November 2021 was a big month for us at Mysterium Network. After much anticipation, years of coding and community support, we officially launched on mainnet.
While it’s super cool that we finally graduated from BETA, we want to celebrate the final phase of our pre-mainnet journey
Here is a short look at everything we achieved and introduced while on Testnet 3, the final phase aka the pre-mainnet upgrade as we say our goodbyes.
By the time we welcomed Testnet3, We had over 400,000 downloads of our dVPN, eventually reaching over 120,000 monthly active users!! We also had over 6,000 nodes getting paid in almost-real time.
There was 500Tb of traffic served each month and millions of P2P transactions (micropayments) taking place in the network each day.
(And now that we’ve officially launched, the network is stronger than ever…)
Internet Access for All
As a team committed to making the Web3 experience as accessible (and enjoyable) as possible, we put serious thought into how we could alleviate this friction point. Ethereum’s transaction fees would kill our ability to reach the emerging markets to which we are a natural ally.
So we delayed our original plans to launch mainnet in 2020 - and the wait paid off. We used Testnet3 to research, adapt and update our payment infrastructure. This testnet facilitated millions of micropayments taking place within the P2P network each day - instantly, without friction, and cost almost nothing.
Faster & Cheaper Withdrawals for Node Runners
While we were still paying bounties to node runners, Testnet3 also allowed us to internally test withdrawals to the Polygon blockchain. It’s now available to all node runners on Mainnet offering very fast and cheap payouts.
Free & Faster Registration for dVPN Users and Node Runners
On Testnet3, it was possible to use a Polygon wallet, which is almost instantaneous and is free of charge. The wallet address would be stored in local node databases and only recalled for payouts to happen.
Automagic Pricing
We know it can be a hassle to have to set prices manually, so during our pre-mainnet upgrade we came up with an algorithm based on supply and demand for each region to determine the prices. The algorithm considers a number of factors like node type (residential or non-residential IP), geo-location and quality.
Nodes that are in demand more are priced higher, and the prices go down, when/if the demand goes down. The system also has adaptive pricing based on the current value of the MYST token.
Additionally, we came up with a way to pool nodes with similar features and the same prices so that when a user disconnects they can reconnect to a new node with the same price.
Better Node Discovery
Our node discovery service was coded in Python. We rewrote the whole thing from scratch in GoLang and added some architectural changes to make it 1000 times faster than before. So you can open the dVPN and list IPs worldwide almost instantaneously.
We also made changes to give a lot more flexibility and room for devs to filter and slice nodes.
New Node Runner Dashboard
You can go to mystnodes.com for a brand new and user-friendly experience that allows you to easily view the latest stats and earnings for all your active running nodes. This page will also walk you through the onboarding process step by step, with visual descriptions. You can install a Mysterium Node on Windows, macOS, Linux, Raspberry Pi, DAppNode and AVADO.
We even made a video for your convenience!
What the Future Holds for Mysterium Network
Did you know that post-mainnet, Mysterium is evolving into a whole ecosystem? We want to enable developers and entrepreneurs to pioneer the next generation of the internet.
While other decentralised ecosystems may reveal their impact in five or more years, Mysterium can already spread its protocol to all corners of the internet, whether Web2 or Web3.
Exciting things are happening!
See you on the other side of Metaverse :)