August Wrap Up
The most significant achievement in August was Blessnet mainnet going live. That's right, we are live!
Blessnet is taking a different path to most new chains. The standard approach is to have a large amount of publicity upfront, making a big noise while engineering work to release testnet and then mainnet take place.
We want to reverse that trend. Our plan is to have Blessnet ready for use and then commence work on getting the message out there. That means we have a lot to build, but in August we took our first substantive step.
One of the earliest decisions we had to make was on whether we hosted all chain infrastructure ourselves or made use of a Rollup As a Service provider (RaaS). There's a lot we could write on this decision and the factors we balanced when making it. But that's enough for an article in its own right!
To cut to the chase, we made the decision to make use of a RaaS provider. This removes a lot of complexity from our infrastructure requirements, and allows us to leverage the expertise of professionals whose sole focus is running chain infrastructure. We're proud to be working with Caldera to bring you Blessnet.
On August 9th Caldera put Blessnet mainnet live! This marked the beginning of Blessnet's Alpha phase. During Alpha the only ones working on Blessnet are the Blessnet team.
Our focus for much of August was bridging, specifically the BLESS native gas token. On other chains BLESS is a self-bridging ERC20 (more on self-bridging later). On Blessnet BLESS is our native gas token.
Having a smooth and seamless bridging process is very important to us. Blessnet's reason for existing is to support other Ethereum chains. It makes sense that BLESS should move as frictionlessly as possible between these chains.
By the end of August we had confidence in our core architecture and had bridging of BLESS down to a fine art. At the same time we had progressed our design and development of a number of code Blessnet apps that will form part of our Beta release.
More on that later...