Radium Update #38 — An Interlude

The Radium community has been anticipating an announcement on the future direction of the Radium blockchain for a few weeks since we announced that we had decided what route to take with the Radium protocol.

Justin, one of our main core developers has been away these last few weeks in order to assist with relief efforts in Puerto Rico after hurricane Maria. As such our plans have had to be delayed. In essence this means that the announcement and release of a “milestone” roadmap, which we had suggested to the community as a way to set ourselves clear goals, has had to be moved back.

We do not currently want to give ourselves a definitive deadline by which we will release this as we want to make sure our marketing efforts are inline with our announcement and since this depends on contractors we cannot ensure they will be ready by a specific date.

Now that Justin is back we will continue to follow the timeline we had set out for ourselves and strive to bring a “milestone” roadmap to the community as soon as possible.

Having said this we can briefly allude to what will be included in our next set of goals. Specifically these revolve around the core protocol as opposed to the SmartChain. We believe that having a robust base layer means that our second layer applications such as the SmartChain can continue to function uninterrupted and in the most secure and decentralized way possible.

Our intention is to update our core protocol to a more updated bitcoin base, there are various options on how we can do this and we have shortlisted these to two potential options. Discussions are ongoing among the core developers and senior community members as to which approach would be more inline with our long-term goals. This will provide us with the added security and features that have been developed on bitcoin throughout the last few years.

The second aspect to our roadmap includes how to fund ourselves in the most transparent and less obstructive way possible. As you all know the Radium team did not conduct an ICO and has so far been self-funded. Although this has worked for us up until now we believe that in order to remain competitive in the fast developing world of blockchain technology we need a more reliable source of funding to be able to attract more developers as well as increase our marketing footprint. The way we believe is most appropriate to achieve this goal is through a Decred or Zcash type model where part of the block reward is used to fund a developer fund. Expenditures from this developer fund will be both transparent and voted on by the community through SmartChain elections.

We hope this blog post acts as a bridge between now and when we release a more detailed “milestone” roadmap and show that we are committed to the long-term success of our project.

— The Radium Team