Development update July 2019
Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.
Another month has flown by; it’ll be Christmas before you know it! In that time there have been some notable achievements on the Crown development fronts.
NFTs
Artem released technical documentation on the NFT framework on 20 June and v0.13.9 in testnet the next day. This is alpha software designed to foster collaborative development. There is enough functionality for developers to start developing applications and to identify problems, friction points and desirable changes or enhancements. Artem already has a list of next steps including NFT registration and trading but has spent most of the last couple of weeks working on the sandbox environment and a database corruption problem.
Crown contributor Andy D (defunctec) is working on a simple NFT generator addition to the https://crwwallet.net/ site to facilitate end-user experimentation. It will probably be available within the next few days and will allow less-technical users to create and experiment with NFTs without having to venture too close to a command line.
If you’d like to be more directly involved in testing and need any help getting started, please contact us in Discord.
Codebase update
Ashot has been ploughing through the thousands of commits which differentiate Bitcoin from Crown and carefully merging the two codebases together. He has also been working on the build environment. He has compiled all of the Bitcoin v0.17 depends but the main code compile is currently failing with Boost errors. This is very much a marathon rather than a sprint and it will be many more months before it is complete.
Most altcoins forked from Dash or PIVX or Bitcoin are forked from very old versions and very few are still under active development. Crown is here for the long term and we recognise the need to plan for the future by upgrading the existing codebase to something much more modern. This will bring security, speed and stability improvements, and allow for easier maintenance in the future.
Trezor
We are still waiting for Satoshi Labs to release the next Trezor wallet firmware upgrade. They don’t have a published timetable for doing so, but based on past update frequency we think it could well happen this month.
Additional development
We currently have only two full-time developers, but we have more development ideas than they can possibly achieve (in a reasonable timescale) on their own. We had a conference call today with Tom (press tab), the external developer of our class-leading MNPoS staking system regarding improvements to the Crown decentralised governance system. A couple of the key changes we would like to implement are on-chain voting and systemnode voting.
The current governance system is based on the early Dash governance system and is a fragile and temperamental beast. Our developers have already spent a lot of time working on stabilising and improving it. Much of the groundwork for on-chain voting has already been done, but was set aside in favour of higher priority work. We think that groundwork could be adapted to use the NFT framework to provide on-chain voting and systemnode voting at the same time.
Tom has agreed to review the not-yet activated code changes with a view to submitting a proposal for superblock payment to gradually build out the new functionality we would like to have, starting with on-chain and systemnode voting. Before even seeing the code he was able to give us (very rough) guestimates for the development effort/time required for several Crown platform enhancements.
Hopefully, following the review, he will be able to leverage the existing work done by Volodymyr and Artem and submit a proposal for 5k CRW per superblock, to be matched by community contributions. At this level of funding, and with the current CRW/BTC price, an 8-point estimate task could be paid for in about 2–3 months.
This level of funding is a drop in the ocean for many newer, ICO-funded, all fluff and no substance projects. It represents a much more significant commitment for an older, honest, hard-working project like Crown. We will be counting on the continued support of the Crown whales to make these platform enhancements possible.
There is a chance the first proposal will be ready in time for the next superblock (block 2462400, expected around 18th July 2019).
Would you like to know more?
There are bi-weekly development update calls which all community members are welcome to participate in. Details are available in the #development contributor channel in Discord.
Questions, comments and suggestions are always welcome. Crown is a community project and the more engagement we have, the stronger our kingdom is.
