Monthly Crave Development Update — May 2018
Greetings Crave Community!
This is the first edition of a monthly development blog which will be posted on the last day of every month. The goal of this series is to summarize what we have been up to recently, giving you some insight into current developments, projects, and the progress of these tasks.
May has been an incredibly busy month for us.
The first portion was mainly focused around wrapping up the previous few months’ work, in order to meet the May 10th deadline that we set for a major update. As you may be aware, this update included a complete rebranding, release of the Crave white paper, and activation of the budgeting & governance system. More information on this can be found here.
Let’s move on to current developments though, as that may be of more interest to many of you!
New Crave Website Domain
On May 25th, we moved the official Crave website from https://craveproject.net to https://crave.cc. The shorter URL address is preferred, and is a nice way to represent Crave Cryptocurrency going forward.
Crave Forum
The Crave Forum has just been released in the past few days, and can be found at https://forum.crave.cc. This will be beneficial in a few areas — the first of which is the discussion of proposals. Before, when someone had an idea for a proposal, they went to a dedicated channel on our Discord server where they could get feedback from other community members, and adjust their proposal as needed. However, information there easily gets pushed into the abyss as posts come in, and the feedback can be hard to find. With the new forum, discussions will be able to stay on topic and will foster a more efficient and enjoyable experience for everyone.
The Crave Forum also houses multiple additional sections, such as:
- FAQ
- Official Guides
- Team News
- Bugs & Feedback
While the forum has been released and open to the community for posting, asking questions, and finding information, we are still working on both the organization and adding more content to it. This statement is mainly directed towards the FAQ section, a resource which we plan on building upon for our users — especially beginners.
Exchanges & Services
We have been communicating with various different services with the goal of adding Crave support to their platforms. This includes exchanges, payment processors, masternode hosting options, and more. While more details will be announced as talks are finalized, we are actively trying to embrace new partnerships to expand the usability of Crave.
Three such partnerships include:
- MYCE — a masternode hosting and setup solution to simplify the process.
- Whopper — provides sleek and stylish Crave cold storage cards.
- Indacoin — allows the user to buy Crave directly with a credit or debit card.
As far as exchanges, we are looking to find smaller to mid-size exchanges with large amounts of potential — to grow with them. While large exchange additions would be a big deal, even as we are accepted and given offer listings from them, since we had no ICO or premine, we are not currently able to pay a 50 BTC fee for listing (won’t name any exchange in particular!).
As more new listings and additions are finalized, they will be posted on our social media channels, news forum, and on next month’s development update.
Proposals
We have begun to push out proposals to be voted on by the community. These range from such items as a Crave masternode watcher app to track status and earnings, to savings funds for possible future listings on exchange and Ledger support. The masternode watcher app is being outsourced to a freelancer, and depending on the results, this could also lead to a Crave mobile wallet. This also depends on new team additions in the next month or two.
While all of the proposal submissions so far have been by Crave team members, this is the first month with the activated budget & governance system, so we are hoping that more community-proposals are submitted as everyone becomes more familiar with the system.
Team Additions
Back in March, we began our Marketing team with the addition of Green_crypto_and_ham, and we realized there was never really an official announcement regarding that. That goal of this initiative was to increase the awareness of Crave across the map, as well as to increase retention of members by finding flaws that could impact this. Examples include writing press releases regarding the Crave rebranding, contacting news outlets to share this information, and adding a Team page on the website, which we had previously lacked.
We now have a few more members lined up to join the marketing team, with the focus on expanding our presence on YouTube and adding video content to our website. This could range anywhere from short animated videos to explain features of Crave, to longer Q&A or discussion type posts. This will also allow putting a public face(s) on Crave, and could possibly expand into an ambassador-type program in the future, where our team members could make their presence at blockchain events and conferences.
One of these members is SoundDrGenie, who was just officially added to the Crave team in the past few days. He will be working with Video and Film Outreach, a subsection of the broader marketing program. SoundDrGenie has actually been with Crave since we were starting back up in 2017, where he played an instrumental role in community-building and marketing. We are excited for his expanded and more specialized role to grow in new areas!
We will have more information on team expansion as it develops, and are still searching for new team additions in areas that we could use a few more hands in.
Project Management
With the addition of team members and more tasks/projects being taken on, disorganization quickly settled in. Again, we were previously using Discord for all of our communications regarding task management, but there becomes a point where even having separate channels for organization does not suffice.
We have since moved to using Freedcamp for project management purposes.
This provides us with a very easy and efficient way of seeing every project that is being worked on, broken down into individual tasks that can be marked as ‘In Progress’ or checked off as they are completed. It also allows for task assignment, so each team member knows where they should be contributing their skills to help get the task done on time. This will also be helpful for writing these monthly development updates, as we won’t be leaving out any important information!
New Wallet Progress
As you may have seen in our 2018 Roadmap, a new wallet design has been planned for release sometime in Quarter 3. Our fantastic front-end development team (shout-out to DruMn!) has been working hard on this project to create a product that shines among the rest.
Here are two rough teaser shots to get you craving this release!
We decided to try something different from the standard wallet design approach and use an HTML-based user interface. This allows us to have much more design customization. In order for this to be successfully integrated into the wallet, our core development has been working on a ‘bridge’ between the QT wallet and this HTML interface.
There is still quite a bit of work and testing to be done before release, but progress is being made quickly and impressively.
Total Supply and Emission Model
Last but not least, we have been discussing a new model to move to regarding coin emission over time and reducing the maximum supply from an infinite supply (currently) to somewhere around the region of 50–75 million Crave.
We have created and analyzed multiple different models, in terms of the rate at which masternode rewards, staking rewards, and budgeting funds both decrease overall, and in relation to each other. We have concluded that our current staking reward percentage is too high, and will likely be decrease at a faster rate than masternode rewards.
Other factors that have been taken into consideration include:
- Time to reach the maximum supply
- Exponential vs. linear reward percent decreases
- Coin supply inflation rate over time
- How budget funds are reduced, as we do not want to limit future proposals too extremely
Shown below is the model that we are likely going to be proceeding with. The maximum supply would be capped at 60 million Crave, which would occur a bit before block 14 million, near the year 2044. This is also assuming that 100% of the budget funds will be used (which they likely will not be).
Block rewards move toward: MN — 76.92%, Stake — 15.38%, Budget — 7.69%.
Pending community approval through the proposal and governance system, this change will happen — it is just more of a matter as to when.
The current plan is to release this new emission model along with the new wallet and activation of zCrave staking — all in one big (Q3) release. Proceeding this way will reduce the risk of possible forks and make it easier on the community, as there will not be two or three separate mandatory wallet upgrades.
That covers most of it. We have a few other ideas and items to be worked on and discussed, but these will be announced in a future development blog post once they come into complete fruition.
If you have any questions or would like to join the Crave Community, please feel free to check out any of the links below.
Website: https://crave.cc
Discord: https://crave.cc/discord
Telegram: https://t.me/craveproject
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CraveProject
