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Intro to Vult App | Zus Weekly Debrief — January 18, 2023

Tiago Souza
January 18, 2023
News & Updates

Happy Wednesday! Last week we hosted ourCloud Cover (Ecclesia #7) with our CEO Saswata Basu, where he introduced our dStorage App Vult. Now, moving forward, our AMAs will be held bi-weekly. The next Cloud Cover AMA will be hosted on the 26th of January at 9am PST. Now let’s dive into this week’s update! 

Vult App

Zus Vult App Absolute Privacy
Zus Vult App Absolute Privacy

Vult is our Decentralized Storage App for consumers. The Vult App will be available on iOS, Android, and your preferred browser. Vult allows you to store your photos, videos, and files with absolute security and privacy. The Vult App is unique because it makes everything transparent in the blockchain, so you can always track how your files are stored and distributed in the network.

Furthermore, Vult was designed to be easy and simple to use while enjoying complete privacy and control of your data. With private sharing, users can privately share their files, so only the recipient can access them (encryption sharing). Also, it is possible to publicly share files to share non-sensitive files for a larger audience.

In addition, Vult has some noteworthy features like automatically uploading recent photos and videos, downloading videos on the go to watch later, and even creating your live streams! 

Chimney App update:

The team built a new process for service providers to control their servers completely. The new deployment process provides complete ownership to the end user instead of asking them to provide us access to their server. With this update, every blobber will have a unique URL that can be an IP address or domain. Domain names are preferred as they support SSL certificates for increased security.

As for the other Apps, expect the demo in the next two weeks.

Load Testing

Our devs are now preparing to start load tests, which we expect to commence in the next two weeks. After testing, we will be able to onboard the remaining miners of the Active Set to continue testing as we prepare for Mainnet Launch.


Storm of the Week:

Messari report on Decentralize Storage

Messari, a crypto data firm, posted an article comparing traditional cloud storage to a decentralized cloud. Interestingly, they listed some strengths and weaknesses of current decentralized solutions. You can check the thread here

Although Messari missed Züs on the report, the community reached out to Messari on Twitter and pointed out some of the weaknesses of current decentralized solutions (e.g., Filecoin, Arwave, Storj) that Züs tackles: faster retrieval of files, support for small files, easier to use, and high performance to power apps and richer media.

We appreciate the community for the amazing support!

Blockchain Team Update:

Last week, the blockchain team merged 14 PRs, closed 8 tracked issues on the Zus repo, and merged 14 PRs on gosdk repo.

With the upcoming deadline for mainnet delivery, the team decided to write unit tests for the changes in each PR. Although the team has covered unit tests for most of the cases for our smart contracts, the main problem was the recent SC changes were lacking unit tests. Because of this, the team will request tests to cover all changes. This change will be important to improve the quality of the code and reduce bugs from the beginning. 

Beyond the unit tests requirement change, another main improvement will help the team fix the event db update issue by introducing the `updater` tool for events db to do the batch update. Previously, the gorm’s `upsert` was used to do batch updates. This worked well except when the `update` event happened before the `insert` event, or the `update` applied on items that do not exist in the db yet. With this PR change, this issue will be addressed.

Gosdk Update:

The following PRs were closed on both Zus and gosdk repos:

This was mainly caused by the provider health check event not updating the db correctly. The team added the event `updater` as discussed above, fixed the sharder missing blocks, and merged the PR and the blobber getting deregistered issue after running for a while. Moreover, they added a ZCN service fee. The authorizers will be paid for each mint transaction and fixed a bad block.CreationDate format, which would fail the gosdk block validation due to the different date formats used between APIs. 

Corrected the block’s finalizing status update, fixed conductor-related runner issue and the CORS issue that requests will be blocked if there is a custom HTTP header, and cleaned up flushing logs and updated dependencies. The team fixed the `is_finalised` column is always `false` in the event db issue. Also, they will now be using an updater to update the provider reward.

The following PRs were closed on the gosdk repo:

The team implemented optimistic transaction verification. Supported new fields added to the response returned by `getBlobber,` `getBlobbers`, `getValidator,` and `getValidators.` and added `bulk upload` to bulk upload files by wasm, also added caching for allocation query. They also improved the performance of any allocation’s operations and added GetBalance() API and `getLookupHash` on wasm SDK. Furthermore, they fixed `UploadFile`, `UpdateFile` and `RepairFile,` and deleted duplicated methods: `UploadFileWithThunmbnial,` `EncryptAndUploadFile` and `EncryptAndUploadFileWithThumbnail.`.

Finally, the team fixed slow txn submission on the large network and cryptojs web compatibility, and they will now be using the generic parameter `iossimulator` instead of `iossimulator/amd64` produces build compatibility for both amd64 and arm64 simulators.


Read Züs’ most recent article:

Blockchain technology offers a unique solution to many of the challenges facing our current education system.  Blockchain technology will transform it in unprecedented ways, here are a few. How do you think blockchain will change our current educational system? Join the conversation and share your views. 

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