Viacoin Development Update — 09/2018

6 min readOct 1, 2018

As most of you may have experienced, the bear market is real! The past months have been really hard on the biggest part of the cryptocurrency community, seeing a decline in the marketcap of most coins. We would never let a declining marketcap affect our development so we’ve been really busy over the past few months! Read all about it in this Viacoin Development Update.

Latest announcements:

Viacoin Blockfolio Signal

A while ago the Blockfolio team contacted us and told us that they wanted to add Viacoin to their Blockfolio Signal beta. Blockfolio Signal is the first communication tool built from the ground up specifically for cryptocurrency teams. Blockfolio Signal allows us to broadcast messages (Signals) directly to anyone holding or watching Viacoin in the Blockfolio app.

Roadmap update

Over the past few months the Viacoin development has made a lot of progress on the things that are currently being developed like Viacoin Core 0.16, NViacoin, ViacoinJ, LND etc. so we have updated our roadmap by changing its progress. We have added even more items to the roadmap like Vialectrum 3.2.2 and c-lightning for Viacoin. Visit https://viacoin.org and see the progress the Viacoin development team has made lately.

MyCryptoCheckout

Viacoin has been added as a payment option to MyCryptoCheckout. MyCryptoCheckout does not charge any transaction fees. As a vendor your only cost is a flat-rate license if you need unlimited transactions. In contrast, expect to pay 1–3% of your income to credit card processors & other crypto payment services. Payments go directly from the customer to you. Automatically detect unique payments from endless customers using one wallet address (optional HD wallet support).

Getting added to another payment gateway makes it easier for the millions of vendors on Woocommerce to choose their preferred payment gateway and accept Viacoin.

Vialectrum 3.2.2.

We have the latest version of our fast, secure and very easy to use lightweight Viacoin client, Vialectrum 3.2.2. Improvements include libsecp256k1 (speed up elliptic curve operations). This means signing a transaction with 100 inputs with python-ecdsa takes about a minute, while with libsecp256k1, it will take less than a second.

Other features are hardware wallets improvements, an optional ‘dark’ theme, several minor bug fixes and more! CLICK HERE to download Vialectrum 3.2.2. and read the entire change log.

Merchant adoption:

You can now use Viacoin on the following websites:

Cryptips allows your favorite Twitch streamers to accept Viacoin tips. Their peer to peer system gives the streamers full control over their tips, which means no third-party system or fees. Tips are sent directly to their own wallet.

Evolution Host is a premium VPS hosting provider that also specializes in game servers, IRCds and mIRC Bot Hosting. Evolution Host is based in the United Kingdom and their team has over 20 years of experience in the online hosting industry.

Blockchain Denim offers premium quality clothing for cryptocurrency and blockchain enthusiasts. They strive to provide items which suit their customers desires through their highly customisable stock.

Another awesome addition to Viacoin adoption is that Lionfood stores started accepting Viacoin. Lionfood’s customers include consumers, resellers, franchises and others interested in providing sports, nutrition and health services. Lionfood currently has 2 branches in Switzerland. 1 branch is located in Lucerne, the most populous town in Central Switzerland. The other branch is located in Brig-Glis, a historic town in the canton of Valais in Switzerland. Read all about it in our Lionfood article.

We have more exciting news to share about merchant adoption soon!

Coin development:

Viacoin Core 0.16

The Viacoin development team is close to finishing the development of Viacoin Core 0.16. One of its features is the support of native Segwit bech32 addresses, which start with ‘via1’. Using bech32 results in lower tx fees and avoids confusion when writing it down (not case sensitive). Viacoin Core 0.16 also adds sha256 hashing optimizations (which leads to faster synchronization and block validation), HD wallets by default, several bug fixes and other optimizations. You can check our progress on Github or on www.viacoin.org.

C-lightning

The Viacoin development team has started working on c-lightning, an alternative Viacoin Lightning Network implementation written in C. C-lightning is easier to compile, compared to LND, and will allows us to create wallets based on c-lightning, like Eclair.

Viacoin Samourai

The Viacoin developers have made a lot of progress on the Viacoin Samourai development. Most work so far was put into making the app compatible with ViacoinJ. Development is being done in a private repository but keep an eye on the Viacoin Samourai Github repository to see commits soon! Read all about Viacoin Samourai in our recent article.

Upcoming releases

VIApay Server

We will soon release VIApay Server, a hosted payment processor where anyone can set up a VIApay payment gateway or Point-Of-Sale for free. All you need to do is sign up and you are good to go! We will release a tutorial soon for people who need help setting it up.

What is VIApay?

VIAPay is an Open Source payment processor, written in C#, that conforms to the invoice API of Bitpay. This allows easy migration of your code base to your own, self-hosted payment processor. VIApay is P2P, so no middle man is involved. This means increased privacy and no processing fees.

Viacoin Raspberry Pi Full Node + Lightning Network node

Chainfailure is currently working on adding Viacoin support to RaspiBlitz. This will allow anyone to run a Viacoin Core Full Node + a Viacoin Lightning Network node on a Raspberry Pi. You can follow the steps in the RaspiBlitz Github and assemble your own node! We will pre assemble and sell the nodes in case that assembling your own node is too difficult.

Marketing

In the last development update we shared that we had planned the following things in the field of marketing:

Regular advertisement.
Advertisement on an Augmented Reality platform (timed exclusive partnership).
Viacoin explanatory video.
Viacoin Copay product videos.
Viacoin Merchandise.
Polymerbit Cold Storage wallets (high quantity and very affordable).
Merchant adoption.

These things are all on track and will be released once the market conditions have improved. We received lots of input from our community and have been asked a lot of times how people can help out. This made us decide to start an official Viacoin Ambassador program! More information on the program will be released very soon!

Do you want to help spread the word about Viacoin? Create a Twitter account and join our special Telegram group. We’d love to hear your ideas about sharing Viacoin with the world!