The Crown Platform Chronicles — PART II: Years 2016 and 2017 — The rise of the Star
The second part of the chronicles looks back in time to two decisive years in Crown history: implementation of Masternodes model in 2016 and strong community growth after the listing to Bittrex in early 2017.
Early 2016: few “desperados” keep on going
The beginning of 2016 was the lowest point in Crown history. Most contributors left the project because there was no progress in terms of value — “Crowncoin” was trading for zeros and total market cap was in the range of 5 to 20k USD. Understandable. The project seemed dead. One or two guys kept on going and trading with themselves to keep the project afloat on C-CEX. Delisting would mean certain death.
I remember the day when faith nearly left me. That day I thought we will not make it. The universe however had different plans. I woke up the next day and checked my BTC talk message. There was a guy called “Defunctec” who reached out and told me that Crowncoin should implement Masternodes if it wants to survive. I had no idea what he was talking about…
Masternodes: the new hope
When “Defunctec” told me about masternodes I did some research and asked a few developers — hard Bictoiners for opinions. Unfortunately, all of them told me the same: they do not believe in a masternode future. They envisioned that the future of blockchain will be a bitcoin-based mining model. I passed this message to Defunctec, but after few days of thinking about it, I realized that these nodes/servers which would power the Crowncoin blockchain, could actually become the backbone of future blockchain-based governance. We agreed we will make it happen. Defunctec brought in his three collaborators Dan aka “Stonehedge”, Fabian aka “Chaositec” and Luke aka “Calnaughtonjr”. All of them met as contributors for the Dash project.
After several months of development, the code was ready and a key milestone was reached in mid 2016. The community of node “stakers” started to be responsible for the faith of blockhain. Within the enthusiasm the community renamed Masternodes to THRONES.
December 2016: London, MDZ: the Crown papers
Crowncoin transition to masternodes was finalized. Now the community needed a new exchange and started to bug Bittrex Bill, pushing the Crown idea to him and his team. The Crown symbol attracted a new guy who joined our community and started to contribute. Matt “MDZ” who went by the nickname of “urban_idler”, from California, said that he read our knights code which the community timestamped into the blockchain and liked our values. He wanted to meet with the key contributors and organized a meeting in London just before Christmas of 2016.
Everyone in attendance is committed to building, or attempting to build, a durable cryptographically secured application platform of lasting value. This commitment and long-term orientation will be essential for the project’s success if we are to avoid “pursuing an attractive local maxima” — or in more colloquial terms, we aren’t going to run up to the top of the nearest hill and say we’ve won. We have our sites set on a mountain — or constructing a system which solves problems which have developed for Bitcoin.
Part of the value of the Crown Platform will be that “Crown” will not be in the application business — Crown will be focused on the new blockchain and providing a stable framework for compute capacity and a process for integrating and operating applications on the platform.
The successful meeting in London led urban_idler to start drafting the Crown Papers, which laid out the philosophical foundations of the Crown Platform. In this series of 8 papers, which were released during 2017, Crown outlines its plans for a decentralized and incentivized application platform that will diverge from current blockchain technology in a revolutionary way. The final product will be an open, decentralized application platform that provides a cryptographically secure method to harness the many benefits of the next generation of blockchain. The papers can be downloaded from https://crown.tech/about/ at the bottom of the page.
2017: Hard work and faith rewarded by strong community growth
I woke up one day in March 2017 to learn that the Crown community finally managed to list Crown on Bittrex. Crown jumped to 1 USD and new members were joining the chats every day. This included our two key developers thanks to whom the Crown code and its architecture is evolving further: Artem and Ashot. Looking back in time, it seemed that things were running almost by themselves.
The community implemented the decentralized governance system to democratically fund the development of Crown, the code was updated to Bitcoin 0.10 and Dash 0.12, a second node layer of Systemnodes was implemented, the community was meeting every three months in a different part of the world — in Prague, Toronto and the largest meeting so far which took place in Amsterdam in November 2017. The market capitalization was also moving up as Crown ranked in the top 100 blockchain projects according to coinmarketcap.com. It seemed that the project had made it, the community was full of optimism and strength, it seemed that nothing could stop them now!
That assumption was wrong! The blockchain space was changing sharply in 2017 bringing hundreds of new ICOs hungry to succeed, and of course a huge inflow of new capital, which inflated a crypto bubble. Bubbles, however, have one thing in common: they tend to burst… which happened to Crown as well after hitting its all-time high of 5.41 USD on January 9, 2018.
Uff, what a ride! The next chronicle will be about the altcoin bear market years of 2018 and 2019 and the Crown community reaction to abruptly changing market conditions! The fall of the star, but the rise of heroes — Jose, Mark, Edwardmorra, PJ and others who navigate a small ship through the terrible crypto storm. Thank you for staying tuned.
