SettleMint is excited to announce a powerful new feature: Run Anything with Custom Deployments! This feature revolutionizes how users can deploy decentralized applications (dApps) on our platform, offering unprecedented flexibility and control. Whether you’re developing a fintech platform, an NFT marketplace, or a DeFi solution, Custom Deployments let you seamlessly integrate your custom-built front-end and web technologies while leveraging the robust blockchain backend that SettleMint provides.

With Custom Deployments, you now have the freedom to design applications according to your specific needs. This includes using custom domains for a more professional appearance, integrating advanced functionalities, and selecting the best infrastructure for your use case. The platform allows for flexible application design, which means you can use your preferred frameworks, programming languages, and design architectures without limitations. For instance, a fintech company developing a peer-to-peer lending platform can now deploy a user-friendly interface that meets their precise user requirements, streamlining the entire deployment process.

Moreover, this feature unlocks enhanced scalability and security for your dApps. With SettleMint’s scalable infrastructure, you can handle high traffic and performance peaks seamlessly, ensuring your application grows as your user base expands. Additionally, our secure environment ensures your deployments meet the highest security standards, making Custom Deployments perfect for businesses that need to maintain trust and reliability with their users, such as investment firms launching asset tokenization platforms or DeFi platforms managing cross-chain transfers. 

We’re excited to introduce a new feature in SettleMint that lets you connect directly to existing Hyperledger Besu and Quorum blockchain networks run by other organizations. This is a big win for businesses already involved in blockchain consortia or those looking to join one. With this feature, you can create nodes on the SettleMint platform and easily integrate with these permissioned networks, making collaboration with external partners more streamlined and secure.

For companies working within consortia, this feature simplifies the process of joining networks that are already up and running. Whether you’re part of a supply chain network, a financial services consortium, or any other multi-party blockchain setup, you can now seamlessly connect without needing to build or manage the entire network yourself. This opens the door to stronger collaboration and more efficient operations, as all members of the consortium can easily contribute while maintaining control over their own nodes.

By allowing organizations to integrate into these existing networks, this feature helps businesses accelerate their blockchain journey. It’s a powerful tool for enhancing transparency, security, and trust between partners in a consortium. With SettleMint, you can now tap into the benefits of shared blockchain networks with minimal setup, helping your enterprise grow and innovate alongside trusted collaborators.

SettleMint’s support for the Soneium testnet is a significant boost for developers wanting to build on this efficient blockchain platform. Soneium is designed for scalability and offers a great environment for testing decentralized applications (dApps) before going live. With this integration, developers can take advantage of SettleMint’s powerful tools while experimenting with Soneium’s features, like low transaction costs and high processing speed. This makes it easier for teams to test their applications effectively and make quick adjustments as needed.

By supporting the Soneium testnet, SettleMint improves the development experience by providing a secure and flexible space for developers to refine their applications. Users can easily deploy their dApps on the Soneium testnet, benefiting from its advanced features while using SettleMint’s straightforward interface and tools. This partnership not only encourages innovation but also helps developers create more reliable and efficient blockchain solutions, supporting the growth and adoption of the Soneium ecosystem.

SettleMint is also committed to supporting the Soneium mainnet as soon as it goes live. This means that developers who have been testing their applications on the Soneium testnet can seamlessly transition to the mainnet without any disruptions. By providing immediate support for the mainnet, SettleMint ensures that developers can launch their dApps confidently, leveraging the full capabilities of the Soneium blockchain from day one. This approach not only streamlines the deployment process but also allows teams to continue building on the solid foundation they established during their testing phase, making it easier to bring innovative solutions to the market.

The User Wallet Manager feature within SettleMint provides a sophisticated and elegant solution for account management and identity masking through the use of Hierarchical Deterministic (HD) wallets. These HD wallets generate a structured hierarchy of private/public key pairs from a single master seed, allowing users to create a unique address for every transaction. This approach not only enhances privacy and security—since the addresses are related but not publicly linked—but also streamlines the management of keys. Users can efficiently create multiple child wallets under a single parent wallet, making it easy to categorize funds and back up their assets securely.

One of the most significant benefits of the User Wallet Manager is its ability to mask user identity on a per-transaction basis. This feature provides an unlimited supply of account addresses, each with its own unique, untraceable private key. Organizations can manage different transaction classes or allocate accounts for various end users, significantly enhancing operational flexibility. This capability is especially beneficial for businesses that require distinct accounts for different functions, enabling them to avoid key reuse and duplicate signing, which can pose security risks.

Moreover, the User Wallet Manager’s HD wallet functionality greatly simplifies asset management for both individuals and enterprises. By allowing businesses to partition separate wallets within their organization, it enhances organizational efficiency and security. The ability to recover entire wallet structures from a single master seed minimizes the risk associated with losing individual keys, making it an attractive option for financial services looking to deliver a secure blockchain solution.

The feature to customize Kubernetes deployment settings within SettleMint offers users an intuitive user interface (UI) that simplifies the management of deployed services in self-managed installations. This UI provides a comprehensive set of options for adjusting key deployment parameters, such as annotations, labels, tolerations, affinity, and node selectors. By making these customization options readily accessible, SettleMint enables users to tailor their Kubernetes configurations to better align with their specific operational needs and infrastructure requirements, fostering a more efficient and optimized deployment process.

One of the standout benefits of this feature is its ability to facilitate seamless integration into existing infrastructure. Organizations often have unique requirements based on their operational environment, and the customization options provided by SettleMint empower users to implement any necessary settings effortlessly. This flexibility ensures that deployments can adhere to organizational policies and best practices while maintaining compatibility with the broader Kubernetes ecosystem. By allowing users to specify their desired configurations directly through the UI, SettleMint reduces the complexity typically associated with Kubernetes management, allowing teams to focus on their core business objectives.

Moreover, the customization of deployment settings significantly enhances the scalability and resilience of services within the Kubernetes environment. By leveraging advanced features like affinity and tolerations, users can optimize resource allocation and improve workload distribution across nodes, leading to better performance and reliability. The ability to modify labels and annotations also aids in effective resource management, enabling users to implement advanced monitoring, logging, and orchestration strategies tailored to their needs. Overall, this feature empowers users to harness the full potential of their Kubernetes deployments, ensuring they can operate efficiently and effectively within their own customized infrastructure.

QBFT (Quorum Byzantine Fault Tolerance) is the latest consensus algorithm now available in Hyperledger Besu on the SettleMint platform. This proof-of-authority consensus mechanism is designed to provide enhanced security, scalability, and performance for enterprise blockchain networks. QBFT ensures that all participating nodes in the network agree on the state of the blockchain, even in the presence of potentially malicious actors or network failures. By utilizing a leader-based system with rotating block proposers, QBFT maintains network integrity while allowing for efficient transaction processing.

Compared to its predecessor, IBFTv2, QBFT offers several significant improvements. First and foremost, QBFT provides immediate transaction finality, meaning that once a block is added to the chain, it's considered final and cannot be reversed. This feature is particularly crucial for financial applications where transaction certainty is paramount. Additionally, QBFT boasts enhanced performance metrics, with faster block times and higher transaction throughput. The algorithm also incorporates improved security measures, including protection against certain types of attacks that could potentially compromise IBFTv2 networks. These enhancements make QBFT a more robust and efficient choice for enterprise-grade blockchain deployments.

We're excited to announce that QBFT is now the default consensus algorithm for all new Hyperledger Besu networks deployed on the SettleMint platform. This means that users can immediately take advantage of QBFT's benefits when launching their blockchain projects.

The Attestation Service is a groundbreaking framework designed to facilitate the creation, management, and verification of attestations on EVM cpmpatible blockchains (public or cosortium). By leveraging the decentralized and immutable nature of blockchain technology, it allows individuals and organizations to issue verifiable statements of fact, which can include anything from identity verification to compliance with regulatory standards. This service empowers users to maintain control over their data while providing transparency and trustworthiness to various processes.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the Attestation Service is its potential to streamline numerous processes across various industries. For instance, in the realm of education, institutions can issue verified diplomas and certifications that are tamper-proof, ensuring that employers can trust the qualifications of job candidates. In healthcare, medical professionals can share validated credentials, thus enhancing patient safety and care quality. The Attestation Service also plays a crucial role in compliance-related scenarios, allowing businesses to demonstrate adherence to regulations and standards seamlessly, reducing the burden of paperwork and audits.

The versatility of the Attestation Service extends to a wide array of use cases, making it an invaluable tool for both individuals and enterprises. Beyond identity verification and compliance, EAS can be applied to create transparent voting systems, enhance reputation management in decentralized finance (DeFi), and even support peer-to-peer lending by validating the creditworthiness of borrowers. Moreover, in the realm of environmental sustainability, it can help track and verify carbon credits, ensuring that claims about carbon offsets are accurate and trustworthy. Overall, the Ethereum Attestation Service stands as a transformative solution, unlocking new possibilities for trust and verification in our increasingly digital world.

You can now create new consortium networks where you have the capability to customize literally everything.

1. You can build your own genesis files,

2. import them from external sources,

3. customize boot node lists and the key material used for your nodes

This allows you to do a variety of use cases that were impossible before.

For example, you can migrate between different networks and different instances of the SettleMint platform. You can execute your own hard forks, customize settings that are not customizable via the UI, join external consortia that are restricted by identity or just in general join any external network you want.

Every application and organization/workspace now has full access to the audit log. This will help you ensure maximum compliance in enterprise environments.

The Smart Contract Portal is a middleware which creates an easy to use api on top of your smart contracts. It can be used with all EVM-compatible chains like Ethereum, Hyperledger Besu, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche, etc. You can run it on your own blockchain nodes (both public and permissioned) or on a Load Balancer.

Benefits of using the smart contract portal:

1. Simplified Integration: APIs allow developers to interact with complex smart contract functions through familiar interfaces, reducing the need to understand blockchain-specific languages and protocols.

2. Data Aggregation: APIs can consolidate data from multiple smart contracts, providing a unified view.

3. Improved Performance: GraphQL optimizes data fetching, ensuring that clients retrieve only the necessary data in a single request, reducing network load and improving performance.

4. Stack agnostic: Teams are free to choose their own technology stack.

More information on https://console.settlemint.com/documentation/docs/using-platform/middleware/#the-smart-contract-portal-middleware

Getting started with the self-managed platform might seem daunting, but in practice it is not that complex. To showcase this we have open-sourced a complete guide and Terraform module to do so on GCP. From 0 to hero in about 30 minutes!

Get started today on https://github.com/settlemint/tutorial-btp-on-gcp

Hedera is a public distributed ledger technology (DLT) network that was launched in August 2018 by Hedera Hashgraph, LLC. It uses the Hashgraph consensus algorithm, which is a unique and novel approach to achieving consensus in a distributed network.

Hedera’s native cryptocurrency is called HBAR, and it is used to power the network’s services, including smart contracts, file storage, and regular transactions.

Hedera focuses on providing high throughput, low latency, and fair transaction ordering, making it suitable for enterprise-grade applications. Unlike blockchain-based systems, Hedera’s Hashgraph algorithm ensures fast, fair, and secure transactions without compromising decentralization. We support, the Hedera Mainnet and the Hedera Testnet.

Read more on https://console.settlemint.com/documentation/docs/blockchain-guides/Hedera/hedera-the-basics/

The platform now includes a complete observability suite. It powers the resource metrics and logs in the platform UI, and includes a Grafana instance for operation personel to track any metric they wish to follow.

The beloved and widely used Mumbai testnet for Polygon PoS uses Ethereum’s Goerli testnet as its root chain. This means Mumbai counts on Goerli for block production. 

But Goerli is currently scheduled for deprecation, by the end of Q1 2024.

The Amoy testnet for Polygon PoS is the replacement and has been launched, a new testnet that provides a low-stakes environment to build, test, and break things. 

Amoy will use Ethereum’s Sepolia testnet as the root (L1) chain. Developers deploying on Amoy can continue to count on the availability of essential validators, infra, faucets, tooling, and more, in a sustainable and future-proof environment.

Now available in the SettleMint platform.

Note: Any Mumbai nodes will cease to function in the near future, please migrate your applications as soon as possible.

The managed platform has been upgraded to the same codebase as the earlier Self-Managed release, providing a secure and more importantly, low barrier entry to transofring your organisation with Blockchain

Fully modular overhaul of the self managed platform to enable maximum flexibility in its deployment and feature parity with the Managed Platform

• New and improved Helm chart to deploy the platform on your own infrastructure

• Fully customisable and configurable via the Helm values

• Complete feature parity, from services to service deployment with the Managed platform (same codebase and helm chart)

• Dramatically improved performance in restrictive environments

• Open-Source Smart Contract sets and the ability to build custom sets from these templates and add them as default options in the platform

Get in touch with your SettleMint contact to upgrade or start a trial