Since July 28th, Matters.News has been targeted by DDoS Attacks for over two weeks long. The IPs that launched the attack were located worldwide, mainly in the United States, Indonesia, India, Germany, and Singapore. The attack lasted during UTC+8 working hours, peaking at 4 million requests per second.

For a decentralized content platform supporting beleaguered independent writers, such an attack was more or less expected, although we could not have anticipated the scale of the attack.

DDoS attacks are used to overload the server with a large number of requests, preventing users from using the service normally. Therefore, all users’ data, content and assets are not affected. Upon discovering DDoS attacks, the team quickly upgraded the firewall and migrated Matters.News within 48 hours. The team has put the site back in service since August 10th. Because of the security upgrade, website might be unstable shortly. Thank you for your patience.

We have now prepared a response mechanism to minimize the impact of the attack on user experience. We will also compile the data of the attack and share it in the near future as a case study for Web3 information security.

PRODUCT UPDATES

Matters.News

• New feature online: Circle Notifications, you can now interact with your backer community / subscribed author just in time when they post a new topic or mention you.
• Continuous UI improvements of Tags are as follows: new rules are applied to Tags to ensure qualitative contents, and under each Tag page, you could view all trending articles.
• Trending keywords in the search bar are better managed to avoid spam and fraud.

The Space

• To better motivate pixel owners on thespace.game, starting from July 8th, we manually allocated the tax collected as UBI to players once a week.
• After the bounty program was open to the public last month, thanks to @catding for resolving three issues in the smart contract. Please see more details here.
• New Feature: automatic drawing script (Bot) & canvas playback. The Space aims to become the cultural hub & Museum of the Web3 revolution, and the history playback and using bots to respond to public issues are part of that plan. For More discussion, please go to The Space DC.

Partnerships and Ecosystem Collaborations

• The Space and frens SeeDAO Art Nearby participated in Summer of Wamo held in Dali, and a new canvas dali.thespace.game was born for people to express the Dali Web3 festival they’ve witnessed.
• The Space cooperated with RaidenINST, a non-profit art institution exploring art, technology, and nature through interdisciplinary collaboration. creating a new canvas curation with digital artists “The Cloud”: raiden.thespace.game

Community Growth

• Aside from AMA on Matters Lab and Game Night on The Space Discord, we’re also active weekly on @MattersLab Twitter Space, follow us to tune in to our upcoming events.
• Matters Web3 Class on DC will discuss DeFi in September, see our full class calendar.
• Matters.News and SecuX, the sponsor of cold wallet is holding a “Summer Giveaway” on articles concerning topics of blockchain information security.
• Footprint Analytics cooperated with Matters.News creators to write about blockchain data analytics, providing rich prizes including exclusive NFTs and premium membership of the platform.

FEATURES & PUBLICATIONS

• Frontline Non-fiction writing Award Season 2 has received 200+ proposals, and 4 winning works are selected. Together with 13 other finalists and winners from Season 1, we will host an orientation and writing workshop for all writers to exchange their field research experience.
• Matters Lab Founder Jieping Zhang was featured on Bilingual Podcast Web3 Revolution, in which they discussed the roles of decentralized creator platforms like Matters.News and how it could empower writers to monetize their works.
• The Space DAO is recommended by DAOs core contributor Shawn on the Block Beats, sign up to become a member in The Space DAO.

What’s Next

• September will be a very sociable season for Matters Lab, as we are hosting three salon gatherings on Web3 Creator Economy in the United States: Los Angeles, Bay Area and NYC, which will also be a live Twitter Space @MattersLab.
• We will attend quite a few conferences introducing exciting product progress in the next quarter: Mainnet 2022 by Messari & Unfinished in NYC, TOKEN2049 & FIL-Singapore ’22 Summit in Singapore, bringing back fresh insights and strengthening our ecosystem with more projects with aligned vision.

To achieve truly decentralized, user-owned digital assets are two key aspects in Web3 development. Let’s BUIDL together a robust and fertile crescent for creators.

📢 Starting from this month, we will write regularly covering topics of Web3, Creator Economy, and Blockchain Technology on our website matters-lab.io, subscribe us to get the latest updates.

Learn more about Matters Lab:

• Matters Lab Discord：https://discord.gg/matterslab
• Twitter [Mandarin]：https://twitter.com/MattersLab
• Twitter [English]：https://twitter.com/Mattersw3b
• Matters Lab is actively hiring full-stack and blockchain engineers : Matters’ LinkedIn