Moonlight has introduced its Asteroid Load Balancer to the community. Asteroid Load Balancer simplifies the process for light applications connecting to public nodes, whilst helping maintain the uptime of the node ecosystem.
Moonlight is a decentralized workforce platform built on the NEO network that aims to make contract and freelance employment more appealing to both contributors and project owners. The platform seeks to develop an alternative approach for project staffing, realization, and compensation to create a distributed workforce.
Many light applications in the NEO ecosystem rely on public nodes to provide the latest blockchain information and to interact with the NEO blockchain. Currently, the responsibility of selecting the best node to connect to falls to the application. There are many nodes available, so applications may need to hop between nodes to find a fully synced, responsive, and performant option.
The Asteroid Load Balancer will do this work for applications, using a reverse proxy solution. The Load Balancer will register and maintain information about a number of different nodes and will handle the ‘node hopping’ functionality on its own. Light applications then need only to “target a single server for the NEO blockchain with high confidence that it will resolve to a fully synced, performant node.”
The Asteroid Load Balancer has been running as a City of Zion seed node for the past two months, and Moonlight welcomes community use and pull requests via GitHub.
The Load Balancer is just one component of a larger Asteroid system that will make up Moonlight’s distributed back-end infrastructure. Moonlight is being designed as a ‘hybrid application’, taking advantage of both on-chain and off-chain technology. This will allow the project to achieve things such as: regulatory compliance for storage of sensitive data, perform advanced operations that are not supported by the NEO-VM, and make use of storage and compute requirements for analytical methods.
The Asteroid ‘Core’ will be open source; however, for security purposes, will be kept closed source until after the Moonlight token sale.
Moonlight has recently released information on its public token sale. 250,000,000 (25% of total supply) is being made available to the general public. Access to the token sale will be granted based on the Moonlight newsletter subscription order and broken into four groups. Each group will have the opportunity to purchase up to the maximum contribution amount (100 NEO or 250 GAS), and any remaining available LX tokens at the end of the sale will be made available in a “close out” phase.
More information on Moonlight can be found at the below links:
About The Author: Dean Jeffs
Dean is a digital project manager who has worked extensively with start ups and agencies in the marketing space. Fascinated by the potential applications of blockchain technology, Dean has a passion for realising the new smart economy.
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