Constellation Update - TechCrunch Disrupt, Ambassador Program, AirDrop 3 & More

Dear Constellation Community,

It’s been an incredible couple of weeks here at Constellation Labs, and we’re excited to recap all that has transpired.

TechCrunch Disrupt proved to be an enormous success. We spent three days meeting the wider SF tech community, connecting with business leaders, developers, and entrepreneurs who expressed interest in what we’re building and how their projects can potentially integrate with our distributed ledger technology. The conversations were truly inspiring, and they’ve helped us further refine our product vision and how we communicate as a company. On Friday, Ben Jorgensen joined an amazing panet of industry leaders from Mozilla and IBM to discuss the future of blockchain enterprise adoption.

Following that talk, Wyatt and Ryle gave an in-depth overview of Constellation’s technology and how we are improving and differentiating ourselves from legacy blockchain protocols. The reverberations from this presentation keep coming, with attendees from the conference continually getting in touch to find out more. While at our booth, we captured a series of short interviews with the wider team which you can view below. Stay tuned, as the panel and workshop videos will be shared next week.

As if TechCrunch wasn’t enough of a success, last week also marked the launch of our Ambassador program. We’ve seen a huge amount of press coverage and interest with applications rolling in. Check out our team’s interviews from TechCrunch below, and read on for further Ambassador program news and the regular engineering, product, and Airdrop updates.

Constellation team interviews at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018:

Wyatt, CTO & Co-Founder:

Ryle, VP of Engineering:

Gio, Lead Product Designer:

Brion, VP of Product:

Zac, Head of Marketing:

Altif, CCO & Co-Founder:

Product Update

Features

Built and released Metamask validator that checks whether a user is on version 4.9.2 and above on Chrome and Firefox. Users are asked to upgrade before going through any of our Metamask flows if they’re on an older version.
Updated upgrade/downgrade and airdrop flows with new Metamask images reflecting the UI on 4.9.2+.
Users can now link their Facebook account to Orion under Settings.
We updated the Airdrop flow to support dynamic sign up. Users who have been airdropped 250 DAG are directed to join the Community tier while users with 1,000 DAG are directed to join the Developer tier.
We officially launched Points to DAG (PTD) to the community. All users can use PTD including Orion members on the Free tier.
We built a monitor that tracks ETH in the wallet that holds PTD DAG to ensure we always have enough gas for transactions.
We built version 1 of the Smart contract and updated it to their repo. Work paused for now.

Engineering Update

Peer authentication and banning flow updated for REST endpoints.
Fixing bug in Actor dispatcher thread pool allocations. Added more separation boundaries between actors and futures.
More refactoring of schema to incorporate new edge flow, more metadata added to DB.
Updated genesis to add another distribution tip to pass validation.
Work on balancing max graph width vs. the number of active tips.
Safer database update models for multi-threading transaction handling support.
Refactoring whole flow with new metrics collections and updating tests to reflect changes.
Changing checkpoint validation logic to prevent excess recalculations, requires schema updates to DB metadata.
Began migrating resolver from bundles to edges.

AirDrop 3 Announcment

AirDrop 3 is approaching. The next round of emails will be sent out on Tuesday, September the 18th, kick-starting the KYC process. Remember to complete your application by Friday the 21st. If successful, the tokens will be staked for access to the Orion Portal and released 6 months from the completed KYC date. You will not be able to sell your tokens prior. On that date, you will receive an email with instructions on how to access your staked tokens via Orion.

Ambassador Program

Earlier this week, we announced the Constellation Global Ambassador Network. The Ambassador Network is a global network of blockchain and crypto enthusiasts focused on creating strong word of mouth networks and growing local communities for blockchain projects that align with Constellation’s core mission — to advance the mainstream adoption of blockchain technology in a way that is truly decentralized and open to all. Here’s a quote from one of our first ambassadors, Ray Rehito Hatoyama:

“In 5 years, I believe blockchain will become the core technology for innovation, and I believe in Constellation Labs's vision to bring decentralized technology to the next level. I saw an ambitious dream in Constellation. Constellation will take a big role of upgrading blockchain technology to a universal common language, and thus enhancing global connectivity, such as internet and mobile, that shaped the world to how it is today. I'm happy to be an Ambassador of Constellation Labs, helping to continue to propel innovation, together.” - Constellation Ambassador and former Hello Kitty Managing Director, Ray Rehito Hatoyama

In addition to Hatoyama, early Constellation Ambassadors include Sebastian Spitzer, New Business Specialist at REHAU; Ratul Saha, Founder of GetonChain; Julian Jung, Co-founder, and Partner of Game Theory Crypto Group; and Jacob Mullins, Partner at Shasta Ventures.

The Ambassador Program announcement has already had several media placements:

PaymentWeek - Constellation Labs Launches Global Ambassador Network
CryptoNinjas - Blockchain for consumer dApps Constellation Labs launches Ambassador Network
NXTalpha - Constellation’s global ambassadors to spread blockchain gospel
Block Asia - Constellation Labs Launches Global Ambassador Network
Bit-Media - Constellation Labs Launches Global Ambassador Network

For more information on applying to be an Ambassador, check out the Constellation Ambassador Website.

Reddit AMA

We’re hosting an official Reddit AMA with Wyatt (CTO) and Ryle (VP of Engineering) on September 20th and 21st. Stay tuned for our promoted post. We’ll be inviting the community to ask questions from the 18th leading up to Thursday and Friday’s event and will share the official thread on TG next week, so keep an eye on the group!

Upcoming Events

The Constellation team will be at the following upcoming events. Let us know if you’re going to be there, too!

Block-Con 2018, October 10-12, Santa Monica, California
World Crypto Con, October 31-Nov 2, Las Vegas, Nevada
Scale by the Bay, November 15-17, San Francisco, California

New Content

It’s no secret that we love our Constellation Community. Your feedback to the content we release is always positive, and it’s what keeps us wanting to give you more. That said, when discussing future content ideas with our marketing team, we decided that the best way to give our wonderful community what it wants want would be to simply ask.

Have a burning question you’d like addressed or a blog post you’d like to see us tackle? Go ahead and fill out this form, and we’ll take your suggestions into consideration for our future pieces. We look forward to hearing what you have to say!

Until next week,

The Constellation Team