Viacoin Development Update — 10/2017

6 min readOct 31, 2017

The past few months have been an exciting journey for us as we’ve been able to accomplish much in the way of both development and partnership growth. In the interest of full transparency and to provide with a more detailed and comprehensive record of what’s been accomplished and what’s to come, we’ve decided to publish a summary of both recent and future releases. We hope you find this useful and that you’re given a clearer view of where we’re headed with the Viacoin project. We are planning on releasing similar updates every 1–2 months.

Latest announcements:

New Whitepaper

We have recently released a new whitepaper, listing and explaining some of the upcoming features and capabilities for Viacoin. We have further focused our efforts on releasing both a Chinese and a Korean version in order to accommodate increasing demand from several parties in the South East Asian region.

Our new whitepaper can be found here:

Ledger

Our recent fund raise ended successfully with donations from the community, the Viacoin team as well as our project backers. Now that development and costs have been fully covered, Viacoin has been added to the Ledger support list and can be safely stored on Ledger hardware wallets by downloading their latest update.

In addition to Ledger support, we have started working on the integration for Trezor Core. We will keep you updated on our progress.

Coinomi

Another exciting integration we have been working on recently is a partnership with Coinomi. You can now send, receive or store Viacoin on your Android phone with the Coinomi app. Having a mobile app, combined with our insanely fast confirmation speed, makes Viacoin perfect to use for merchants and shop owners around the world.

You can download the wallet from their website or the Google Play store.

Slack

We have recently launched a new Slack channel for Viacoin. The Slack channel will allow users to discuss all matters related to Viacoin in multiple sub-channels to maintain coherence and relevance. The Viacoin team staff is always around to answer questions!

Please feel free to join us on Slack or check out our Telegram group.

Exchanges

Up until recently, Viacoin has primarily been listed on U.S based exchanges such as Poloniex and Bittrex. While these remain partners of strategic importance to the Viacoin project, we have begun to accelerate our global market expansion efforts and are now also listed on UpBit, the newly launched Korean based exchange. We believe that the more key exchanges Viacoin is partnered with the more accessible the project becomes to new users who’d like to participate in our unique offering.

We can now confirm that we are in communication with several more exchanges in the South East Asian region, and look to progress matters even further once Chinese regulators make a ruling in terms of regulation and licensing of the crypto space domestically. More exciting news to come!

Roadmap

We are glad to report that our development pace has fully coincided with our projected 2017 roadmap and is now nearing completion. To give our users full transparency and shed light on the direction Viacoin will be moving towards in months to come, we will soon be releasing a new roadmap with a lot more promising developments. We will be focusing on an infrastructural overhaul and new on-chain as well as off-chain capabilities that will propel Viacoin to the center of attention as a multi-faceted, private global payment hub, an asset authoring and trading platform, a smart contract creation and validation service, and others.

Upcoming announcements:

Without spoiling too much of the details we can happily share that the following announcements are confirmed for the near future. We will share more details when we are close(r) to launching them.

New roadmap
New website
Trezor Core support.
Viacoin will get added to 1(+) Asian exchange(s).
Viacoin will get added to a big payment gateway.

We are also talking to a few big companies about partnerships, integrations and ATM support. We cannot share any more specifics at the moment but we will definitely share more information as soon as these deals are closed.

Coin development:

Viacoin Core 0.15

We are aiming to release our Core 0.15 update before the end of the year. Core 0.15 will greatly improve user experience with tons of technical improvements which result in faster syncing, faster block validations, enhanced bandwidth, reworked p2p network code and much more.

The two most important updates pertaining to Core 0.15 are Schnorr Signatures, which will result in a far higher grade of cryptographic security while lowering network requirements, and Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees (MAST), which will pave the way to smart contract design and execution on the Viacoin platform.

Keep an eye on our Twitter account for frequent updates about Core 0.15.

Lightning Network & Atomic Swaps

This is a new and rapidly evolving aspect in the cryptocurrency space, namely the ability to perform blazing fast transactions between users (Lightning Network), and using it to create 2 way payment channels between 2 distinct blockchains, for example VIA <-> LTC, VIA <-> BTC, VIA <-> DCR, etc (Atomic Swaps). In essence, users will be able to specify an amount of Viacoin they’d like to exchange against an equivalent amount of another coin, such as Litecoin. Once the two parties agree upon an exchange rate, they are free to exchange both currencies from the comfort of their personal wallets. This transaction is extremely fast, secure and most importantly trustless as keys are never disclosed.

These are the early days where decentralized and trustless methods of exchange are shaped into the market, and financial privacy solutions are ever increasing in demand. By combining these two aspects into a single network, we are future proofing Viacoin for years to come, and tapping into larger networks (Bitcoin, Litecoin, etc) with a combined market capitalization of +$100B.

Our Lightning Network implementation is enabled on the Viacoin backend in alpha state and a final version will soon follow, based on the Lightning Network Bolts specification (https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd#lightning-network-specification-compliance) — with an outlook of implementing bolts 1–11.
Atomic Swaps have been successfully tested by the team against the Decred and Litecoin chains, signaling the first stage of a broader cross-chain cryptographic network.
A GUI LN-based wallet is in the works to make this new revolutionary development more accessible to a broader userbase. The Wallet is known as the Zap Wallet, a very promising Lightning Wallet made by Jack Mallers. Zap is a free Lightning Network wallet focused on user experience and ease of use, with the overall goal of helping the cryptocurrency community scale Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

A new Java-based anonymous mobile wallet

We have plans on working on building a Java-based mobile wallet (both Android and iOS) for Viacoin, based on Samourai and boasting high anonymity. It will become an in-house independent mobile wallet for extra variety. This is in line with our goal to make Viacoin simple and accessible to everyday users and merchants around the world, as it will enable secure, anonymous and lightning fast transactions.