XEL Update — May 2019

Hi everyone,

Most of you have been wondering what happen since last year, we stopped publishing monthly updates, xel.org website went down for months, we didn’t publish lots of news.

recent issues

Let’s start with the good stuff, what was our main issues !

As most of you know, the project is open-source and meant to be decentralized, which mean that some of our services have been managed by different people. That’s the case for the domain xel.org, which has been managed for us for a while, but we lost contact with the person in charge of it. At the same time, the server hosting the website wasn’t renewed (again, managed by someone else) so we lost the ability to get the website back up and change the dns to host it somewhere else.

The good news is that we got back in touch with this person this week, he had to disconnect for a few weeks for personal reasons, and we’re now back in full control of our domains : xel.org / xeline.org / xel-project.org

The xel-project.org is a backup domain we bought to add some redundancy to our infrastructure (we’ll get back to that)

Well, that’s it ! Not so bad right ?

xel.org website

Since the end of 2018, we’ve been working with an agency on a new website. We decided to work with an external contractor because we wanted to build something meaningful.

They conducted interviews, market research, everything needed to release something we can be proud of and keep for a while.

So there it is : https://xel.org

You’ll notice that we’ve lost the green/black theme, it might feels strange at first be we like it ! We’ll update the other assets shortly (wallets, explorer)

This website is hosted on github, so anyone can submit updates to the website or the documentation.

xel core infrastructure

We started to host few “trusted” nodes and the testnet on servers managed by the team to ensure a better resilience. We will also use a second domain xel-project.org to ensure a better redundancy.

state of the devs

Another thing that slowed us down, one of the historical devs, ek, couldn’t work on xel since January. We’re still in touch with him, don’t worry about it. Let us remind you that xel operates on zero funds, only voluntary developers and friends who helps with the skills they have. We don’t have the firepower of multi-millions ETH ICO projects, so we do our best.

The biggest challenge we have for month is to get new people to use the ePL language and build new use cases. This language is close to the C language and is the core tech we use. It’s not like we could put up bounties for specific tasks, we need people ready to spend time understanding it, play with it, and help us making it easier to use.

Doing so, we could go to universities or companies that could use the xel network, submit work to miners, generating fees ont he blockchain and only then everyone would have their place in our ecosystem.

Despite all of that, we are working on merging the codebase of the lite and computation wallet in order to have only one wallet, and be able to enable/disable the computation functionality.

There is also interesting ideas that have been discussed, as leveraging eBPF into the project to use core unix technology to improve adoption. We also talked about genetic algorithms in the past, there is a lot to be done !

So we might no be as sexy as other projects, but if you want to be a part of it there is room for you anytime !

patreon

We are thinking about opening a patreon for those of you who want to support us. We’re not looking to get massive funding, but just a few bucks to pay for the backup servers, things like that

mintflint

We’ve been in contact with the MintFlint team for a while, and we are happy to announce that they agreed to do an airdrop to all xel holders !

MintFlint gamifies the crypto trading experience. It allows traders to challenge each other based on portfolio performance and bet on their own portfolio using Mints.

The details will be announced by them shortly, but what we can tell you is that it will be a fixed amount of tokens per xel holder, the application period will last one week and you will be able to claim your airdrop from your wallet or bittrex.

Follow their twitter account for more informations : https://twitter.com/mintflintapp

conclusion

That is all for now, i hope you still have faith in the project (we do), and if like others you want to come to discord and chat with us, we always have time to answer all of your questions :)