2018 Re-Cap Luxor

As we head into the New Year we wanted to reflect on 2018, talk about our story, and answer questions from our community.

Our Story

Luxor was founded in late 2017 by Nick and Eddie. Two unbelievable devs committed to creating high-quality mining products to support the industry.

The company was created because Nick and Eddie truly believe that crypto will fundamentally change value creation & transfer in our future society (for the better). From the beginning, we have all thought of classical Nakamoto consensus (Proof-of-Work) as the only proven and tested mechanism for securing a decentralized platform. We revisit this debate as a team bi-weekly, and our conviction in the consensus mechanism is still as strong today as it was back in 2017. This means the future of decentralized finance will require responsible guardians to efficiently harness energy to maintain the security of networks. We strive to be one of those responsible guardians.

We started the year with a team of two and two mining pools. In January we had a very small market share in Sia and Decred. Over time, we received great feedback from our community. We understood that miners valued high-grade mining pools with strong customer support and a mission to improve the ecosystem in which they operated.

Fast-forward 3 months and we had expanded our team to 5. Brenton was essential in improving the strong infrastructure that supports our pools (that we built from the ground up). Guzman & Ethan helped transform our products into a business.

By the end of 2018, we had built a total of 9 public mining pools and a suite of enterprise-level mining products; all built as we worked part-time. We are proud of what our team members have been able to build with the support and feedback of our community.

In 2019 our new year’s resolution is to work full-time. We have ambitious plans in the mining space so will be looking to raise capital to continue building top-quality products.

As always we could not have done this without our community members. The Luxor miners have been vital in helping us refine our products, troubleshooting issues, teaching us things and welcoming others to our community to help it grow. Thank you all and we wish you a happy New Year!

Your Questions

What are Luxor’s long term plans regarding crypto?

We think crypto is here to stay. The value it drives for society and businesses is yet to be fully discovered or communicated. So we are planning on continuing to support the ecosystem in the best possible ways. Our team is experienced when it comes to building software products, especially around cryptocurrency mining. Our long-term plan is to continue to build and help the ecosystem grow. We have some upcoming projects we will announce in 2019. If you have any thoughts on what the mining ecosystem is lacking or want to partner with us on something please feel free to reach out to the team at hello@luxor.tech

When do you see crypto winter finally ending?

This is the founders’ third crypto bear cycle. One thing is certain, nobody knows what will happen with the crypto market. It’s hard to tell whether crypto winter has ended or when that’s going to happen. In the meantime, our strategy is to continue to build products that can help support the ecosystem. After rain comes sunshine so don’t despair and be patient for things to come around.

Any crypto market trends you think are the most important upcoming changes in 2019 and beyond?

• ICOs cooled off, particularly in the second half of the year, due to increasing regulation and adverse market conditions. We also believe that an ICO is a failed model as projects/companies raise a lot of money without giving away any equity. We believe that tokenizing real assets, like equity, will be the next wave of capital raising.
• Many more side-chains and drive-chains that leverage the underlying cryptocurrency hashrate. This allows for increased security and taking care of the planet by saving energy. You can find more information about Merged Mining Here.
• Decentralized financial instruments like collateralized loans and micro-lending enabling a true social revolution in those countries where there’s no financial freedom like Venezuela.
• Ease of transaction, we expect new projects to improve UX and therefore driving cryptocurrency adoption.

What is the first step to start creating my own pool like Luxor?

The first step is to build a fantastic team! You can’t build a pool like Luxor without the support of a top-notch team.

Will Decred finally take its true spot in the top 20?

While we aren’t in the position to speculate on coin market caps we do truly believe that Decred is one of the best currencies out there.

For readers that are unfamiliar with Decred here is a bit of background:

Decred has a strong focus on community input, open governance and sustainable development. To support this, Decred utilizes a hybrid of two mining systems. While Bitcoin only operates on a proof-of-work (PoW) basis, Decred builds on top of it by introducing proof-of-stake (PoS) as well.

This hybrid system means that Decred gives power to the stakeholders, further decentralizes governance, makes network attacks more difficult and enables forks to be more effective.

The on-chain voting system, mutual governance and fantastic development team are reasons we are bullish on Decred.

When is the Luxor UI update?

We are finishing not only an UI update but a complete overhaul of our infrastructure. Luxor’s v3 will enable new functionality like a dark and white theme, user-defined payment thresholds and intervals, improved stats, fiat revenue estimates, multi-wallet support and more.

The launch will happen in the upcoming weeks so keep an eye on our social media.

When will the hover tooltip text, in the hashrate graph, be readable?

Next UI update!