We are glad to share with you the latest development report about our work and progress over this year. We faced new challenges and achieved major progress in building our vision of decentralized cross-chain framework.
Alphanet Launch & Development
All issues mentioned in last update (new vectors of double-spend attacks, desync of nodes and tx fence synchronization failures) are fixed now and 9 other bugs in our experimental implementation of alphanet were fixed as well. With that done after many failed trials we have finally launched the earliest version (v0.1) of EXRT alphanet that is fully compatible with our alpha protocol technical specification that we defined last update. This version of our private alphanet has been stable for 25 days now so we consider it a success on our development roadmap. Next up we need to develop improvements to the alphanet stability and to backend codebase that will allow us to try first ‘real-conditions’ cross-testnets transactions to happen (such as connecting real BTC and ETH testnets).
EXRNex, EXRNswaps, EXRNpay and Alias are going to be actively developed after betanet as they all rely on cross-chain functionality.
TAI Development
TAI (Trustless Asset Identification) development has been pretty successful this year thanks to the funding we started to utilize. Zhuan Wen (head of TAI development) delegated some segments of work to third party developers while also improving his existing code.
TAI chain will be a separate light-chain (likely EXRT side-chain relying on EXRT validating power) and will likely have a token. Portion of TAI tokens will be reserved for EXRN/EXRT community. Any other network/protocol will be able to utilize TAI technology within their own projects. We are planning to release EXRT mainnet with a simple early version of TAI initially and then put more of our resources into working on full potential of it. Trustless Asset Identification is now in the alpha stage of development.
Backend Infrastructure Development
We’ve been working more on a backend infrastructure development. Backend is one of the main components of our technical specification — it connects chains, transfers & generates information, messages and execution calls between them, locks & escrows funds and hosts a TAI protocol on distributed machines. Backend by itself is a complex protocol that will be running on many different computers at a time. We have changed its codebase due to needed improvements in speed and latency of operation. As expected due to this change more powerful machines are required to run the backend (16GB+ RAM server with expandability once EXRN/EXRT gain more usage). Next steps are extending backend functionality (TAI and cross-chain contract executions) and fully integrating backend into EXRT alphanet client.
New Team Members
Now that we approach more complex stages of development we need more human resources. We have hired two part-time developers to the team and are planning to hire more next year. We have also added a lawyer to the core team. She is a professional and will help us operate as non-profit community project and launch our projects safe and legal. All future team members will stay pseudonymous to distance EXRN from ‘investment’ to ‘community project’.
Team ‘Questions & Answers’ Session
During June 2021 we had a third ‘questions & answers’ session in our official Telegram group where many important questions from our community were asked.
Some important highlights:
Q: Are we still on track with the roadmap?
A: Our updated roadmap since the end of last year is estimating alphanet launch at 2021–2022, for that I believe we are on track. As for mainnet, official roadmap is ‘TBA’ but we feel like 2023 should be reasonable expectation if no major issues occur, delays are possible though.Q: Can the team explain what makes EXRN different to other bridge and swap protocols?
A: We have not yet seen a similar approach by any other project.
EXRN is about blockchains ‘communicating’ with each other, not just about bridging, wrapping and swapping. Communication includes cross-chain-contracts, data transfers, oracle feeds and more.Q: You’ve said in the past we are likely to go with a POA consensus algorithm. How comfortable is the team with that decision at this point, and do you think that could still change?
A: PoA is not the most decentralized so we are not ‘happy’ about it per se but we are comfortable with the fact that it is the best and simplest way to validate a complex system like EXRT and its backend. That should not change unless some new amazing consensus gets released.
4 Year Anniversary
October 7th was the fourth EXRNchain Anniversary.
Message to the community from Yon Jung:
EXRNchain reaches 4th year of development. I truly believe that ‘slow and steady wins the race’. We are progressing step by step towards our vision of decentralized cross-chain framework. We are very thankful for your support during these years.
On behalf of whole development team, volunteers and community managers, we are thanking and congratulating all of our supporters!
EXRT Distribution Round #9
EXRT distributions ended on January 2020 as 500,000,000 EXRT were distributed directly to our community. We decided that considering roadmap adjustments we want to reward our long-term supporters with more EXRT. Starting today you can register for 9th EXRT distribution.
Since we expect alphanet and betanet development to take at least 2 more years this distribution will last for 2 years (ending earlier if mainnet launches earlier) and will reward 200,000,000 EXRT to EXRN token holders.
The rate of EXRT rewards will depend on:
a. amount of EXRN tokens held.
b. source of tokens (team contributors get 10x more rewards).
c. time of registration (users that apply earlier and do not move tokens until final snapshot will get more EXRT than users that apply later).
Register here: exrt.org/application
EXRT distribution #9 is similar to vesting/staking your EXRN during continued development without actually locking the tokens and interacting with a contract. We decided that due to gas fees being so high for most users it will be too expensive to actually interact with a staking contract.
For highest amount of rewards you should sign up and never move tokens until distribution happens. The EXRT tokens used for this distribution are tokens previously reserved for partnerships.
Moving further…
We are progressing ahead to improving alpha and developing beta protocol of EXRNchain which should allow the first ‘real-conditions’ crosschain transactions to happen. Betanet development is our next goal. Thank you for support!
