. With those measures, we could ensure our uptime again.

We are also working on bringing our Hyperion API back up. We added multiple servers to our infrastructure over the course of the past months and are in the process of syncing our Hyperion (currently on block 119,145,451).

OneApi load balances traffic to all API-Endpoints of the WAX Mainnet, based on the geographical location of the user.

Feel free to test it out yourself. Just make API calls as you would with every other endpoint:

WAX Mainnet Endpoint:
https://wax.oneapi.dev

Why OneApi?

Currently, just a handful of guilds handle the majority of the traffic. This not only results in underutilization of many API endpoints, but downtime of a single guild would result in the malfunction of major services and websites.

OneApi solves these problems, by offering a single endpoint URL. The requests are automatically routed to the optimal endpoint based on the geographical location. This not only improves the performance for the user, but traffic will also be dynamically rerouted to other endpoints in case an endpoint fails.

Deployment

The service is deployed via Cloudflare Workers. This means that the code is simultaneously deployed in ~40 data centers around the world.

This has two main advantages over a more traditional bare-metal approach:

1. Performance: Deployment in 40 Datacenters means that there will always be a datacenter close to the user, reducing latencies and improving speeds. Additionally, the service is automatically scaled by Cloudflare, preventing potential bottlenecks.
2. Reliability: When building OneApi, one of the highest priorities was to decouple it as much from a single guild as possible. Using an independent infrastructure such as Cloudflare Workers allows decoupling the service as much as possible from my guild. It should be noted, that there is still some code running on my servers (more on that later).

How it works:

When OneApi receives a request, it forwards it to the optimal Endpoint based on:

1. geographical region
2. required feature set (Chain, Hyperion, etc.)

The country from which the request originated will be matched to one of the following three load balancing regions:

1. Americas
2. Europa & Africa
3. Asian Pacific

The traffic is only forwarded to a list of API Endpoints that have successfully passed a set of validations. These validations are performed by the Validationcore, which is running on Blacklusion’s servers. Once every 10 minutes all API endpoints are validated.

The pool of API Endpoints that are used by OneApi is refreshed every 10 minutes as well, by calling the Validationcore API. However, an endpoint has to work for at least 6 validations in a row (~60mins) to be considered healthy. It is not enough to just pass the last validation. The Validationcore API also performs a location lookup based on the IP, to match the API to the correct load balancing zone.

Middleware Features

Currently, OneApi offers two main Middleware services:

1. Route checking/blocking: The list of allowed routes is hardcoded and only requests that match this list will be forwarded to an API Endpoint. For example, requests for the producer Api or routes that don’t exist will be directly blocked by OneApi.
2. JSON check: If a request has a body, it will be checked if the body can be parsed into a valid JSON before forwarding it to an API Endpoint.

In both cases, standardized error messages will be sent and no API endpoint will receive the faulty request.

Custom Headers

One unfortunate byproduct of the Cloudflare workers is a couple of headers that are added to the response by Cloudflare. Currently, there is no possibility to remove those. However, some custom headers are added as well:

“x-handled-by” header. This header indicates which API Endpoint has processed the request.

“x-rejected-by” header. This header will only be set if one of the middleware features is triggered, and the request is directly rejected by OneApi. In this case, no x-handled-by header will be set.

Backup Requests

OneApi automatically times out an Api request after 2000ms. If a request has timed out or if certain HTTP errors have been returned (e.g. 403 forbidden or rate limit associated errors), a second request will be sent to a different API. The result of the backup request will then be returned to the user. This reduces the chance of a user not getting a response. The API Endpoint, that did not respond successfully is then excluded from the locally cached list and no further requests will be forwarded to that API Endpoint.

Reliability

As mentioned in the beginning, one of the main objectives was to reduce the dependency on single guilds. Unfortunately, the Validationcore has to run on Blacklusion’s servers. To mitigate the dependency on my guild, the current API list is stored in three separate locations:

The OneApi worker has a locally cached list of the API endpoints in the worker's memory. The worker is able to edit that list and to detect and remove nonfunctioning endpoints. This also has major performance benefits, since a call to the Cloudflare KV storage costs ~100ms. Having locally cached lists, allows the worker to handle a request completely without accessing the KV or other Apis.

Once per minute (or if the locally cached list is empty) the last list is pulled from the KV storage. This mechanism was implemented to overwrite the local list and to add endpoints back into the pool that may have been removed e.g. because of rate-limiting errors.

It should be noted, that the worker is not able to edit the list in the KV storage itself. The list in the KV storage is only updated when a new list is requested from the Validationcore API. This update process is running on a different worker and is decoupled from the actual OneApi Worker.

In a worst-case scenario, where Blacklusion’s servers would stop functioning, the OneApi service would still be able to keep running: The workers can pull the last list from the KV storage and prune nonfunctioning endpoints by themselves. And since the list in the KV storage cannot be edited by the workers, it is prevented that workers remove endpoints from the shared list, that may work for other workers. Of course, this will reduce performance and should not happen in the first place, but there is some room for failure by design. And in case everything is falling apart, every worker is also deployed with a hardcoded fallback list. This list kicks in if the KV storage List is empty or cannot be accessed.

Have fun with OneApi and feel free to integrate it into your services and products.

Links:

• OneApi Repository: https://github.com/Blacklusion/oneapi
• Validationcore Repository: https://github.com/Blacklusion/validationcore
• OneApi WAX Endpoint: https://wax.oneapi.dev

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