What’s next for Torque?
We’ve had some issues with the project in the past few weeks, most of it stemming from some of the core developers being busy with other things and not being able to dedicate ample time needed to work on the project. In this post we’ll be describing what our next goals are and how’re we’re going to tackle them.
Upcoming ‘Newton’ V6 fork
We’ve been working on things like a new CPU favoring proof-of-work algorithm, the mobile miner, new ways of funding and IPFS/ZN integration for a while now. This fork and the updates succeeding it will bring forward these things along with improvements for our existing applications such as the GUI wallet, TorquePay wallet and GUI miner.
The new PoW algorithm
If you’ve been in the community long enough our past PoW changes were just band-aids meant to hinder the effect of ASICs/FPGAs, it was never really favorable to CPU miners in general. The new algorithm which is a hybrid between Yescrypt-RH and CN-R will make CPU mining more sustainable for the foreseeable future.
We’ve already completed the daemon integration and is working on getting the miner implementations, both for desktops and small devices. We’ll be having a test round of the fork as always which will help us assess the algorithm in depth and helping us get rid of most of the bugs. Once we’re done working on the miner we’ll have test pools with which everyone will be able to participate.
Mobile miner
This is one experiment of ours that has been dragging for many months now, the main reason being the current PoW algorithm not being friendly to low power devices. With the inclusion of our new PoW this will no longer be the case to an acceptable degree.
IPFS and Zeronet integration
We’ve partnered up with another cryptonote coin named MoX a few weeks ago and we’re actively working with them to get both the IPFS and Zeronet integration done. This part since it being consensus-free will probably roll out into production after the fork has completed. Two reasons for this being that changing too many things at once might cause unforeseen difficulties and cause our chances of failure during or before the fork to increase and also reduce our time to test everything to ensure quality.
State of other software
The GUI wallet, GUI miner, IPFS/Torrent based blockchain downloader and TorquePay will see incremental updates and also some of them might get the much needed facelift.
We updated the backend and the frontend since the opening of the beta happend and added new features like “Delete my Account” and a new TorquePay Card which is a small business card like page to share your address with other users via a link. We also improved our stability regarding the rush of new members and simultaneously users at the page. TorquePay got about 100 new users since the opening
Open sourcing the analytics platform
We use a very extensive platform to monitor malicious or non-malicious changes that may occur on our blockchain. This is a very fast application that leaves all other explorers in the dust in terms of it’s speed and efficiency. This can be a very nice tool for fellow developers of the cryptonote community and we feel like we should make it opensource so that it gets more contributors and will also help other projects give fast and real time knowledge of what’s going on.
Funding
Funding has always been an issue for Torque, we have only a handful of developers and unfortunately most of us are quite busy than we were before when we had just started the project. We tried setting up donation pages and one of our community members who is now a developer OxHaK has even made a tipping and donation platform which accepts XTC. Both of these efforts have been lamentably futile. Both of which were not bringing in enough money to grow the project let alone sustain it.
To overcome these issues we’re integrating a treasury within the blockchain which will contain 1% of all the total supply. This money will be used for paying the team efforts, getting new people to help with the design, marketing etc.
The community has been suggesting an option like this for many months now but we thought we would try going the donation route before we do something like this. But since that didn’t work out we think this is the best possible option that is in front of us. In the spirit of transparency we will be making the view keys to the wallet public so the people will have some knowledge regarding the movement of the funds.
Marketing
Since most of our user-friendly apps are nearing completion, after treasury is active we will be using some of the funds to put forward a new team which will handle all things marketing for our project that will not only help us attain new users but also give us a visible stand in the community in general.
Thank you for being here with us. Look forward to an exciting time!
