The Monthly Transmission 7/01/2022
Incoming…………………………
This June on the Satellite, we have a big announcement. We have been hard at work these last few months building new protocols, SDKs, and ways for you to interact with the Satellite.im network. All of this hard work has helped to bring us to a stable point that we are ready to share with you all. So, this July, we will release the Early Access version of Satellite to a limited number of users!
You may be wondering what is different about Satellite.im’s Early Access from what has been available in the past. For starters, gone are the days of Satellite.one and dev.Satellite.one, the domains to access our various branches now follow a more standard naming scheme. From now on, access to the stable branch of the application is now core.satellite.im, which is now the home of Satellite IM Early Access. Speaking of domains, in attempts to make our platform and all things Satellite less centralized, we have changed our static-bundle web hosting to Fleek.co. This publishes core to IPFS and will allow users to pin their own copy if they want. Some changes still need to happen to make things more decentralized, but they are in the works.
Another significant change coming with Early Access is we are integrating Phantom. Utilizing your Phantom wallet, you can generate a Decentralized Identifier (DID) that you truly own. Eventually, you will be able to generate your DID with any major Solana wallet. Phantom is simply the first step. Optionally while we are in early access, we will give you the option to have a wallet generated by us in the web app, but this will eventually be phased out and replaced with alternative authentication methods.
Finally, with Early Access, we are introducing the Iridium protocol. Leveraging the interplanetary filesystem (IPFS) and DAG-JOSE Iridium enables the end user to sign, encrypt, broadcast, search, and store documents or messages with DIDs and JSON Web Tokens (JWS, JWE). By using Iridium as our direct interface with IPFS, Satellite.im will, in turn, become more decentralized and functionally simpler. Though this does mean we will be ultimately phasing out the use of Textile.
We invite you to join us in creating on our network. We’re always looking for more contributors on our journey, and we’ve got a whole host of places for you to lend a hand. Regardless, be sure to pull up a seat, and a pretty good telescope, because we’ve got some wild things on the horizon, and Early Access is just the start.
Outro…………………………
If you have any suggestions or questions, be sure to leave a comment on this article, post a message in our Discord, or send us a Tweet. Thanks for reading, and look out for next month’s transmission.
