Crown development meeting minutes 27/04/2020

Just the facts, ma’am

Present: ashot, crowncoin-knight, Crownfan, pjcltd, walkjivefly

1. Ashot pushed another MN/SN commit to the Bitcoin codebase update and has started on the NFT integration. In view of the complexity he has revised downwards the completion estimate to 80%. In addition to the NFT integration there are some new RPCs which are stubbed out at present which will need to be implemented.
   walkjivefly asked Ashot if he could possibly document what he learns about the NFT framework implementation during integration. We are rather short of documentation (as the Bitcore and Electrum community developers have discovered) and despite the extra workload, this would be a good chance to fill a hole in the NFT framework. It could perhaps avoid similar issues with NBitcoin integration further down the line, as required for BTCPay server integration.
2. An agreement has been reached with PolisPay, and funded by a small group of contributors (led by Crownfan), to integrate Crown into their wallet. The Crown node is synced and we are now discussing launch dates.
3. walkjivefly asked what is our official position regarding running masternodes/systemnodes on Windows. Among the recent sync issues have been some on masternodes running on Windows. Despite asking for precise details of the circumstances leading to whatever the issue was, very few users actually provided any or the accompanying debug.log. One user did and it became apparent that their particular sync problem was caused by inconsistent index files after an incomplete shutdown of the QT wallet. While stopping short of saying that doing so is unsupported, we strongly recommend people do NOT attempt to run a masternode or a systemnode on any Windows platform.
4. Artem has not had time to make any progress on the NFT trading design specification documentation. This is a critical requirement for the wider adoption of the NFT framework. A number of developers have considered deploying NFT applications on the Crown framework but told us they have switched to Ethereum instead because of the ability to trade ERC-721 tokens (on the Ethereum blockchain).
   The community currently needs to fully focus on building NFT use cases aimed at our registration feature only. We believe there might be a lot of space for such use cases in the education, creativity, environment and other mostly non-profit sectors.
5. Community developer Zhen is still working on the Bitcore NFT adaptation. At first the explorer couldn’t download anything. He updated the DNS seeds to make it work again. But then found that after block 2807349 all hashes were wrong because the explorer had followed a fork. He modified the protocol version so the the explorer could get the correct data and it successfully reached block 2817358 (April 3rd). But it stopped downloading later blocks. He found that the next block contains the first NFT transaction. So now he’s implementing NFT features in Bitcore. This problem could have been avoided if he had NFT documentation.
6. Community developer, Sirak, has withdrawn from the Electrum-Crown project. He is too busy to continue with it. pjcltd has enlisted the help of the MUE team to resolve the Electrum issue. The ElectrumX server has heavy CPU requirements (it builds it’s own indexes over the blockchain) which the current VPS struggles to satisfy. The server will be replaced with a higher spec one but this will raise an issue for the infrastructure team regarding provisioning and costs. Meanwhile a MUE engineer is syncing an Electrum server on loaned hardware and is investigating a code problem, possibly caused by NFT transaction incompatibility. If this is the case then it could have been avoided if Sirak had had access to NFT documentation while creating the Electrum-Crown v1.2 release. There may be as yet undiscovered NFT-related issues in the Electrum-Crown wallet code as well.
7. We received an invitation from Portis.io (part of ShapeShift) to be integrated into their non-custodial multi-platform wallet. It wasn’t clear to Crownfan or walkjivefly (who were both contacted) how this would work and requests for additional information have gone unanswered. If there is a community member interested in following up on this, please let us know.

There ensued a lengthy discussion about the problems which have followed the NFT framework rollout. A major factor was the lack of project management surrounding it. A small number of dedicated community members pushed through the Emerald release but there was insufficient planning and coordination because we don’t have an actual project/product manager. Combined with the lack of developer documentation this has caused the current Bitcore and Electrum problems. These problems have a detrimental effect on the Crown Platform and increase the costs associated with the projects.

Ultimately the root cause is a lack of funding.

We face the possibility of further problems of this nature with the Bitcoin codebase update. To avoid a repeat performance we need someone to take on a project management role. If there is a community member interested in getting involved in this capacity please get in touch via Discord.