Monthly Update: Syntropy in December

Welcome to our December update! It's been a busy month for our team, with various projects and initiatives on the go. From preparing to launch significant updates to hosting community events, we've had a lot to keep us occupied during the festive season.

So without further ado, let's rundown some of the things we've been up to, and some sneak peeks of what you can look forward to in the coming months.

Major topics include:

• Syntropy Chooses Cosmos
• Entain & FIFA World Cup case study
• Stack getting closer to going public
• A fresh podcast appearance
• Syntropy Team goes to PTC’23
• The first community meeting in the Syntroverse

Following the Validator Staking program changes in November, we've promised to announce our transition to the new blockchain ecosystem in Q1 of 2023. Due to our team's collective efforts, we achieved this goal much earlier.

After much careful consideration and thorough evaluation by the Syntropy team searching for the blockchain that best fits our use cases, we have decided to switch to the Cosmos ecosystem.

The Cosmos ecosystem has a proven track record of being used in production environments, with over 250 projects currently active. It offers an easy dApp development process, enabling developers to utilize their existing programming skills. For our team, this means that our developers, who are proficient in Golang, will be able to bring our dApps to production swiftly.

Furthermore, Cosmos enables the creation of specialized chains tailored for a specific, custom-designed application. This gives us more control over the governance of our chain, resulting in an improved user experience for our community and potential users. The Cosmos ecosystem also provides interoperability and facilitated scalability, enabling connections with other chains within the ecosystem and working towards connecting different ecosystems to its "Internet of Blockchains." Its design allows for the easy scaling of transaction volume through multiple side chains, potentially allowing unlimited scalability.

The robust and scalable Cosmos blockchain will help us drive the future of the Internet and bring innovative solutions to the market. This is a significant step for Syntropy and a giant leap forward for the wider Web3 community.

Our decision was recognized by Cosmos and Interchain teams:

We look forward to January as we deploy our private devnet on Cosmos. As the name suggests, it will be used as an active development environment for our internal Cosmos team of developers. The testnet, to which our community and general audience will be invited, will happen later following the devnet.

In the meantime, our team continues to build to support our upcoming transition to Cosmos, which consists of internal team restructuring, onboarding everyone to the Cosmos ecosystem, and more. With a dedicated Cosmos team, we look forward to continuous developments throughout the upcoming months.

During the FIFA World Cup, sports betting companies, such as Entain, experienced a significant increase in traffic and revenue. It is a crucial time for these companies as they look to take advantage of the increased interest in betting.

To ensure that everything runs smoothly, the Syntropy team worked behind the scenes to ensure that customer networks were able to withstand the heavy traffic load. By utilizing our technology and internal network of relays, we were able to provide congestion-free and reliable network traffic for Entain's mission-critical network application.

Syntropy’s technology played an important role in the success of Entain's operations during the FIFA World Cup. In today's digital age, efficient and reliable networks are more important than ever, and Syntropy Stack proved to be valuable in ensuring successful operations for Entain.

Here’s the feedback we received from Lubomir Pirozek who’s the Network Team Lead at Entain:

“Syntropy has shown to be a great tool for building resilient and unique SD-WAN setups. By maximizing Entain's traffic during the 2022 FIFA World Cup, we are able to provide our consumers with fast and uninterrupted entertainment. The solution demonstrated its ability to always find the best route available, dramatically lowering both packet loss and round-trip durations, and putting us one step ahead of our rivals even during the peak moments of the whole World Cup.”

Here’s our CTO Jonas Simanavicius take on the use case:

From designers to engineers, the Syntropy team has been working through December to prepare for the upcoming Stack Self-Service release in January.

First and foremost, we will finally merge the Syntropy and Syntropy Stack websites. With a separate landing page for Syntropy Stack, updated brand design, better value proposition, and proper funnels, we expect this to increase and streamline user acquisition.

We will notably release the optimization functionality to the broader public instead of just select testers. This will enable us to reach a much broader developer audience and also help our sales & partnerships department outreach potential partners. Each Stack workspace will receive a fixed amount of free bandwidth to tinker and experiment, with the ability to purchase more bandwidth if the limits are exceeded.

Together with the Stack Self-Service, we will launch our updated Syntropy Documentation, which we intend to function as a Syntropy knowledge hub, covering everything from Stack to the blockchain. While many changes are happening to the Syntropy ecosystem currently, it may lack some content from the get-go, but we look forward to expanding with many things coming in 2023.

The Stack will also see multiple updates that we have covered in previous monthly updates. Python code in SDN is deprecated and rewritten in Golang, allowing our dedicated Go developers to work more efficiently. Multiple topologies are now supported in workspaces, allowing for network and workspace categorization based on numerous factors, for example, as previously mentioned, bandwidth limits in workspaces. Traffic reporting is also released, giving a more detailed insight into your network’s traffic in real-time and post-fact.

Speaking of data, our data analytics team has been working on creating an internal dashboard that gives us even more insight into the traffic that goes through our network. Every SDN server reports data on its server usefulness, which includes how much traffic has been sent through the relay, how long the relay node has been used, how effective it was at routing the traffic itself, and many other variables. This will enable us to make decisions and manage our network more efficiently.

We look forward to sharing exciting insights that we may find in the future.

Syntropy Chief Technology Officer Jonas Simanavicius recently appeared on The Index Podcast by The Graph for a discussion on Web3, blockchain development, and the future of networking with host Alex Kehaya.

Save the date and meet our team at the Pacific Telecommunications Council (PTC) event #PTC23 in Honolulu, Hawaii, on 15-18 January 2023.

PTC’s Annual Conference is a strategic springboard for the global communications industry and is sponsored by one of our partners, Zenlayer.

If you’re planning to attend this conference, send our community managers a message if you want to meet up with our team for a photo or a cup of coffee!

In December, community manager Kasparas hosted our first meetup in the Syntroverse with our community members. They all had a chance to interact directly and have informal conversations with marketing, developer relations, and sales team members.

The discussions quickly became even more colorful with fun initiatives such as easter egg hunts that included $NOIA token rewards. We, and most importantly, the participants, were thrilled with the turnout of this event, and we look forward to hosting more events in the Syntropy Dome shortly.

Syntropy Team Blitz is an initiative to bring the Syntropy team closer to the community. Every month, we interview someone from the team and ask several questions to understand their thinking and get insight into what keeps them busy.

This time, we are excited to have a valuable conversation with Gustas Baltramiejunas. Let’s jump straight into the Blitz interview.

Q: What are you responsible for at Syntropy?

A: At Syntropy, I have taken upon the Global Partnerships Manager role as part of the Sales & Partner Department. My day-to-day operations span from sourcing new industry partners to managing present relationships and maintaining stable progress with partners like PCCW & Zenlayer. Although I am new to this role and have had to face many challenges, I quickly became very confident in how we plan and overcome any obstacles with the team.

Q: What made you pursue a career in sales & partnerships?

A: Circumstances. I came to Syntropy amidst a career change. It was difficult trying to find my fit, but I soon discovered that I have a natural talent to connect with highly-qualified people across diverse fields. I never have any fear that a conversation may go wrong. I love every single part of my work. Most recently, participating at the Capacity Europe conference pushed me to new highs in my career. I have realized the immense potential of Syntropy and met many executives who commended our progress and dived right into talks with our engineering and product teams.

Q: With the crypto industry exponentially growing each year, have you noticed a change in how companies react to blockchain-powered solutions?

A: Amidst a bear market in the crypto industry, I continue to notice signals from traditional and digital companies preparing to take on new waves of innovation. From what I have read, blockchain-powered solutions are not generally for everyone. Some are resisting, some are adapting, and others are innovating. I believe we are still in the early adoption stage, which leads me to focus on the early majority that believes in utilizing blockchain technologies to improve traditional products or services. I’m mesmerized by those who challenge the status quo through innovation.

Q: Could you share some of the biggest challenges that you had to overcome?

A: The biggest challenge has been to learn every technical bit and bite about Syntropy. As a partnerships manager, I must have a clear knowledge of how our technology works to give thorough answers to complex questions. But ultimately it is a team effort, and having my team able to support me on call is what gives me the edge and enables us to be on top of our game.

Q: Every other day you hear about massive names such as Google, Red Bull, or FIFA partnering with various crypto projects. Which industry is most likely to experience a revolution and be the first to massively adopt and leverage distributed ledger technology in your opinion?

A: The telecommunications industry has been rampant with the innovation of blockchain-powered solutions. Blockchain technology has several applications in this industry: ranging from enabling new services and technologies to simplifying internal telco operations. There is a telco alliance for establishing blockchain-powered use cases known as CBAN, with top innovators such as PCCW, Deutsche Telekom, Colt, Orange, Telefonica, and others. Together they are completing proof of concepts and contributing heavily to increasing adoption of distributed ledger technology across the telecommunications industry.

As we close out this year, we are grateful for the support of our partners, team members, and our community. We're looking forward to all that the new year will bring and we hope to continue to serve you to the best of our ability. Thank you for following along and supporting us throughout this journey.

You can reach our community managers anytime through our Telegram and Discord channels. We are always pleased to hear from you and appreciate all the feedback you provide.