We are excited to announce the alpha release of the Stratis Masternode technology.
The Masternodes feature a Service Advertisement Protocol where services are registered on the blockchain and subsequently made discoverable by client applications.
Masternode Service Advertisement Protocol
This part of the protocol advertises that a Masternode hosts a particular service. It works as follows:
1. The Masternode operator chooses which services they wish to host then configures and starts the Masternode.
2. The Masternode performs a small micro transaction on Stratis mainnet which is committed to the blockchain in the normal manner.
3. The transaction includes a small amount of service specific tokenized data that is used by the Client Discovery Protocol. This data could be a standard internet address Uniform Resource Locator (url) or an IP Address, for example.
4. The Masternode monitors any changes to the data represented in the tokenized data and will perform a superseding update transaction if required.
Masternode Client Discovery Protocol
A client application, such as Breeze Wallet with the Breeze Privacy Protocol, can read the tokenized data on the blockchain as follows:
1. The client application includes a Stratis Blockchain technology component that receives blockchain blocks as they are added to the Stratis Mainnet blockchain. This is similar to a wallet that receives new blocks as it processes transactions.
2. The Stratis Blockchain technology component examines the transactions in the block and picks out the data.
3. The component passes this data to the main part of the application to be used for service connection or other application specific purposes.
Advantages
The decoupling described creates a robust, trustless, decentralized advertisement and discovery mechanism that is resistant to manipulation or censorship.
Masternode Support in the Breeze Privacy Protocol (powered by TumbleBit)
The Breeze Privacy Protocol is the first Stratis Service to support Stratis Masternodes. The Masternode release includes the Breeze Privacy Protocol Service. Here the Masternode Service Discovery Protocol is used to advertise the internet address of the Breeze Privacy Protocol Service hosted inside the Masternode. When a user of the Breeze Wallet wishes to use the Breeze Privacy Protocol, the application has available a list of Masternodes hosting the service which it has discovered through the Masternode Service Advertisement and Discovery Protocol.
Testnet and Mainnet
The release of the Stratis Masternode is configured for testnet however the Advertisement and Discovery Protocol is mainnet ready.
Breeze Wallet with Breeze Privacy Protocol (powered by TumbleBit)
Download and try the beta testnet version of Breeze Wallet with Breeze Privacy Protocol here and try connecting to our Masternode:
https://github.com/BreezeHub/Breeze/releases/tag/v0.2.0-privacy-alpha
Masternode Release
If you wish you can download and configure a Masternode yourself. The instructions and source code are available here:
https://github.com/BreezeHub/BreezeProject
Feedback
Please get in touch to provide your feedback. You will find us on Slack or come see us on GitHub.
