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2019-09-14

Polar.io - WAX Guild Candidate Introduction

Contents:

  1. Introduction
  2. Founding Team
  3. DApps
  4. Community Service Projects
  5. Technical Details
  6. Beliefs
  7. Contact

1. Introduction

Welcome to Polar.io, a Guild candidate with a world-class technical team and seasoned blockchain DApp developers. As one of the most international and technical Guild candidate, we're bringing together EOSIO and WAX super fans from the United States, Europe, China, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and more. This article will introduce Polar.io's team, core values, current progress, future development, and contributions to the community. We will also share our understanding and beliefs about the future of the EOSIO and WAX ecosystem.

Highlights of Polar.io:

  • World-class technical team (Y Combinator, Alibaba Cloud MVP, speaker at various technical conferences)
  • Most international team (China, Europe, USA and Korea)
  • Dedicated to creating mainstream EOSIO and WAX DApps

2. Team

We are the Avengers of the EOSIO and WAX community. Polar.io has an all-star founding team that brings together wizards of China, Europe, United States and South Korea. Our core technical members are backed by Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator and recognized by well-known industry veterans. With 15 years of experience in server and cloud technology, handling applications for tens of millions of users, we'll bring the best of of technology and international representation to make EOSIO and WAX the blockchain infrastructure for mainstream applications. Our team has previously built games and applications that are used by tens of millions of people, and we are committed to build DApps that will take EOSIO and WAX technology to mainstream adoption. Moreover, our goal is to ensure EOSIO and WAX continues its success as a healthy, community-driven decentralized protocol, and we will fight anyone who wants to privatize the ecosystem for their own benefit.

Dafeng Guo - Cofounder Dafeng is cofounder and CTO of Strikingly ,where he graduated from Y Combinator in 2013. A successful serial entrepreneur, he previously has created Facebook apps with more than 20 million users. Dafeng began coding when he was 14 years old and has since been deeply involved in the technical community. He has spoken at various technical conferences including QCon, SDCC, Computing Conference, RubyConf and JSConf. In 2017, Dafeng was awarded as Alibaba Cloud Tech MVP for his contribution to the cloud computing community in China. As a blockchain and EOSIO and WAX enthusiast, Dafeng is committed to contributing his technical insight and passion to the EOSIO and WAX community.

Joseph Fanelli - Cofounder Joseph is the founder of EOSIO and WAX Link, EOSIO and WAX Go China ambassador, guest writer for NEO City of Zion, and cofounder of webao.co. Over the years he has cooperated with many large corporations including China's Tencent QQ Music, overseeing large projects and taking the helm of NIO Capital's online presence, all while managing multiple companies throughout Asia. With EOSIO and WAX Link, Joseph seeks to bridge the gap between Guild candidates around the world and especially between East and West. Through EOSIO and WAX Link, he has coordinated efforts and provided technical support to multiple Guild applicants. With a love for EOSIO and WAX and a relentless drive to push the EOSIO and WAX community forward, he teamed up with Dafeng to create Polar.io. He offers not only milestone contributions at the technical level but also valuable perspective for our communities.


3. DApp Projects

What sets Polar.io apart from many other Guild candidates is our world-class application design and development capability. Our team has built and scaled products from zero to millions of users, and we know what it takes to achieve massive growth, covering all angles from design to tech to business. We're dedicated to creating EOSIO DApps that everyone can use and love. We aim to be leaders in the EOSIO and WAX DApp community, serving as the premier example of the possibilities of building on the EOSIO and WAX platform and continuously shepherding talented developers worldwide to EOSIO and WAX.

EOS PIXELS We created and open sourced the code of what became one of the most popular DApps in EOS: PixelMaster. This project also inspired the economic model of the latest Block.one Project: Voice. EOS Pixels is a live canvas drawing DApp built on EOS, where each pixel changes hands for EOS tokens. After a certain amount of inactivity, the canvas, with all its painted pixels, will be saved for all eternity and a new canvas will be freshly created.


4. Community Service Projects

EOSX An all-in-one EOSIO scanner & toolkit. Voting, transaction scanner, account scanner, BP scanner, account creation, proxy management, buy/sell RAM, name auction, and more! EOSX is the next evolution of EOSIO chain visualization and the most advanced block explorer ever created!

EOS GO The largest EOS community and the go to place for EOS projects, EOS tokens market cap rankings, EOS news & blog and DApp explorer. EOS Go is also the biggest western media with over 50k members.

EOS INFRA Scalable & reliable API access for dApps on EOS. Used by 50% of the top DApps in the EOS ecosystem. We've served over 25 billion requests through our free service with 0 downtime! To support all premium features, we have rolled our own dedicated clusters of EOS API nodes around the globe to ensure maximum performance, minimal latency, and consistent configuration.


__ 5. Technical Details__

We choose not to use bare metal infrastructure for this beginning stage due to the high difficulty of rapid-response scaling. However, we will consider bare metal infrastructure in the future, when the technical requirements for Guild become more apparent and predictable. Bare metal servers offer benefits for efficiency and cost reduction in the long term, but only if computing requirements are more stable.

Initial Stage - Tech Specification on the Cloud We plan to deploy our server instances in AWS Seoul, Singapore and Tokyo regions to best serve the Asia EOSIO and WAX community. These instances will be optimized for high availability, high memory performance, and strong resiliency against possible attacks.

Our initial setup on AWS are summarised in the points below and may scale depending on demand:

Primary and Backup Guild Node:

  •  Network 10 Gbps (up to 25 Gbps)
  •  AWS Shield (Managed DDoS Protection)
  •  Intel Xeon 8 vCPUs / 256GB RAM / 1TB SSD
  •  Public Full Node:
  •  Network 10 Gbps (up to 25 Gbps)
  •  AWS Shield (Managed DDoS Protection)
  •  Intel Xeon 4 vCPUs / 256GB RAM / 1TB SSD 
  •  Testnet:
  •  Network 1G High Shared Network
  •  AWS Shield (Managed DDoS Protection)
  •  Intel Xeon 4 vCPUs / 32GB RAM / 128GB SSD

Network Topology

Our highlevel cloud infrastructure network topology is designed as illustrated below.

Our infrastructure follows the Well-Architected framework from AWS to provide the most secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient services.

We plan to deploy nodes to multiple AWS region starting in Seoul followed by Singapore and Tokyo to best serve the Asia EOSIO and WAX community. All the incoming requests will be routed to appropriate region using Route53 based on geolocation proximity, performance and availability.

Each region is separated into two Availability Zones. AWS Availability Zones are engineered to be isolated from failures in other Availability Zones. Availability Zones within a region provide inexpensive, low-latency network connectivity to other zones in the same region. In case of any failure in node, replicating data synchronously across data centers will be fast. The dual Availability Zones provide active redundancy for the nodes. When the nodes of a particular Availability Zone fail their health checks, ELB (Elastic Load Balancing) will stop sending traffic to those nodes and automatically failover to healthy nodes in other Availability Zones with no manual intervention.

We apply high security at all layers: Virtual private cloud (VPC), subnet, load balancer, every instance, operating system, and application. All traffic will pass through AWS WAF and AWS Shield services. AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that safeguards applications. AWS Shield provides always-on detection and automatic inline mitigations that minimize application downtime and latency.

Mature Stage - Tech Specification on Bare Metal

Once the resource utilization becomes apparent, we will consider moving the cloud infrastructure to dedicated servers to increase efficiency and reduce cost in the long run. All the infrastructure we set up on AWS is automated using Terraform and Ansible. We firmly believe in the approach of Infrastructure as Code to automate and codify infrastructure. This makes moving to bare metal IDC set up much easier. We are still evaluating IDC vendors based in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Seoul and will release more detailed evaluation reports at a later date.

We are also exploring the possibility of using AWS Bare Metal Instance. Although the server specification offering is limited at the moment, this approach combines the best of cloud and bare metal without the hassle of maintaining the stability, availability, and security of IDC.


6. Beliefs

Core Values We are 100% dedicated to the community.  We will never take bribes or kickbacks. We reject the struggle for power and profit. We will only strive for the health of the EOSIO and WAX ecosystem as a whole.

Mainstream We aim to use our technical ability to create DApps that will push for widespread adoption and take EOSIO and WAX into the mainstream. We will create DApps ourselves, and we will teach, inspire and fund others to do the same.

Collaborative We believe that a decentralized network requires open collaboration among individual BPs. Polar.io engages in open discussion with other Guild candidates and offers free technical consultations and community support. Polar.io hopes to join forces with other BPs to fulfill our mission.


7. Contact

  • Website: www.polar.io
  • Business: cp@eosasia.one
  • Tech: dapp@eosasia.one
  • Telegram: t.me/eosasia
  • Twitter: @eosasia_one
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