VAMPIRE HUNTING 🧛
If you’re a fan of silver bullets, wooden stakes, and chains of garlic, then boy do I have news for you: we’ve been working on the staking frontends for Session Token.
These are the frontends which users will interact with when they’re staking their Session Tokens via Metamask and other EVM-supported wallets. This will be a core part of the Session Token ecosystem, so getting the designs right is super important – staking Session Token should be simple and snappy.
And as a lil’ treat, here’s a sneak peek at our mock-ups. 👀
GETTING TO THE POINT 🫵
We’ve got Session point releases comin’ out the wazoo! We’re on the brink of releasing updates for Android and iOS, and Desktop had a point release last month. These releases contain a bunch of upgrades and fixes that didn’t make it into the disappearing messages release.
There’s a laundry list of upgrades coming to each platform. I'll drop a few of the highlights here, but you can also expect to receive some more in-depth emails/blogs/wax-sealed letters from the Session channels in the upcoming month.
Desktop has gained keyboard shortcut navigation and improved accuracy for path info in the user interface; Android people will enjoy some improvements to emoji reacts and a fix for that annoying bug that’d hide messages under your keyboard; and those on iOS will receive new UI showing more attachment info and (you may not, like…notice this…it’s important…the devs told me) an overhaul to the networking protocols so they now use QUIC (transport-layer protocol but with encryption 🤓).
T.E.A.M 🧑🤝🧑
There’s no I in TEAM, but there definitely is in RAPIDLY GROWING DePIN MESSAGING APPLICATION. We welcomed some new folks to the team during the month of April, injecting fresh energy, fun vibes, and new skills to the team.
We’ve added two new developers to the team to supercharge our progress towards the token migration. And we also brought in a new Community Manager, who will help us prepare for a successful launch + prime the community for happiness and abundance.
I DID HAVE RELATIONS WITH THAT PUBLIC 🎷
The team is growing, and so is our network of collaborators. Tony Stark had a pretty badass suit but he would not have defeated Thanos and lived happily ever after without the Avengers (I haven’t seen the movie).
A PR firm who were very interested in Session reached out to us recently, and last month we began working alongside them to make sure that we’re securing territory in the media landscape and taking part in the global conversation about secure messaging and web3.
We’re also developing a strategy for including some influencers in our third-party media strategy, so stay tuned for more on that next month 😏
DePIN 🔥
DePIN is the hot new thing. Well, it’s not that new. Some very long standing projects are finding themselves in the DePIN bucket, like Arweave, Helium, and…Session.
Noting the interest and hype around DePIN, we’ve set out to put together some DePIN content to get in on the action. We recently dropped this article and this thread, and we’ve got more content loaded up, too. If you’re keen on the DePIN angle, make sure to make some noise and send a clear signal we should stick with DePIN.
GET ON BOARD 🛹
We’ve spoken about onboarding a few times before, but that release is right around the corner. In April, we continued our work overhauling onboarding. The process for designing our new onboarding was quite rigorous, with multiple rounds of user testing and surveying, re-designing screens, and testing and surveying again. We think we’ve arrived at a great upgrade which will help retain more first-time users of Session.
We’ve also been plowing through the last chunk of Groups v2, and unifying all strings cross-platform (which has been a mega effort, and will make a huge difference to updating and localising Session).
SQUARE EYES 📺
SessionTV is really starting to find its groove, with 2 more videos released in April: Passkeys: the End of the Password Era and Is Your Phone Listening To You?. Our Passkey video has surged past 500 views in just a couple of weeks, and it looks like the phone-spying video will surpass that mark as well.
This month you can expect to see more of Cam – this time chatting about DePIN.
COME ‘N’ VIBE 🎮
Our campaign with DappRadar has officially wrapped up! Our Discord now has over 2,000 members in it – it’s the best place to get insider information about our progress, hang out with other fans of the project, and discuss Session Token right now.
There will probably be some more changes coming to our community channels thanks to the work of our new Community Manager, so if there’s anything in particular that you want to see happen – make yourself heard!
JUST WHAT THE DOC ORDERED 🍎
Our Session Token docs have officially launched. 🎉 The docs give a good overview of our designs for Session Token, staking, and the genesis distribution. Thanks to everyone who supported the release and pointed out any small changes that we had to make – it’s much appreciated.
We’re also going to use the content from these docs to put together some early FAQs for Session Token and train an FAQ help-bot for the Discord.
For those of you hanging out for the nitty-gritty details, we’ll be adding more technical information to the docs as it becomes available and relevant.
THE GREAT MIGRATION 🦅
Now that we’ve got a lot of the smart contract work sorted out, the Oxen Core Team are working heavily on the Oxen core side of the migration – making sure the appchain has compatibility with the Layer2 activities.
We’ll also need to prepare upgrades to Service Node software for the transition, which is now underway.
LOW-KEY LOKI 🪄
Only true OGs will get the reference. 😏 The Lokinet team is working away in the background – refactoring the Lokinet client, and building a standalone tunneling implementation to test and debug any issues with the client refactor.
We are getting closer to our goal of liblokinet integration into Session – which will be one of the single biggest QOL upgrades to Session ever. Godspeed, Lokinet devs. 🙏
GATHERING 🫂
We’ve been doing some itinerary planning this month, figuring out which events we will prioritise over the next year. We’ve already got a few smaller events lined up – but if there are web3 or crypto-specific events you’re high on, give us a shout in the Session Token Discord and we’ll see you there.