XEL Monthly update — November 2018

Since the XEL/Elastic Project began in April 2016, the community has witnessed many talented developers including one of the best in Crypto, know as Evil-Knievel (EK).

Recently, the XEL community has become more active with marketing and developing.

Recent Victories and Milestones

Certain community members connected with EK in September 2018. During that time, the Elastic network was having a few technical issues:

• Fork warnings detected by the Bittrex exchange
• Eventually leading to a wallet block

EK asked for help setting up a new block explorer, and help he found! Following the revamped block explorer, team members stayed in the team Slack and created the Discord server. With both the Slack and Discord activity, many contributors volunteered to help the project. For the past few weeks, there has been a “community reboot”. The Elastic Project is seeing more activity than ever before.

After the Community Reboot

In the last two months, the refreshed XEL Community has:

• Gained access to the official GitHub account to update all XEL projects (https://github.com/xel-software)
• Opened an additional community GitHub account for all community related projects (https://github.com/xel-community)
• Opened a medium account in-order-to share updates and stories to the whole world (http://link.xel.org/medium)
• Opened a new telegram channel to replace the previous one (http://link.xel.org/telegram)
• Updated the Elastic’s Slack channel (http://link.xel.org/slack)
• Created a small group of people to help organize the Discord server (http://link.xel.org/discord)
• Opened a brand new wiki (https://xelastic.wiki soon to be hosted to https://wiki.xel.org)
• Opened a new community Twitter account (https://twitter.com/xel_community)
• Opened an Investfeed account (https://link.xel.org/investfeed)
• Started a monthly update on Medium
• Applied to Delta Direct and Blockfolio Signal to push more updates to the community
• Been selected to the beta-test of MintFlint (https://www.mintflint.com/)
• Made some tests on different platforms (mastodon, riot.im) to reach the community without access to discord

Rebranding from Elastic to XEL

To avoid the confusion with existing products/brands in the same technical field, the community has decided to rebrand from “elastic” to the simple “XEL”. Rebranding includes:

• Renaming all git repositories
• Updating the website (https://xel.org)
• Updating the block explorer (https://explorer.xel.org)
• Updating the wallets (https://wallet.xel.org)
• Updating all social media accounts (the twitter accounts @elastic_coin and @elastic_comm will have been renamed to @xel_project and @xel_community)
• Reaching out to Bittrex and CoinMarketCap to update the information

Other Recent Updates from the XEL Community

• All wallets have been updated (fixing the fork warning, rebranding to XEL, automated installers with auto-update functionalities, docker based installer for servers)
• The block explorer has been refreshed (geolocation of nodes, fixed rich list, more last tx, performance)
• A paper wallet has been created (https://github.com/xel-software/xel-paper-wallet)
• Created a repository with tools for developers (https://github.com/xel-software/xel-developers-tools)
• Created a media project with all necessary resources (https://github.com/xel-software/xel-medias)
• Opened a contest to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem with a prize of 3,000 XEL (https://github.com/xel-community/traveling-salesman-problem)
• Reaching out to the scientific community to gather great minds around the project
• Having some new material about possible orientations for XEL (https://medium.com/@tieandsuit/why-xel-community-have-to-concentrate-on-ga-algorithm-511969fac685)

XEL Project Updates in the Works

• A new website
• A new block explorer
• New GUI for the wallets
• 19+ translations for the wallets
• New developer resources and tutorials regarding ePL
• Research on getting compatible with hardware wallets
• A few other things still too early to share!

Moving Forward

With all the updates in mind the question remains, what’s next?
Well, here are some ideas :

A Roadmap

With every crypto project, there are conversations about the roadmap. XEL currently does not have an explicit roadmap. Is it a bad thing, or good thing? Who knows? Here is a proposed list (extracted from a discord chat as-is):

1. Keep making the network stronger

• Creating more nodes
• Making the network more reactive
• Having nodes with auto-updates,
• Or being able to communicate directly to node so they update.

> An update process is critical to ensure that future structural changes (computation plugin, merging the compute side chain) will not require a fork.

2. Making ePL easy to use and understand.

• Currently, this is the highest priority item. The community can get more miners on board, yes. We could make a website, explorer, wallets, yes. But if nobody is capable of using XEL for its main purpose, there is no customer-base. And what happens to a company without any customer-base? Failure.
• Once ePL is easily understood, the community can reach out to people able/willing to use to submit work to the network.

3. After an ePL update, add more miners to the network.

4. Once XEL has users submitting work and miners doing work? Update or create a wallet with the computational plugin.

5. Next, let’s make more plugins for the new use-cases crowd-sourced from the users.

The overall goal of the suggested roadmap is to bring users to the awesome tools that EK and other have helped build. A strong network will come from a strong user-base of miners, forgers, and customers.

Suggested Roadmap Requirements

In order to deliver, the XEL community has a long list of needs:

• More developers, who are able to learn ePL and help use make more use cases, build a real knowledge base (there is already a great article https://xel.org/programming-first-steps/ but it needs to be more user friendly)
• Devs with UX/UI skills. They can participate on the website, explorer, wallets.
• Devs with C skills. The xel miner needs updating to ensure better performance.
• Devs with strong Java skills and most of all a good knowledge of the XEL tech could be very useful to make real upgrades to the wallets
• Content creators (designers, writers, community managers, etc.)

What About the Dev Fund?

For those who don’t know it already, XEL was not an ICO. This is a donation-based project, but sadly there is no more funds available (others can share the full story).

How do we attract talented people considering a lack of funds? Here are a few possibilities:

• Counting on people working pro-bono (for free)
• Sharing donation address for individuals devs and let the community reward them as they please
• Creating some kind of dev fund to reward/pay for the work done by the community
• Reaching out to the community for people ready to fund specific tasks/projects

There is no ideal solution. Conversations about rewards and funding are always difficult. We’re actively working on a solution to ensure xel’s future.