STRESS TESTING 🥵
The Session Token testnet was humming along in July. At the time of writing, there are 75 active nodes on testnet. This is awesome considering the testnet still exclusive to the OG community—thank you to all who stake.
With the help of the dedicated community, there have been UI fixes for the Staking Portal, backend updates for reward claims, and improvements for post-release registration. The Session Team is continuing to support anyone and everyone who is facing issues on testnet—make sure you reach out if you run into any issues.
Next up, unstaking and multi-contributor staking. Keep an eye out on the docs for new and updated guides as the testnet evolves.
TYING UP LOOSE ENDS 🧵
How long is a piece of string? I don’t have an answer for that age-old question, but what I can tell you is we have finished and released an updated and consolidated cross-platform strings list for Session. There was a big sprint to get this over the line in July—including almost 600 conflicts resolved on Android alone. If you’re scratching your head wondering what a string is or why this matters, a longer explanation will be dropping on the Session blog soon.
The spark notes go like this: The Session Experience™ will be more consistent across platforms, localisation will be faster and more accurate, and the design and QA process will be streamlined for all future features and updates. These strings will be utilised at levels we haven’t seen since MacGyver.
MOD POWERS⚡
Session community mods, free up some space on your belt—there are new moderator tools coming your way. The Session Team has cooked up some new mod functionality, using a solution that is working locally, including functions like challenges for joining users—intended to stem the flow of spam attacks in Communities. Next up is getting this running server side.
RIGHT ON BOARD🧑🏫
Session’s day1 experience is about to cop a major upgrade, with overhauled onboarding right around the corner. Multiple rounds of user testing and design work have culminated in this release, which has almost passed QA on iOS and Android.
Desktop is dealing with a couple more bugs, then this major upgrade will be released into the wild. Expect to be able to experience it yourself within the next few weeks.
The team will also be sneaking a few bug fixes into this update, so expect some added stability and smoothness when this rolls out.
DEEP DOWN 🦈
The Lokinet devs are currently deep into debugging. An example of some of the issues they’re tackling is a specific shutdown process bug. It appears after everything necessary has been correctly shut down, such as saving data to disk and closing connections.
Despite these steps being executed properly, a segmentation fault still occurs. On the bright side, this indicates that all steps in the start-up and shutdown process, including the handling of critical components like RouterContacts and RouterIDs, are functioning correctly. Additionally, the serialisation and deserialization processes are operating efficiently using oxen-encoding and updated C++20 code.
PRESS UPS 🦾
Session got some serious coverage last month, topped off with a review from the famous PCMag. It has a lot of competition these days, but PCMag has enjoyed many years as the undisputed champion of tech news, and we’re stoked to have gotten their attention. The review is positive overall, with some honest feedback on areas we can and will improve.
On top of that, Session was recommended for its advanced security by AVG in their messaging app comparison article. You can probably count on one hand how many web3 apps are taken seriously as competitors to their web2 counterparts. Session is one of them.
Session Token also got some time in the sun, appearing as the top item in the Blockster newsletter in some of its first ever coverage.
YOU GET A CAR, AND YOU GET A CAR! 🎤
Our social media is about to go sicko mode, with a four-week incentive program designed to massively boost followers and engagement. This campaign centres around a major giveaway which will be followed by a series of smaller giveaways, all carefully designed to incentivise audience growth and ongoing engagement.
This strategy will inject some rocket fuel into our social media, and give the Twitter/X algorithm a little slap around so that it realises it needs to take notice of Session Token. Once the dust settles at the end of this campaign, we will have bootstrapped serious growth in a very short time and have taken a very important step towards becoming a larger and louder voice in crypto twitter.