Stealth Roadmap 2019 and Beyond
The Stealth development team is pleased to share our new roadmap for 2019 and beyond! This exciting release includes info on our pending rebrand, the launch of 2 new Stealth-related websites, and updates on qPoS, StealthNodes and additional apps in development.
Stealth Brand & Applications
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Stealth.org website | Q3–Q4 2019
Concurrent with our active qPoS development, the Stealth team is working on a brand redesign, along with several new releases and apps. This new redesign will be featured in an updated Stealth.org website that is nearing completion, and which will help enable the seamless development of our new applications.
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Stealthmonitor.org website | Q3–Q4 2019
Stealth is happy to announce the pending release of the new StealthMonitor.org website.
This exciting new site will replace our current block explorers, and is the place to find live transactional data. Included in its functionalities will be the ability to search for transactions and monitor the blockchain in practically every conceivable way.
In addition, visitors will be able to find all of the essential information on the new qPoS StealthNodes once qPoS goes live on mainnet.
Please keep active in our community to be the first to find out when the site is live!
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StealthSend Applications | Mobile + Desktop + Online Wallets Q4 2019
The availability of both Mobile and Online wallets represent a first in Stealth’s history and will play an important role in our vision of Stealth and the future of the project. A set of brand new and redesigned applications will incorporate Stealth’s new look & feel. These new apps will offer a greater ease of use, meeting the demands of modern payment applications.
Our new Mobile, Desktop, and Online apps will also introduce SPV light wallets. The updated desktop wallet will enable users to buy StealthNodes and trade them on the blockchain marketplace once qPoS is live on mainnet. Additionally the desktop app will support both Trezor and Ledger hardware wallets, to complement our existing support on Ledger Live. All applications will include the new privacy features upon release and will support XST (Stealth) and XSS (StealthSend), the interconvertible private and non-private coins.
The new wallet apps, to be released in Q4, will not have qPoS features implemented until Q1 2020, and are meant to replace existing wallets. These new apps will also introduce the new privacy features collectively named SteathSend (XSS) which represents the minted private coin of Stealth (XST).
Stealth Protocol Development
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StealthSend
Fast = qPoS
Feeless = feeless option work-proofs
Private = zerocash
Scalable = qPoS
Continuing our mission since the inception of XST in 2014, we are well on the way to achieving our vision to be the fastest cryptographically private digital currency possible.
qPoS will set a new standard in the blockchain industry.
The following steps will highlight what we consider to be the most important goals until qPoS goes live on mainnet.
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qPoS Whitepaper published
The qPoS whitepaper outlined the functionality and proposed implementation of the qPoS technology that will make Stealth the holy grail of crypto, offering a fast, feeles, private, and scalable blockchain.
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qPoS published on Github
May 11th 2019; After 6 months of development, Stealth Quantum Proof-of-Stake (qPoS) code is published to GitHub and available for public review. While several blockchains offer privacy solutions, none of these solutions are also fast and scalable. To achieve this combination, blockchain needs a new approach that fundamentally challenges existing technology. To this end, we offer qPoS, where transactions are confirmed within 5 seconds using a round-robin block signing algorithm inspired by high performance computing. Additionally, qPoS uses a network timekeeping approach that is unique to cryptocurrencies, drawing from techniques developed for high performance distributed computing. We feel like these revolutionary approaches are necessary to make privacy a viable option for the typical end user.
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private qPoS Testnet
The goal of the private testnet is to run a network of four computers (called “nodes”) under conditions that simulate the most extreme connectivity problems possible, to ensure that the protocol is highly robust. The private testnet has been active for several weeks. It has inspired significant improvements, such as our unique approach to network timekeeping, outlined in our development blog series.
The private testnet has also inspired our development of novel techniques that improve the reliability of the blockchain, where blockchain signatories are much more likely to continue to produce blocks even when they can not determine the health of the larger network under extreme conditions such as massive global network outages.
We will move to private testnet when our small, volatile network of four computers can retain consensus indefinitely under that most extreme network conditions that we can simulate. Think of the private network as bootcamp for a battalion of soldiers who must continue to march in unison for days on end while numerous drill sergeants relentlessly and continuously kick the legs from under the soldiers.
The biggest challenge has been for nodes to regain consensus with the rest of their peers (begin marching in unison) quickly and automatically, after being dropped from the network (gotten their legs completely kicked from under them). All bugs we have discovered and corrected in the private testnet have addressed this most important functionality.
We should say that actual network conditions for mainnet would never be so harsh. However, one of the critical development goals of Stealth has always been to achieve the most robust network possible. We are developing qPoS precisely to deliver an unparalleled robust implementation.
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public qPoS testnet Q3 2019
Public testnet will consist of 15 to 20 testers who each have the technical expertise to run a StealthNode with minimal help from the Stealth development team.
Builds will generally not be available for testers because part of testing is to ensure that the clients can be built hassle free by any competent participant. Additionally, mainnet will require highly powered servers, which generally mean they should run Linux or BSD. For this reason, Windows and Mac builds of full nodes will not be provided.
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qPoS Preliminaries Hard Fork Release | Q3 — Q4 2019
1. Switch from OpenSSL to Bitcoin secp256k1
The Bitcoin secp256k1 is a highly optimized elliptic curve library that represents a significant performance improvement over the OpenSSL libraries currently. The Bitcoin secp256k1 implementation makes for faster synchronization and bootstrap times and reduces computational overhead. Additionally, it is a standard for cryptocurrencies, and reduces the likelihood of making mistakes when using the library. Details are at https://github.com/sipa/secp256k1.
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2. Zerocash protocol
Simply put, zerocash has the best combination of performance and resource usage for private transactions. Zerocash transactions are constructed using a cryptographic technique called zk-SNARKs. This technique has some tradeoffs detailed elsewhere. But the overriding considerations arise from the properties of zk-SNARKs. zk-SNARK transactions are small compared to other privacy schemes like Monero. This is important because the smaller the transactions, the more the blockchain will scale. zk-SNARKs can be validated quickly, allowing validator nodes to process many more transactions, also important for scaling.
Zerocash is also the most potent privacy solution possible in that it hides everything about a transaction: sender, receiver, and amount.
As part of its approach to regulatory compliance, Stealth will also use the existing auditable non-private coin (XST). The XST coin allows verifying the coin supply such that irregularities in the XST supply will signal that there may be issues with the XSS supply.
Despite any potential criticisms, it cannot be overlooked that zerocash is one of the most vetted privacy protocols. It has been used in the ZCash cryptocurrency for almost three years without any known exploits. This lifespan has given not only academics opportunities to vet the zerocash protocol, but hackers as well. With no security issues found during this rather long lifetime, we feel like zerocash is the safest and strongest privacy solution in existence.
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3. Adjusting the coin supply
We are planning for the future. Bitcoin has a cap of 21 million coins, but this limit already hinders bitcoin’s usability. With qPoS and zerocash being implemented within the next few months, Stealth is and will be a highly usable coin that should also have a convenient denomination. We want to avoid a situation similar to bitcoin’s where, for example, $100 represents a fraction of a coin (currently 0.01 BTC) and users are left counting zeros with a magnifying glass.
As part of the strategic positioning of Stealth in the market we will increase the circulating supply of XST through a 1:100 coin split. For illustrative purposes, this means that if an individual owned 1 XST prior to the change in the supply, they would own 100 XST after the change.
The release and the accompanying hard fork will include:
1. Change the base unit of COIN to an integer with a value of 100,000,000, like Bitcoin / BTC.
2. 100x split every existing COIN, meaning 1 COIN becomes 100 COINS.
The combination of these two changes means that if you have 1 XST, you will have 100 XST after the split, but the same fraction of the total coin supply.
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qPoS mainnet Q1–Q2 2020
The Q1 2020 Release of qPoS mainnet will involve the simultaneous introduction of several changes to the XST protocol and implementation, including a 100-fold split of XST denominations, increased XST divisibility, an improved implementation of the underlying cryptography, and the zerocash anonymity layer. These changes also need to be added to qPoS before its release. In preparation, early 2020 will involve these integrations onto the testnet before moving to mainnet later in 2020.
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Update StealthSend Applications to qPoS Q1–Q2 2020
The updated desktop and new mobile and online applications will include full qPoS functionality, with 5 second blocks and feeless transactions. Full privacy features will extend through each application, supporting both XST and the private XSS coins.
Stealth Marketing & Community
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Exchanges
The Stealth team continues to hold discussions with many of the top crypto exchanges in the market, and we will strategically join those that we believe provide us with the best exposure and most value as we grow. As trade volume is critical to maintain a presence on exchanges, the overall rate of community growth and participation will help determine when new exchange relationships are finalized.
The most recent international exchange to list Stealth was SouthXchange based in Argentina, providing us with a strong and respected presence within the South and Central American communities
Our integration onto the BLOCK DX exchange is in progress.
Updates on all exchanges will be posted as applicable.
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Community
We encourage all of our community members to share our development and marketing news with your friends, colleagues and followers. Your active participation will help ensure Stealth reaches its full potential!
At Stealth we’re committed to open and frequent communication with our community, and welcome your questions, comments and suggestions.
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Communications & Marketing
As has been our practice to date, the Stealth team will continue to provide periodic updates on the development milestones at relevant times, and as they are achieved.
We plan to continue letting the crypto world know about the features and benefits of Stealth through ongoing PR, social media, and attendance at strategically important conferences. We’ll let you know where we’ll be and look forward to meeting you in person!
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The Stealth Team
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