EOS ASIA BP — An Update

Updated the 11th of August 2019

Contents:
1. About US
2. Credentials
3. Our Projects: Present
4. Our Projects: Past
5. Technical Details

Hi Everyone,

Almost 6 months after the launch of the EOS mainnet we thought it would be nice to check in with the community to recap some of our past projects, and speak about what we are doing at present. We know your time is valuable, so below you will find a quick breakdown.

ABOUT US

EOS ASIA was established on April 16 2018 by Dafeng Guo and Joseph Fanelli. They set out with the goal of helping EOS reach mass adoption and developed their BP with that in mind.

Since launch the team has proven themselves to be viable members of the community by supporting an excellent BP that has performed as both a top 21 BP and a standby BP. Our systems are always ready to go and we have produced blocks consistently. When producing we have NEVER missed a blacklist or have ignored any of our obligations to the Constitution and the community. When not producing blocks we have been actively providing the community with value via news, updates, and DApp incubation and development. We consider ourselves to be one of the best Asia-based BPs and have strived to be involved in all EOS communities, East and West.

Our credentials speak for themselves:

All-star international team representing US, Europe, China, and Korea.
Hardcore technical founders and hackers backed by Y Combinator.
Over 15 years of combined server and cloud technology experience, building and scaling apps serving millions of users.
Hosted SegmentFault blockchain hackathon in various cities throughout China.
Attended and participated in a slew of EOS events including but not limited to:

EOS.IO Hong Kong inaugural meetup

EOS Ignite online web conference

Tulip Conference

Global EOS BP Summit Oslo

Global BP Summit Shanghai

Family Day Shanghai

EOS Community Conference 2018 Seoul Korea

EOS Unconference 2018 Seoul Korea

EOS Seoul Meetup

Blockchain Netherlands Meetup

2050 Conference

Sino-European Blockchain meetup

iFiC Sanya Unlocking the New Economy event

B1June

Tulip Conference 2019 San Francisco

OUR PROJECTS:

PRESENT

EOSGO

EOSGO — Continuous work on eosgo.io, with the goal of making the website a well indexed leading source for EOS information and education to the outside world. Currently, if someone where to Google EOS, they would get the block.one website and the lip balm site along with 3rd party news site articles. We hope to change that so that when someone searches for EOS news they will get an accurate portal to EOSIO related news.

Our hope is that the project can be community led with technical and financial backing from EOS Asia. The vision is to have a collaborative environment where any well informed community member can add their knowledge to the provided tools and help create a better informed community. We believe the EOS community is well informed and are unique in their ability to help one another. We know our team is capable of providing top-notch technical and organizational support to grow the brand to new heights.

EOSX

An all-in-one EOS block explorer and toolkit. Voting, transaction scanner, account scanner, BP scanner, account creation, proxy management, buy/sell RAM, name auction, and more!

Website: https://www.eosx.io/

EOS INFRA

EOS Asia and BlockMatrix, created EOS Infra. EOS Infra is the first EOS Infrastructure provider for DApps. We grant developers the most secure, reliable and scalable access to the EOS network.

It is already being used by 50% of the top 10 EOS DApps, and we serve over 400,000,000 requests per day.

We allow the utilisation of a single API host to gain instant access to the EOS chain data without having to manage private nodes. All requests are served by Geo-DNS contextual to the location of the user. Tap into nodes in the US, China, and all over the world! We take care of the infrastructure so DApp can focus on development.

Website: https://www.eosinfra.io

THE LINK
The link works to bridge the communication gap between East and West by creating EOS-centric news and sharing it through various news outlets. We partner with Marshall Long, Beni Hakak and Yves La Rose to help bridge this gap. More information can be found here: https://www.thelink.one/

REFERENDUM UI
Created one of the first functional referendum UIs so that people could start voting on referendums right away using myeoskit.com. The EOS Asia team recognizes the importance of referendum, and has dedicated countless hours to ensuring that our portal would be one of the first BP created portals to support it. Check out our referendum voting system here: https://www.eosx.io/tools/referendums/proposals.
We have been coordinating with other BPs and organizations to teach the Chinese community how to best use the referendum tools so that users will have an easier experience when voting. Building the tools is not enough; we have partnered with the relevant news sources to get these educational tools to the users that need them the most.

CHRONICLE PROJECT
We are sponsors of the EOS history database project which aims to create better storage for the transactions that happen on the blockchain? Visit the Github to learn more: https://github.com/cc32d9/eos-work-proposals/blob/master/001_EOS_History_Database/001_02_sponsors.md.

EOSX
Performance and style combine to create a user experience like no other. EOSX is part of the evolution EOSIO and we are proud to support the system with our latest project. The project is going to be revealed and launched in the next few days.

PAST

We are dedicated to bringing EOS to the masses. The best way to achieve widespread adoption is through useful, fun, and well-designed products that showcase the best of the EOS platform, as well as tools and resources that support the community.

EOS PIXELS

EOS Pixels is an open source smart contract game created by an EOS Asia incubated team. The game 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 can be freshly created. The EOS Asia team decided to give the code to the community, and several community versions of EOS Pixels were launched. The most popular version raised 163k EOS, had over 2 million pixels drawn, and had a final pot giveaway of 22k EOS. Currently several forks of the project are still running and the code has been adopted and ported to other blockchain projects.

Website: https://www.eospixels.io

100 FREE EOS ACCOUNTS GIVEAWAY
We gave away 100 free EOS accounts in the month of November, 2018. Free accounts are one of the best ways to encourage adoption, so we plan to do similar giveaways in the future.

EOS GO BP PORTAL
We created the EOS Go block producer portal for EOS Go to help the community organize pre-launch. The portal was meant to be the place to go to research block producer candidates when deciding to cast your vote.

THE TECHNOLOGY

FAQs about our Technology Setup as answered by our cofounder Dafeng.

Why do you run cloud and not bare metal?

We started with running the service on cloud because the server specification for running a high performant block production or API node is unclear. Although we have participated in all the pre-launch testnets, years of experience in running apps used by millions of people tells us that the server requirement will only be clear when we see DApps running on mainnet doing real transactions. Thus, we decided to use cloud at the beginning to stay nimble and be able to react to changes faster. For instance, in early September, when we found out that the main bottleneck for faster block producer is CPU frequency, we were able to switch to one of the fastest CPU seamlessly. The change was done within 2 hours after we identified the issue. We couldn’t have achieve this level of fast response if we are on bare metal.

Do you have plans to run bare metal in the future?

We are planning to run producer nodes in bare metal in the future. The one feature that can still affect the server spec is multi-threading. This feature is described in EOSIO whitepaper and will vastly improve TPS of the network. It also adds uncertainty around server CPU and IO requirements. We believe once these requirements are clearer, moving to bare metal is the right move.

Do you plan to run hybrid infrastructure in the future?

When the server requirements are clear, running hybrid infrastructure is the way to go. The API and p2p nodes will be in cloud to leverage world-class application firewall, DDOS protection and scalability. The producer node will be using bare metal to ensure we are using the full resources available in the machines.

What is your current setup?

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

We deploy nodes to multiple AWS region in Tokyo and Singapore to best serve the Asia EOS 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 have one primary and one standby producer nodes in two different AZs and use keepalived to perform auto-failover. This failover mechanism has been battle-tested in production environment.

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.

Do you have a setup that includes redundancies?

Yes, please see our current set up for detail explanation.

Anything cool you would like to point out about your tech?