Hello everyone!
The last few months have been very busy for the SHIELD development team.
Unfortunately, in early April this year, the network of cryptocurrency Verge suffered repeated attacks due to multiple fundamental vulnerabilities. As our codebase was based on theirs, we were vulnerable to the same attack. While we quickly created and deployed a patch to discourage exploiting this specific vulnerability, it became clear that we had to upgrade from the old Bitcoin 0.6.x codebase, to the latest Bitcoin Core 0.16.x, and completely fix those (and potentially other unknown) vulnerabilities.
This forced us to delay our planned roadmap objectives, but we are working hard behind the scenes to complete them as soon as possible.
As for masternodes, Sentinel is a component of recent Dash masternode code which automates governance functions and lays a foundation for their future framework — it doesn’t provide any additional functionality on its own. While this may be useful for their purposes, this is not required for SHIELD, and also makes for more complex masternode setup and maintenance. As such, we decided to go with a no-Sentinel approach, which is turning out to be more time-consuming to implement than expected.
Lastly, as we are focusing on pushing SHIELD out into the world of crypto, we think it’s important to aim for exchanges with higher liquidity, to both raise awareness and make SHIELD easier to obtain for everyone. We’ve started work on paperwork, consultations and legal procedures for establishing SHIELD as a company, which large exchanges often require.
We would like to thank you for your continued support during this busy time!
