Skip to main content

September 13, 2023

· 4 min read
Roderik van der Veer
Roderik van der Veer
Founder & CTO

New User Interface​

The SettleMint platform has received a new design of the user interface for both Light and Dark modes. This interface redesign is a part of larger refresh of our companies public site and branding.

All features and functionality remain the same and there should be no interruption to any of your current running applications. Please contact support at [email protected] if you do experience any interruptions.

Quorum Consortium Networks (QBFT)​

The SettleMint Platform now supports Quorum consortium networks using the QBFT consensus algorithm. The QBFT mechanism ensures that no empty blocks are mined, making it an optimal choice for chains that experience sporadic usage.

High Availability (HA) for Blockchain Nodes with Loadbalancers​

Loadbalancing blockchain nodes has traditionally been challenging due to the unique identities each node holds on the network.JSON-RPC calls typically connect to a single node. An outage on this node can disrupt your application.

We're introducing an application-aware load balancer option. This sits atop your nodes, enabling horizontal scaling of your nodes, thereby ensuring increased reliability and performance. You can direct your connection to a single endpoint, and the load balancer takes care of routing your request to a node that's operational.

For consortium chains, byzantine fault tolerance necessitates a minimum of 4 validator nodes. With this configuration, block production remains unaffected even if one node experiences an outage. This is because over 66% of validators need to be online for block production and transaction processing.

  • Deployment Recommendation: It's optimal to have 4 validator nodes combined with a minimum of 2 non-validator nodes. Place a load balancer over the non-validator nodes for best performance and reliability.

High Availability (HA) for the Graph Middleware​

The Graph is an important middleware in our platform as it allows users to efficiently index and retrieve data from the blockchain. It is comprised of two main components - the indexer and the query node.

In our recent release, we've segregated the indexer and query components. Now, multiple replicas of the query node operate behind a load balancer.This setup ensures continuity of query functions, especially during periods of maintenance or when there are interruptions due to cloud provider operations.

High Availability (HA) for IPFS​

The new release ensures that all IPFS nodes within an application now band together to form a robust IPFS cluster.The distributed nature of this setup ensures data integrity and availability, even if some nodes experience issues.

Once a file is pinned on one node, it's instantly replicated across all other nodes in the cluster. This feature significantly reduces the chances of data loss.

  • Deployment Recommendation: For optimal performance and reliability, we advise deploying a minimum of 2 IPFS nodes for every application. You also need to pin every CID you want to keep on the IPFS cluster.

Hyperledger Fabric​

Creating HLF ordering-only network just for maintaining world state. It allows to use external peers for using shared ordering service.

HLF is now available on Azure which makes give HLF full coverage on our available cloud providers.

Backups​

The SettleMint platform allows you to deploy services on multiple cloud providers, in several regions, on managed auto-calling, auto-healing, and multi-zonal Kubernetes clusters. This ensures maximum uptime and performance for your services. And yet, things can still go wrong. Data corruption in a blockchain node, erroneous deleting files in an IDE, removing a service you still needed.

For this reason, in the background, we backup any storage attached to your services. Hourly (48h retention), Daily (7d retention), and weekly (4w retention). If you ever need to get something back that you accidentally deleted, reach out to [email protected]!

Connect an external Besu node to your network​

The SettleMint Platform now supports connecting an external Besu node to your network. This feature allows you to connect your own Besu node to the SettleMint Platform, thereby enabling you to use your own node for transaction processing and block production. It will also allow you to migrate of the SettleMint platform and run your network yourself. More information in the Besu guide in the docs.