January 2020
Greetings from the new year! In anticipation for the release of Stargate, which will bring private smart contracts to our live network, we wanted to share new developments, discuss some plans for the future, and keep you up-to-date with our development pipeline. We hope that everyone is starting the new year off on the right foot and are as excited as we are at the prospect of bringing our humble technology to the masses.
AstroBWT: Egalitarian Proof-of-Work
The team has been pleased to introduce our new proof-of-work mining algorithm that aims to reduce the performance advantage of GPU, ASIC, and FPGA hardware to allow for competitive CPU mining. With the help of notable data transformation algorithm, Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT), we are able to reduce the performance advantage of specialized hardware and fairly distribute mining rewards.
Main Points
- Long key sizes and iterations to reduce FPGA performance
- Random numbers to hinder GPU parallel processing
- Dynamic and new operations with longer computation cycles to reduce ASIC performance
We are expected to push AstroBWT to our testnet in the next couple of weeks, so we hope that the community will assist us in thoroughly testing the algorithm before it moves to the live network. ASIC, GPU, and FPGA developers are welcome and encouraged to develop hardware-specific implementations for our algorithm.
AstroBWT has been open-sourced under a BSD 3-Clause license. We encourage anyone to contribute.
Release 2: Stargate
As mentioned previously, the developers are hard at work preparing for Release 2. We are hoping to bring Fully Homomorphic Encryption to Smart Contracts (FHE-SC) and it is no simple task. You may be asking yourself, what is FHE? The most simple way to explain this complicated technology is that it allows for computation to be done on encrypted data. This means that code can be executed without actually knowing what the code is. This is by no means a simple task and the developers are working hard to bring this technology to the masses.
We hope to bring more information to you soon on exactly how it works and hope you are excited as we are.
Branding Initiative
Our work continues as we put all of the pieces together for a successful Q2 launch of the Stargate release.
Current Progress
Phase 1: Logomark (Done)
Phase 2: Motion and Sonic Branding (Done)
Phase 3: Web and Print Design (In Progress)
Phase 4: Early Q1 2020 Deployment
Development Tracking
Our current development pipeline includes the following items:
- AstroBWT: CPU Algorithm (Testing)
- Stargate: Full Homomorphic Encrypted Smart Contracts (In Development)
The Stargate release is still on track for our Q2 2020 target, which will be released jointly with AstroBWT on mainnet.
—
Thank you!
Privacy together.
