2023 overview and Crown goals for next year
Summary on what happened on the development front this year, and brainstorming on where to head next in 2024 and beyond.
Wind of change
In May 2023, after two stagnant years and several failures of the project to move its ecosystem forward and come up with a meaningful strategy, long-term community members mostly from Cuba and Czech Republic started to layout new strategic ideas for Crown. Below is a list of key development accomplishments up to this date, inspired by major web3 trends such as chain interoperability, NFT mint infrastructure, NFT gaming, DeFi, wallet flexibility, etc:
1. CRW bridge to Polygon network
A new CRW bridge to the Polygon network (MATIC) has been enabled. Similarly to the Crown bridge to the Binance Smart Chain, it was developed by Crown infra guy PJ and it can be found at wrapping.services/get/crwpoly/
The main idea is to continue to bring Crown to other chains in the form of wCRW (now on BSC and MATIC) in order to use established and proven DeFi tools.
2. New Road For Crown NFTs
Launch of a user friendly app, which finally enables users to easily mint NFT tokens on the CRW, MATIC and also ETH blockchains.
More information about the app can be found in the May development update
The community is encouraged to use the app here: https://nft.crownplatform.com/
3. Monty NFT collection successfully dropped, a NFT playable web3 game in development
The first usecase of the brand new NFT app was the launch of the Crown mascot, Monty NFT collection. Monty was born on the 3rd of July, 2023, when the Crown contributors started minting on the Ethereum blockchain, followed by the public mint launch on the 5th of July. Up to today, 52 Montys out of the 100 were minted. The minting will be open until the entire collection is sold out. If you want to support this project head to https://nft.crownplatform.com/collection/monty/1 and mint your Monty knight!
The team behind Monty is currently busy building a web3-based game, accessible through a web browser, that runs on the Crown Platform blockchain —see more info on the 2024 goals section further in this article.
Make sure you check out the collection on Opensea https://opensea.io/collection/adventures-of-monty
And follow Monty on its official X.com account https://twitter.com/MontyCollection
4. Non-mandatory Crown Core 14.0.4 update released
This update resolved the long-term issue, where the Crown client was getting stuck during signbypayer NFT registration transactions. This issue occurred when syncing past blocks, during the validation process of the NFT registration transaction.
Please download the latest client, and update your nodes in order to help the network: https://gitlab.crownplatform.com/crown/crown-core/-/releases/v0.14.0.4
5. A brand new Crown website released
A slick new website created by Crown lead designer Kali using the visual brand guide he created in 2021 (https://medium.com/crownplatform/re-branding-crown-platform-c4415fc1f873) is online to better explain the Crown project to newcomers in an easy-going, professional and clean way.
Check out the new website www.crownplatform.com and submit your comments in the Crown discord channel.
6. New Trezor Blockbook explorer
Devs have been working on making Crown compatible with Trezor’s Blockbook explorer/indexer/API. This is an important milestone for Crown and a requirement for the MetaCrown light browser wallet extension.
The new explorer is now online at https://explorer.crownplatform.com/
7. MetaCrown browser wallet
Inspired by MetaMask, a new, light browser wallet based on 12-word HD seeds, with the ability to import/create multiple HD wallets went online making it easy for newcomers to store their CRWs.
Google store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/metacrown-wallet/ikggkgkldeahamgakkgeiolooimapodl?hl=en
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/metacrown/
Where do we head next in 2024?
The Achilles’ heel of Crown is its codebase.
One of the first Bitcoin clones, which decided to fully let go the PoW heritage and go its own way, was throughout its nearly 10 year existence, always trying to add leading web3 ideas to its ecosystem. Masternodes (10k CRW collateral node), Systemnodes (500 CRW collateral node), a decentralized governance to fund project development and democratically decide on Crown’s direction, own in-house built NFT framework, environmentally efficient Proof of Stake consensus where (mostly VPS-run) nodes produce and confirm blocks, bridges to BSC and MATIC chains through wrapped Crown tokens, etc, etc.
This approach however had its toll on the Crown codebase as bringing it on later or latest BTC codebase is not a simple development task. Devs have to fight a lot of dependencies in the code. It does not help that the price of the CRW token is near 0, community engagement is very low and the decentralized proposal system can not serve its purpose. Crown faith is therefore in the hands of those contributors who have a stake in the project and are willing to build a use-case, game or an app in the Crown ecosystem which will get noticed. Well, this is what crypto should be about. Private initiatives on a public blockchain. But, for this to make sense Crown needs to update its codebase!
Stick with BTC codebase vs relaunch options
Several attempts were made to update the Crown codebase to later Bitcoin versions but they have failed, possibly because they were too hurried, or too ambitious trying to incorporate thousands of commits in one go. Some contributors have also suggested to scrap the current codebase for new, more advanced blockchains, discarding the Crown block history, basically starting from 0 with a complete relaunch.
But how do we know that these new blockchains will still be here in few years with all the dev tools support and cheering communities? New chains are baked like pizzas on a daily basis as their community members change altcoin dresses like during a fashion show. From the chains which were proposed: EOS and WAVES, both have lost most of their value as new leading projects such as SOL, AVAX, DOT, etc emerged taking over the fashion top spots.
Slower, step by step code upgrades might be a way
The community has to re-evaluate both approaches and find a sensible way forward. One of the voices from the Crown community suggested to go ahead with partial and slower updates of the codebase, until a bullet proof relaunch solution is proposed, thoroughly reviewed, and properly funded. The lead developer of Crown, Pablon has heard this voice as he is currently working on the first 2024 milestone which is bring CRW to a professional DEX market after our main trading partner Bittrex Global discontinued its operations worldwide and closed its business.
OP-CLTV update needed to be compatible with a leading DEX — One of the first milestones for early 2024 is bring Crown from the current BTC version of 0.10.2 (through 0.10.3 and 0.10.4) to 0.10.5 implementing the OP-CLTV feature in order for CRW to be compatible with Block DX https://blockdx.net/, a reputable DEX for BTC (and other leading coins). Pablon is now running 0.10.5 in testnet and integration testing is on the way. As soon as internal testing is successful, it will be opened to community testing.
1. Bring more smaller-scope commits to Crown core
If Pablon manages to release OP-CLTV update to core, it would be a first step towards demonstrating that slower updates strategy might be a way for Crown. Even though, Crown development is currently active with no signs that it should be discontinued any time soon, there is still no guarantee that any of the below goals will be completed in 2024 as dev tasks are done on a purely voluntary and private basis.
Lets dive in in the development areas currently being considered to be focused on in 2024:
Later/latest BTC core — analyze and work on higher BTC core clients steadily moving up to newer versions.
NFT Trading — Pablon has analyzed the Crown NFT platform and has confirmed it was well designed and implemented by Artem. It makes sense to continue work on it. The next step is to implement the NFT trading feature.
Explore the launch of an evm-compatible side chain — one success story of a project which inspired Crown is definitely Syscoin. As a potential further inspiration for Crown, Syscoin is running two chains — the main one powered by PoW providing high security and next to it, an Ethereum ecosystem compatible chain where ETH-related tokens and usecases can be born, traded and experimented on.
Explore alternative methods of connecting the Crown ecosystem to other chains — there are several web3 Layer 1 projects with the objective to become connectivity bridges across mayor blockchains. One of the important ones is Polkadot. We are exploring options of how to connect Crown to chains like Polkadot in order to extend interoperability beyond simple bridges to wrapped Crown on Binance Smart chain and Polygon network.
Deterministic masternodes — one of the former goals of Crown, introduced in 2020, was deterministic masternodes. We need to study further how this could be implemented and what changes it might bring to the end users.
2. The Monty Adventures web3 game
The team behind Monty is currently busy building a web3-based game, accessible through a web browser, that runs on the Crown Platform blockchain. The primary goal is to create a Monty universe, featuring social dynamics, rewards, and NFT management. Players begin their journey humbly, introduced to the game’s storyline and basics, followed by daily missions that guide them through gameplay and character development.
Each character is customisable based on personal choices and preferences, and develops through play. Character developments could be from a simple farmer to a kingdom administrator, or from a modest soldier to commander of the King’s Army.
A more detailed description of the game logic is available here:
https://medium.com/crownplatform/crown-development-update-october-november-1a7392c040aa
3. New centralized exchange
Although we envisage a future where the digital token economy functions mostly on decentralized exchanges, it is essential to try to get Crown on another reputable centralized exchange. The community is encouraged to come with new ideas where Crown could get a real benefit by its listing. Share your ideas with us on our Discord.
4. Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in blockchain development
One of the dreams of crypto teams is that AI will be able to assist in taking care of development and maintenance of blockchain tech and their respective ecosystems. Although this now sounds like science fiction, Crown lead dev Pablon is closely monitoring the advancements in the AI space and believes we are about 6 to 12 months away from potentially applying some of the AI tools to assist us with Crown core. With the code complexity problem Crown is currently fighting, this would be a hand for the project directly from heaven.
5. Long-term philosophical thoughts
Later in October 2024, the Crown blockchain will reach a big milestone — 10 years since its chain was launched from 0 as an experimental open-source project merging the symbol of the Crown (one of the most fascinating symbols out there, well understood across all continents and cultures), with what we thought was a world-changing technology: blockchain.
Many illusions were lost during this long time, but Crown blocks keep on ticking. Engagement in the community is at its lowest point, but we are blessed that there are still few contributors out there who are continuously bringing valuable ideas, free time and hard coding skills towards the project.
As we went through the main goals/ideas for 2024, there is a vision of a perfect crypto project, which will serve most digital economy participants with a real non-speculative purpose. Not only orange, blue, red or pink boys or girls who own one whole BTC, one whole ETH or any other crypto asset including Crown, where the main use-case has mostly speculative character, and where holders are driven by the holy grail of “the riches”.
What if there was a truly public, decentralized, fair-launch, proof of stake based digital currency, lets call it a “stablecoin”, where holders/users/stakers get token rewards in exchange for directing their node/computer power towards a pool-backed blockchain ecosystem. This new kind of stablecoin is backed by a strong mix of assets, basically anything that the users/transactors/stakers would decide to back it with (and technology would permit). From crypto assets, fiat currencies, stocks, bonds, gold to NFTs — a truly global, non-speculative digital pool reserve currency used for transacting value.
The blockchain technology is still at an early stage. Like it or not, this very young movement is yet to see several ups and downs. Many years will pass until we will see if existing ecosystems like BTC or ETH are the “final crypto solution” or if a new systems like the one described above will rise and takes over the emerging digital economy.
May Crown blocks keep ticking and contributing with its small ideas to this space and potentially to the “final crypto solution”. May the force be with us in 2024 and beyond.
