BEARING WITNESS 👼

The Session Network is materialising before our very eyes, with a MAJOR milestone now under our belt. We’ve got Session Node registrations on the Ethereum chain being witnessed and replicated on the workchain in a test environment.

Practically speaking, this interaction means Session Nodes can fetch the information they need from an EVM chain like Arbitrum. This information includes things like new Session Node registrations or rewards claim transactions, and those transactions are then translated into a format readable by the workchain which will be fundamental to the function of the Session Network. Although staking and rewards using the Session Token will occur on the Arbitrum network, a workchain maintained by Session Nodes will be used for a lot of the actual ‘work’ involved with running the network – like network governance, and tracking node rewards and punishments.

This is a significant achievement for the core team, and brings us one step closer to the transition to Session Token.

ABRA KADABRA 🧙

Do you believe in magic? It’s one thing to pull a rabbit out of a hat (easy, boring) but quite another to make a message disappear in a decentralised messaging app (challenging, interesting). Without a centralised server, there is no easy way to create a single ‘source of truth’ for your Session client to rely on for the information about how and when a message should disappear. But building Session has never been easy, so we created a solution anyway.

To overcome this challenge, we completely re-configured how disappearing messages work to allow for two different modes: ‘disappear after send’ and ‘disappear after read’. Both participants can now have their own settings, too — you might select for your messages to disappear 5 minutes after it’s been read, and I might select one hour. This creates more flexibility for users and also allows each swarm to have an independent source of truth on which to base your client’s disappearing message settings.

At time of publication, the update will have begun a staged roll-out. There is, however, a two week interim period between the release of the update and the activation of the new functionality that it enables, meaning that you won’t notice any changes until March 13th 10am AEDT. This is to ensure that as many users as possible have updated to the new release, because the upgrade will not work effectively for clients who haven't installed the upgraded version of disappearing messages.

NOTHIN BUT (LOKI)NET 🏀

Our massive upgrade to disappearing messages isn’t the only exciting Session news we’ve got for you today. The Lokinet client refactor is entering its final stages, meaning that we’re not too far away from being able to start testing Lokinet end to end. We will soon be within striking distance of integrating Lokinet into Session.

Lokinet integration will be a quantum leap forward for Session, unlocking myriad new functionalities, including features which had previously not been possible for a messaging app to achieve. Primarily we’re talking about high quality, onion routed video calls (or onion rings 😋), which will be a completely unique feature for Session that no other app is capable of replicating.

NOW WE HERE 🙏

As controversial musician Drake once said: started at the bottom, now we here. Session Token started at the bottom in the first week of February, with zero followers on social media. Our community on Twitter now numbers in the thousands, and it’s safe to say we’re here.

This is thanks in part to the warm reception that Session Token has received from the Session community. If you’re a Session user who has taken an interest in the token, welcome! We’re excited to have you here.

The other major factor in our audience growth has been the successful publication of collaborative content via a strategic partner who shares news about the happenings in the Arbitrum ecosystem. Our content significantly outperformed similar content on their platform, demonstrating that the Arbitrum community are just as excited as we are that Session is coming to their network!

This won’t be the last time that we engage in this kind of community-building strategy, so get ready for more frens to join us in the near future as we continue to spread the word about Session Token.

WEBSITE LOADING … 90% 💽

If you are a frequenter of the world wide web, you may have heard about or used websites. If so, we have some great news for you — The Session token website is nearly entirely built out. The new site will be responsive, beautifully designed, and carefully created to utilise an effective and strategically built marketing funnel. You can check out the interim website here for a sneak peak of what to expect, and ⬇️ check this out ⬇️ for an even sneakier peak of the (WiP) staking page, which has never been released publicly before.

I WANT MY SESSIONTV 📹

If you want Session tutorials, hot takes on Big Tech, and all the content you could ever need to free yourself from online tracking — have I got news for you. SessionTV is the home for all this and more, and we have been working away on two new videos that will be dropping very soon. Since we’re pals, I’ll tell you a bit about them.

The first will give you everything you need to know to find the best way to secure your online accounts and keep out hackers 🕵️ that’s right — we’re giving you all an in-depth rundown of the different kinds of 2FA, and spilling the beans on which one you should avoid if you don’t want to get pwned. The second will be a brief overview of Session Token, so that we can explain quickly and easily what the token is and why we’re building it, without making people read 🤓

So far this year, our new approach to the channel has been resonating a lot with the audience, and we’ve been seeing a serious uptick in views. We’re also connecting with the folks watching over at Odysee, which isn’t surprising as a fellow web3 platform. If you want to check out our Odysee channel and avoid YouTube, click here.