Hello again! You may not have recognized us, but it's Pylons! Hi! We've rebranded! With the help of a fabulous agency called Study Hall we have a new logo, new colors, and new branding system fit for a consumer brand bringing the cutting edge of technology to the world of digital fashion. It's a revolution! Same great name though. We're very excited to see what you think, so reach out to @pylonstech.

The Pylons website branding update is up next. We are hiring for HTML/CSS to help implement the website design and other front-end projects. If you make web sites, reach out; this could be your moment to join up with a rocket ship!

In time for the new look, marketing pro https://twitter.com/StargazeChad has joined the crew as an investor. He has great energy and a passion for the Cosmos ecosystem, and we are happy to have him on board.

Lastly, the validator signup is now closed because we got a lot of responses. Thank you! If you missed the window to apply, tweet at us @pylonstech, and maybe we can take in another tranche.

OK, that's it for this week. If you see the old branding somewhere please let us know, and stand by for updates on the chain next week!

Hello from rainy Los Angeles! I'm here for NFT LA, and so far it's been fun, I've met some cool people, and have given some demos of the Pylons and Easel apps, and gotten some great feedback. There are still issues to fix, but no one has seen anything like it. People love how mobile-native it is and how easy it is to use. Giving demos is one of my favorite parts of my job, I get to see people react to something new, and I also get to see their perspective on how to make the apps even better.

We've got a couple updates for you today! First off, a signup form to apply to be a validator for the incentivized testnet: https://forms.gle/1JBc7McZ4PKroknU8. If you want to be a validator on Pylons for the coming phase, fill it out, and we'll be in touch.

Second, we have finalized our testnet license and we will be making the chain code public next week, so be ready to check that out when update #2 comes out. There will be more to come about the licensing strategy for the chain, I'm pretty excited to tell you all about what we're going to do in a future update, so subscribe if you haven't yet!

Finally, we now have a privacy policy available at https://www.pylons.tech/p/ if you like reading privacy policies, which you don't.

That's all for this week, next week we'll have something for people who want to get involved with the testnet as artists and collectors.

Hello Pylons community!

Starting today, and continuing through the launch of mainnet, we will be providing weekly updates on the progress of the Pylons project. As we approach the time for the second (and incentivized) testnet, we are going to start building more in public.

Here is a small update 0: Goals and challenges for the incentivized testnet phase 1 will be released a week from today, March 28th, along with an application for validators. But artists, devs, and regular users will be able to earn rewards as well.

We've been at this for most of a year now, and we are very excited to show you all our take on digital items and NFTs. If there are things you want to know about in particular, you can find me on Twitter at @mikesofaer or to the team at @pylonstech

OK, that's it for this week, see you next week with more juicy details.

Hello, Pylons community! It’s time to talk about the 2022 plan and how Pylons will expand the accessibility of the Cosmos ecosystem and blockchain in general. Let’s talk about spam, liveness, and the concept of gas fees.

Spam mitigation is one of the central challenges of the internet. From toxic comments to DDOS attacks, the world is full of people trying to engage with systems in ways the designers do not want and impact the experience of other users. Sufficient spam can threaten the liveness of the system, in addition to the quality of its data.

Blockchains have traditionally had constraints around spam prevention beyond the spam prevention constraints that web sites have. The increased fidelity of distributed consensus can be damaged if a spam-mitigation system can also be used for censorship. The techniques used on the broader internet, IP filtering, captchas, banning malicious accounts, are all vulnerable to being used in censorship. Part of the history of developing functional blockchains was finding a spam prevention technique that fit. So far, blockchains have been primarily designed to be financial systems. Every user coming into the system already has tokens, so requiring tokens to use the system doesn't add friction to real users. This scenario creates an opportunity to simply charge spammers to spam: gas fees.

Gas fees have a very strong liveness guarantee, meaning that the system continues to process transactions. It’s clear to everyone which transactions are paying the highest fees to be included, and it’s in the interest of miners and validators to include those transactions. A gas fee system is easy to administer without governance because everyone can see what should happen and whether it is happening. But gas fees have no fairness guarantee. In particular, as we see in the Ethereum community right now, rising usage and fees make the system inaccessible to the general public.

Pylons is fully accessible to the general public, so trading fairness for strong liveness is unacceptable. When it comes to mass-market products, a system made inaccessible by gas prices is not much better than a system made inaccessible by spam.

We know that accessible systems are possible. The web is full of accessible mass-market systems that are low-friction for new users, and the blockchain projects that become relevant to the future of the internet will be just as accessible. Throwing the mempool to the highest bidder has worked to an extent so far, but it’s not a long-term strategy. Systems choked with transactions, with spiking gas fees, are live in the sense that the validators are still making money, but they are not live in the sense of providing value to users.

So how do we do liveness better? The gas metaphor is designed to spike the cost to users during an attack, to match the difficulty the chain is having, so that actually taking the chain down takes too much money. Every chain has a limit on the amount of processing it can do, and if the chain charges enough for that processing power, the block space won’t run out. The core idea of gas fees is that by having people bid to get their transactions in, the most important transactions get included because people will bid higher for more important transactions. To actually choke the system, a spammer would have to spend an unreasonable amount of money. In practice, gas fee execution isn’t so clean. Gas prices on Ethereum are very high and unpredictable, driven in large part by people with a lot of ETH who are willing to pay prices that people with less ETH would not consider. The very wealthy can afford to have their transactions go through, and everyone else cannot. This transaction inequality is not a recipe for mass adoption!

In addition, non-financial systems like free-to-play mobile games do not expect users to already have money in the system when they first come to the product. Requiring users to go out and purchase a token before they can get started represents a substantial barrier to adoption.

The problem Pylons is trying to solve is the same problem that Ethereum and others are trying to solve. With a limited budget of processing space in the chain, we need to prioritize transactions so that the chain stays useful to everyone. But there are some things Pylons can do that Ethereum can’t do.

The biggest anti-spam advantage that Pylons has over Ethereum is its Turing-incompleteness. Because Ethereum has a full scripting language, a single transaction might take up the entire block or more, sometimes with an infinite loop. There’s no way to know how expensive a transaction will be without running the actual transaction (this is the Halting Problem). In the Pylons system, every transaction is simple and fast. We don’t have to worry that a few spam transactions could expand and take the system down.

However, we do have to worry about large numbers of useless transactions clogging up the block space. So how does a validator decide which transactions are worth including when most transactions have no fees?

Some transactions do have fees. Pylons is designed around freemium interactions and pays its validators with a percentage of the gross transaction volume of the network. A transaction that is a purchase has an associated fee and is likely to be included quickly in a block. But if a transaction doesn’t involve a payment, and therefore doesn’t get charged a fee, we have to decide how likely it is that the transaction will lead to a paid interaction in the future. What is the net expected value of the user making the transaction?

Has this user spent money before? Has this user interacted with an experience on which people tend to spend money? Is this user likely to be a human? Is this a new account? If so, is it being created associated with a particular experience on the platform? These are some possible prioritization strategies that still allow the system to be accessible to new free-to-play users while still having a robust defense against malicious spam.

Because Pylons is a Cosmos chain, blocks are proposed in a weighted round-robin fashion between active validators, so different validators can have different heuristics for what they propose for inclusion. This block proposal design gives transactions a greater chance to get included within a minute or so (although this time period may not be acceptable as a user experience anyway!) Having a lot of validators able to add transactions also increases the system’s censorship resistance and makes it less likely that the anti-spam systems will become censorship systems.

But these are all just ideas. We need to figure out what works in the real world. So Pylons is announcing the next step of the Pylons network development: an incentivized testnet to develop and test non-gas spam prevention technologies. Validators and developers that meaningfully contribute to the development of the next generation of blockchain spam defenses will be rewarded with ATOM and Bedrock, the Pylons mainnet native staking token. There will be challenges to take the network down and challenges to stay up under certain levels of attack. We’re looking for suggestions as to what other challenges to add. The games will begin in March 2022!

To get ready, join the official Pylons Discord at https://discord.gg/pylons. You can also come work with us, we are hiring devs for both Go and Flutter. You can start building a Pylons-based mobile experience right now using the Pylons SDK that is available at https://github.com/Pylons-tech/pylons_dart_sdk.

OK, that’s it! But here are some things to think about for the challenges:

• Is there a way to get tokenomics involved? Could stakers choose particular apps and experiences to support and increase the priority of transactions from those experiences? Could token holders sponsor new users in some way (this sponsorship would be a lot like fee grant systems.)
• Could we have optional systems to increase the likelihood of an account creation transaction being tied to a real person? Can we do this without leaking info on who the person actually is?
• What is the user experience for a transaction that is not included due to space limitations? Do we ask users to keep trying or retry automatically? Account creation is one of the most likely venues of spam attacks. Could we do a free in-app purchase (IAP) transaction on the app stores just to validate that an app store account exists and is connected?

gm from the Pylons team!

A lot has happened since we joined up with Tendermint. We hired a lot of people, launched a testnet with 32 validators (https://wallet.pylons.tech/), released a Dart SDK for building blockchain-powered mobile apps (https://github.com/Pylons-tech/pylons_dart_sdk), made our beta Android wallet publicly accessible so people can develop against it (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=tech.pylons.wallet) and we are Gold sponsors of Hack Atom VI! (https://hackatom.org/).

Pylons gave two talks at Hack Atom's opening, my overview of the system (https://youtu.be/6bq-JaViGRM?t=17098) and Mijolae Wright's demo of our SDK (https://youtu.be/6bq-JaViGRM?t=18007). We also met a lot of really wonderful people from the Cosmos community, which is such a fantastic group, the warmest community in blockchain, as far as I can tell. We're proud to be sponsors, and we have two challenges out for Hack Atom, each with a $50k prize pool: One to build a mobile game with the Pylons SDK, and one to build a ticketing system with the Pylons SDK. We're eager to see what people do with it!

We also closed our seed funding round, and released version 2 of our wite paper (https://www.pylons.tech/pylons_white_paper_2.pdf) The white paper lays out our plan for the next year or so, and we're very excited to get going on it.

Next week I will be in Greece for the Tendermint engineering retreat, and the team will be taking a bit of a break (other than supporting our hackers) and we will be back to full force and driving towards a main net release after that.

This is the first time that outside developers can try out Pylons, and we'd like to get as many eyes on it as possible. If you or someone you know is looking to build a blockchain app, sign up for Hack Atom (it runs until Dec 8), give our SDK a try, or jump in our Discord (https://discord.gg/pylons) and we'll help you get started. See you in the Interchain!

Hi, Mike from Pylons here! I’m really excited to formally announce that Pylons is Tendermint’s first incubation, and that as part of that I am now also Tendermint’s Director of NFTs. For most of you, that will raise some questions, such as “What are NFTs?” and “What is Pylons?” and “How do I help win the NFT game for the Cosmos community?”. I’ll try to give you a bit of an answer to all of them.

First, NFTs. NFTs are digital items that you own and control yourself. There are more details, but that’s the core of it. You could ask “why not just call them digital items, then”? Why not indeed. Please sign our change.org petition! And Pylons is an NFT engine. I mean, Pylons is a digital items engine.

So why does Tendermint want to incubate a digital items engine project? NFTs are in the news a lot right now, so it makes sense to make sure that the Cosmos community is positioned to support NFT use cases. And Cosmos is a very strong platform to make NFTs much more mass market, because it’s so performant. Right now, most digital items are on Ethereum, which is very hard to program for, slow, and expensive to use. Pylons is fast, free, and easy to use!

Pylons is a development platform for item-based experiences of all kinds, from games to concert tickets to fantasy sports. Pylons is designed to support complex interactions with a very simple creation process, so you don’t have to know a blockchain programming language to build the recipes for a Pylons app, you can lay out the transitions in JSON, and use our SDK to build your mobile app for user interaction. It’s a solution we’re very proud of, and I’m excited to see how the community reacts to it once it’s out there!

The plan now that we are working together is to leverage the Tendermint team in finishing the open-sourcing process and rolling out a testnet and then a main net. After that we’ll be out there with a sandbox helping you all build cool apps, and build zones that connect to Pylons to do adjacent things like NFT marketplaces. And I want to know what you all think. You can join our Discord, email us, send us unsolicited cat pictures on Twitter (ideally cats being mean to other cats, like knocking them down but in funny ways, no cat injuries), and also apply to be paid to write Pylons code!

We will have a lot more for you all in the coming weeks, a Pylons sandbox, intros to our team members, and thoughts on NFT standards and interoperability. We should have a full SDK, and docs, and a running art minting app called Easel by the end of June (hopefully sooner!) Until then, I’m so thrilled to be on this journey with all my Cosmonauts, and looking forward to hearing from you!