Crown Development update July 2023
Here is what happened in the Crown community this month
1. Monty NFT collection successfully dropped
The Crown mascot, Monty , was finally 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, 50 Montys’ out of the 100 were minted. 15 Montys’ were minted by the creators, and are waiting in the team wallet to be airdropped within the planned Monty NFT game in rewards and raffles. 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!
2. New Crown website is currently being coded
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 currently being coded by Pablon. We expect that the new website will be released before the end of the summer.
3. Next steps for the second half of the year / community discussion
The Crown community contributors leading the current updates and changes in Crown are proposing the following two milestones for the second half of 2023.
- Browser extension wallet like Metamask with the following features:
- HD support (12-word seed with deterministic address generation).
- Send, receive, and store CRWs easily.
- Possibility to connect applications, sign messages and requests securely.
- Create and manage Crown protocols and NFTs.
A Metamask like wallet for Crown is in our view essential for any potential growth of community members. The blockchain industry wallet infrastructure has changed a lot since bitcoin based QT wallets which Crown currently uses were first introduced. Accordingly, a new wallet should be a top priority for potential onboarding of new community members.
This will require a UTXO/NFTs indexer/api which can be used by the extension wallet and also by other applications to obtain CRW balances and NFTs.
2. Joint community decision on a path forward for Crown Core. We currently see 3 paths for Crown core:
- OPTION 1: Work on the current Crown code base and gradually updating it as several people from the community have suggested. After we are up to date on BTC side, it would make sense to implement NFT trading. We have discussed with Artem how to implement it and we are confident it will be successful.
- OPTION 2: Work on the current version of Bitcoin and adapt MNPos and NFT framework to it.
- OPTION 3: Work on the current version of Dash to stay with deterministic masternodes.
Option 1 is slow but it is more realistic because it allows us to achieve our key goals. Crown Cuban devs already have a functional testnet and the builds are operational since the last patch.
Option 2 is more robust and drastic, but the biggest difficulty we currently see is modifying the nodes/consensus/messages etc to support masternodes on BTC. Including special transactions. It is an experiment which can fail, but in case it is successful, Crown Core would benefit substantially.
Option 3 is the closest to our codebase, because it already has masternodes, governance, special transactions, etc. The problem with Dash is that it is an elephant of code with many functions that we do not need which make it very difficult to manage the code in the future. Dash also recently had a chain stall and their core devs had a very difficult time to fix it since their new updated code and platform is very complex.
Lets discuss in Discord and make a final decision which way to go!
