After a year of transition the Galilel Core project is currently on track to expand and push development after gaining some solid footing in the last couple of months. After the initial development phase several people joined the project team under the guidance and leadership of Maik Broemme aka Babyface to drive the project and establish a future vision for it. The first months of such an endeavor were connected to a lot of change and the Galilel team wanted to use the new year as an occasion to give a review of what was done so far and where the project is heading.
Project aims
When developing a cryptocurrency the first thing that usually has to be clarified is the purpose of the coin itself. The initial developer set up the coin as a masternode/Proof-of-Stake(PoS) cryptocurrency after an intital Proof-of-Work(PoW) phase. While this set up is fine, being a cryptocurrency that utilizes masternodes is not a purpose in itself and masternodes should not be seen as an investment tool but for what they are: verify transactions on the blockchain and make them faster. Since the original deployed codebase was stale, the first order of business was to update the code base. Initial testing showed that the code base had no exploits and the Galilel team proceeded to bring it to the newest PIVX source and integrating Zerocoin protocol. This was done with the aim in mind that Galilel should be a General Purpose Coin.
In general most cryptocurrencies which we see today aim to provide some kind of platform solution meaning that they basically offer a currency that is first and foremost used on a respective platform or service which the coin developers themselves offer. The other kind of cryptocurrencies we encounter, which are far less common, are general purpose coins which focus on developing blockchain features and aiming to be a payment solution that isn’t bound to a single service or platform. Galilel chose to be the later, as we, here at Galilel, believe that true adoption will come when a cryptocurrency aims to develop the underlying features that make it a secure payment method rather than providing a short term use case. To emphasize the difference, imagine you go into a grocery store and want to buy coffee. It would be absurd to pay for coffee of brand A with currency A and for coffee of brand B with currency B. Yet this is what it essentially means to be a platform cryptocurrency. Nobody would think this is a viable solution in the real world.
What implications does it have for a cryptocurrency if it now chooses to be a general purpose coin? The next chapter will elaborate on those.
Development
As mentioned in the previous chapter, the code base had to be updated in order to have the appropriate foundation to develop blockchain features associated with a general purpose coin. So the first order of business was to get to the newest PIVX codebase and integrating Zero Coin Protocol. Currently very few coins have activated the protocol. As a result the Galilel team is proud to be among those few which are leading the way. The zero coin protocol was activated with the specific goal in mind that the privacy feature will emulate real life business situations. A company or person who wants to pay with a currency may not want transactions to be tracked or its financial situation to be known. While in the real world financial market intermediaries serve as a gateway where it is not possible to track transactions by the receiver this is not the case when using cryptocurrencies. The obvious advantage is the absence of a controlling centralized body which is the biggest selling point of cryptocurrencies. However, on the other hand everyone can track those transactions on the blockchain. This can and will be a major obstacle when trying to convince a business to use a respective crypto currency for transaction purposes. Therefore the zero coin protocol is an important feature for Galilel going forward as it will anonymize transactions and help to push adoption.
With that being said, it was important to find an optimal balance with regard to the block return a masternode receives and the block return a staker receives. Also the collateral amount for the masternodes has an important role in this equation. Those three combined have huge implications for the stability of the blockchain and for its ability to anonymize transactions.
Since Galilel doesn’t utilize PoW, the heavy lifting in the network is done by people who stake. In order to incentivize staking, the Galilel team choose to implement proportional Zerocoin Proof-of Stake (zPos) reward, depending on the block reward. You could call it a dynamic version of the Zerocoin staking mechanism. It is the first cryptocurrency to do so and represents our first unique blockchain feature. Coin holders who choose to stake zGali will receive a higher reward than masternode holders and coin holders who stake regular Gali. As a consequence the amount of zGali staked will be higher which provides a better degree of anonymization. This way we ensure that the Zerocoin protocol is not just implemented on paper but that it is actually utilized in a way that it adds value to the network.
After an intial warm up phase Gali’s dynamic Zerocoin block rewards were fully implemented at block 340000. We are are currently in phase 9. It will last until block 430000 when Phase 10 will start. The overall reward schedule before and after looks like this:
Phase Reward MN PoS zPoS
Phase no.8 13.50 If PoS: 9.45 / If zPoS: 12.50 PoS: 4.05 zPoS 1.00
Phase no.9 10.00 If PoS: 7.00 / If zPoS: 4.00 PoS: 3.00 zPoS 6.00
Phase no.10 5.00 If PoS: 3.50 / If zPoS: 2.00 PoS: 1.50 zPoS 3.00
As you can see if a zGali staker solves a block he will receive 6 Gali currently, while the masternode operator will only receive 4 Gali. If a regular staker solves that same block he will receive 3 Gali while the masternode holder will receive 7 Gali. It’s easy to see that the reward schedule is skewed towards benefitting zGali stakers the most which was the motivation behind it. This is the first step in ensuring a high network difficulty which in turn is a key component in order to make Gali viable as a payment solution.
On a final note we want to mention that the release of our first Medium article coincided with the public disclosure of “Fake Stake” attacks by Decentralized Systems Lab, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. The Galilel team moved quickly to fix the codebase within days of the publication. We are one of the few coins that have fixed their code immediately in the aftermath of the publication. This should emphasize that Galilel aims to be a state-of-the-art cryptocurrency that keeps up with current developments in the blockchain space and is able to fix problems when they arise.
Marketing/Listings/Exchanges/Finances
While the Galilel team wishes it could concentrate solely on development, adoption won’t magically happen by itself. At this point in time the team applied or got listed at most major listing and tracking sites for masternodes as well as price tracking sites. Also the masternodes can be hosted at several different hosting sites if setting up the masternodes by oneself is too complicated. The team has also struck several marketing partnerships and advertised on several well-known cryptocurrency related websites like mncn.online or mntrend.com. All this was financed through the community since Galilel had no ICO and the coin was taken over with no initial funds. Going forward the project will have a developer budget from the block returns. However, as of now everything was financed by the community and team members which don’t receive any kind of compensation. Logically all community donations have always been invested into the coin and will do so moving forward. Being transparent to the community is important to the whole core team. Therefore all members have disclosed their identities and all finances can be tracked in real time both on the website and the discord since the donation addresses are updated in real time and all transactions are disclosed.
A comprehensive overview of all Galilel partners and listings can be found our official website galilel.org
Core Team
As mentioned earlier, transparency is important to us and trust has to be earned. This is our core team. All members are regulary active in the discord and can be either reached there or through the respective contact information on the website.
Maik Broemme, aka Babyface#7772
Maik is the lead developer and founder. It was his effort and vision for Galilel that brought the team together. He is a full stack developer with years of experience in systems engineering. He’s a blockchain enthusiast and reads wallet code in his free time. Yes seriously. No joke. He has a knack for detail and is basically there 24/7. If you have a question he’s the guy.
Miles Clay, aka Bossteck#6262
Miles was there from day one and co-founded Galilel. He’s a designer
Manuel Gogoll, aka Cryptogerman#8070
Pascal Rebholz, aka crypto5.0#6432
Manuel and Pascal joined the core team recently. They are also there for a long time and supported the project a lot from its early days on. They are responsible for all marketing related activities and are the persons in control of our campaigns and social media channels.
Alex Mesquita, aka Alex Mesquita#9361
Sascha Volland, aka coreyou#6882
Alex and Sascha are both responsible for partnerships and business development. They also supported the founders for a long time and are since recently part of the core team. When we get listed somewhere or you see some new partnership rest assured that one of them had their hand in the process.
Armand Pers, aka Bio_Logik#7089
Armand just joined the team. He’s a marketing and design specialist.
Christian Grieger, aka Swooty#5527
Christian also just joined the team. He’s a Front-End and Back-End developer.
Outlook
In a next step we will release mobile wallets that utilize a light node. Since mobile phones, unlike regular desktop PCs and their desktop wallets, are online 24/7 this will be the next step in decentralizing the Galilel network and ensuring a high network difficulty since more people will be able to stake continously. Once this infrastructure is set up it will enable us to seek out further business partnerships.
That being said the Galilel team has already lined up business partner that are interested in adopting Gali as a payment option. In connection to that most business partners expect a Coinmarketcap.com (CMC) listing. The Galilel team is currently in the process of getting listed at CMC. In the past two weeks we fulfilled their requirements like missing exchange listings and provided them with other requested information making us hopeful that a listing is imminent. Once the listing is approved their price API will enable us to implement our new blockexplorer which relies on their infrastructure. We will implement the Bulwark blockexplorer which offers more capabilities than other commonly used blockexplorers which at times have severe disadvantages especially performance-wise.
Our current time frame for those goals is one to two months. This coincides with the last reward reduction which will be by mid-march. Once the block reward settles at 5 Gali we will concentrate solely on blockchain development and enhancing partnerships. In this context, it is worthwile to mention that business partners prefer the blockreward being stable. The current reward schedule was designed with that in mind since it gave us enough time to build the necessary infrastructure both from a development point of view as well as a business point of view. The former includes the overall operational architecture like Testnet, Blockexplorer, a diversified team structure and first and foremost a stable blockchain. The later includes the mentioned listings, financial planning, community engagement, partnerships and our overall growth and development strategy. Having accomplished most of those tasks in the last couple of months it will enable us to concentrate solely on blockchain development once we reach the final reward reduction.
We also plan to start development of our second blockchain feature within the next two months. It is called Instant On Masternodes (gIONM). The main weak point for available masternode implementations is the requirement to have the blockchain synced and indexed on each machine acting as a masternode. Galilel Instant On Masternode (gIOMN) solves this problem by implementing a shared blockchain to run one-to-many wallet daemons in a client server model. It is comparable to “Instant On” model available in Electrum client.
We plan to implement several other unique blockchain features after that. For now this summary gives a short term outlook. We encourage everyone who is interested in our mid- to long term development plans to check out our whitepaper which will provide more information in detail.
You can find the Whitepaper on our official website galilel.org or directly here.
Yours sincerely,
The Galilel Core Developers
GALILEL PROJECT
Website: https://galilel.org/
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