The Crown Platform chronicles: PART III — A contributor model in an altcoin bear market
The third chronicle portrays a tough period of 2018 and 2019: during an altcoin industry bear market, where a decentralized group of contributors is working hard to keep the Crown blockchain developing to the next level.
The lesson learned from the all-time high
When Crown hit its all-time high in early January 2018 bringing the total market cap to 100 million USD, the community was shocked. In this shock, nobody was even able to hit the sell button, everybody thought that Crown was invincible and that the community had made it. The contrary was however true; the community did not realize that the hardest months and years of Crown history were in front of the project.
During the Miami meeting, which took place in early March 2018, most contributors were optimistic, but this event marked the end of the altcoin uptrend, which was going forward like a train without major effort. Looking back, basically any project in the space was successful no matter what they were doing, newcomers were just pouring capital into altcoins and hoping for riches.
It was a good lesson learned as well: being able to see what a real altcoin bull market looks like will serve as an important experience during the next one. Crypto is an experiment, nobody has been here before therefore every day is a step into the unknown. This is the reason why lessons like these are valuable and the history of a crypto project matters. Perhaps long-term community members might act smarter next time (if there is a next time)— and make reserves in liquid assets for worse times.
Fighting with the bear: back to the reality
Crown started to be under pressure on all fronts. On the code level, our BTC merge mining mechanism was causing a lot of trouble leaving our devs fighting with unpleasant forks and making our exchange partners nervous. The value of our distributed proposal budget system decreased substantially leaving much less capital for our contributors, developers, marketers and ambassadors.
Naturally, people started to leave the project, passing the responsibility on to a few others, who were stepping in with their ideas and energy. The real heroes. One of them, “crownfan” Jose organized a meeting in one of the key emerging markets for Crown: Germany — striking a deal with our partners from Blockchain Hotel who hosted a “recovery” community meeting forging very important decisions and a new truly decentralized direction for Crown.
In the bear year of 2018 some key decisions and milestones were taken and achieved, demonstrating that pressure is one of the factors that lead to progress and evolution, just like we can observe in nature.
- The community democratically voted to change the algorithm mechanism from PoW to an industry-leading MN-PoS, raising 100k USD in an unprecedented community effort for this milestone implementation, escaping a certain “fork” death only by millimetres.
- In light of cutting costs and increasing efficiency, Mattermost was discontinued and the main development discussion moved to Discord, opening doors for an existing crypto community hanging out there.
- Development repositories in Gitlab were opened to the public, enabling new developers to contribute.
- As a reaction to a declining monetary value of the Crown decentralized proposal budget system, the community stepped in again with a vote to increase the superblock rewards from 10 to 25 percent boosting funds distributed mainly to developers.
- Our two developers and other contributors took the responsibility in their hands, submitting their personal proposals to the budget network. The parts of a “centralized” model which were left in Crown were completely replaced by decentralized initiatives.
- The Crown architecture schemes were released to the public leaving the fear of misuse behind in our minds and showing the world a complex development goal for Crown.
- A community decision was made to proceed with NFT development in order to open Crown to new use cases.
- Crown was listed on UPbit, the largest exchange in Korea to push our reach in Asia.
2019 — a recovery on the horizon
In every bear market (similarly to a bull one), it is very hard to see the reality, since emotions are high as people focus mainly on the value of the project in terms of the market cap instead of focusing on real progress which is being made. The progress is then underestimated and not taken seriously as black scenarios are drawn in our minds.
Having faith in something that has a high monetary value can be misleading, we might “love it” because of the $. Believing in things backed by real human values, yet their monetary value is (temporally) low = real faith. It’s like breathing clean air and drinking free water: we take it for granted missing their real value for our lives.
With the successful change of the algorithm to MN-PoS, the stability of the Crown network made important progress, exchanges lowered their confirmations to normal levels demonstrating confidence in the system. The technical lead Artem released his long-expected work: Non Fungible Tokens framework (NFT) into testnet with the main-net switch just a few weeks away. NFTs opened the doors for the community to actually start playing and using the Crown blockchain in a variety of ways such as digital art, notary services, real estate / car registration databases, any contractual relationship between two parties, registration of endangered species (adding a geolocation), registration of food provenience and its history, registration and protection of intellectual property, registration of medical records of patients, and many others. Actually, it is only on our minds we want to use the Crown blockchain!
Looking into the future
Nobody can guess what the future will hold for crypto and Crown in particular. We can only judge from the facts and from the steps this brave community has made and is continuously making. The community remains confident that the Crown blockchain is on the right path in its development efforts: focusing on building a self-governing community, which is taking shared decisions and introducing smart frameworks such as our NFTs, which enable the community to build hundreds of real-world use cases. The future of Crown is only in our hands. It will depend on the ideas and energy of all of us as well as newcomers to the ecosystem bringing fresh points of views, knowledge and resources to the table. May the force be with us!
