The AKASHA project, a blockchain-based social network built on top of Ethereum and IPFS which was unveiled few weeks before, plans to launch its alpha release in few weeks.

AKASHA CEO Mihai Alisie spoke to Bitcoin Magazine in an interview where he said that the company will be doing an alpha release of AKASHA in a few weeks, though there was no specific date mentioned. As the website opens its signup platform to join alpha, the blog reported that there has been over 200 signups for the alpha release in the first 24 hours.

Soon after the launch of AKASHA, there has been an overwhelmingly positive response and the blog reported on 26th May, 2016 that it was nearing around 2000 signups at that time. Talking about the response, the blog stated that, “We are both ecstatic and humbled by the warm response, as it is way beyond our wildest expectations. Many thanks, again, to everyone with the courage to join us in this adventure into the ether.”

Previously, AKASHA reported that, the alpha version is going to be gradually released for Linux, MacOS, on the Ethereum testnet over. However, the alpha signup list revealed that there are more Windows users. To address this issue, Marius Darila, CTO of AKASHA came up with a way to make the IPFS executable download seamlessly on multiple platforms and architectures. Finally Windows has been included after intense research and development.

There have been recent interesting developments in AKASHA as well. One being Orbit-DB, which is one of the most interesting databases explored, while looking into ways to solve the problem of client-side storage for AKASHA dapp. This could open the path to many interesting things that weren’t possible before.

The blog also stated that, Juan Benet, the creator of IPFS has joined the AKASHA team as advisor on May 31, 2016. As the new advisor of the team, Benet said that, “The centralized ad-driven social networks are vulnerable and not focused on our rights. We need free, private, global communication! We need AKASHA!”