Stealth Roadmap 2020
The Stealth team introduces an all new roadmap for 2020. With the successful completion of the Junaeth protocol public testnet competition, we have paved the way for a successful and exciting future for the project.
Our near and medium-term development efforts will focus on Junaeth, the new and groundbreaking consensus protocol. This focus means all new features will be tested on the Junaeth testnet first, including the pending mobile applications for iOS and Android, as well as our soon-to-be-released StealthMonitor.org website. The current Stealth consensus protocol (traditional proof-of-stake), as well as our current QTs, will no longer get any significant updates or changes, except for one critical change which will be the adjustment of the money supply as described in the roadmap.
The reason for our focus on Junaeth is to ensure its speediest development and upcoming release on mainnet.
The changes we previously had planned and announced for the Preliminary Hard Fork Releases will go directly onto testnet, with the implementation of zerocash being the last addition, scheduled for early 2020.
Although our lead development priority is to make the highest performance privacy coin possible, we also believe that visual identity is important to attract wider attention and foster adoption. To this end we are creating an all new website. The improved appearance will permeate not only our web sites, but our mobile wallets and apps. All will feature top of the line User Interfaces and User Experiences, to meet the demands of Stealth as a state of the art payment solution.
The next steps are as follows:
1) Stealth.org website
January 2020
Stealth.org is being redesigned to serve as the project website, providing information pertaining to development, the team, updates and news. This new website is the first important step for the project and will introduce the all new look & feel for the Stealth brand; paving the way for all of our future releases.
Last minute edits and design elements are in progress, and we expect to release this site within the first several weeks of the new year. Features will include our own native XST buying options.
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2) Stealthmonitor.org website (Testnet)
Q1 2020
The Junaeth StealthNode Monitor and Explorer.
This exciting new site will replace our current block explorers (chain.stealth.org, chainz.cryptoid.info/xst/, and blocks.stealth.org) 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 about Junaeth StealthNodes. Until Junaeth is on mainnet, the site will display testnet information.
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3) Tor update (Testnet)
Q1 2020
One thing we are noticing in testnet is that some VPS services prove difficult for their clients to maintain Tor connections. Tor is an anonymous network routing protocol that serves as the backbone of Stealth’s peer-to-peer communications layer. Tor is essential not only for user privacy, but also serves as protection against DDoS attacks that target clearnet IP addresses. To improve connectivity and circumvent incompatibilities, we will update the built-in Tor router to the latest stable version. Additionally we will add features that facilitate the use of Tor in more restrictive political environments.
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4) Adjusting the money supply, both Testnet (Junaeth) and current mainnet
Q1 2020
Bitcoin has a money supply limit of 21 million coins, but this cap hinders bitcoin’s usability for small transactions. The combination of Junaeth’s five second blocks and zerocash’s absolute cryptographic privacy will enable Stealth to be a highly usable payment solution. This usability will include a convenient denomination such that the Stealth money supply will be split 100-fold. This split will avoid a situation similar to bitcoin’s where, for example, 100 USD represents a fraction of a coin (currently about 0.01 BTC) and users often find themselves 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 owns 1 XST prior to the change in the supply, they would own 100 XST after the change. Additionally, if 35 million XST exist before the split, 3.5 billion will exist after.
In purely technical terms, 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.
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5) Switch from OpenSSL to Bitcoin secp256k1 (Testnet)
Q1 2020
The Bitcoin secp256k1 is a highly optimized elliptic curve library that represents a significant performance improvement over the OpenSSL libraries currently used. 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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6) StealthSend applications (Testnet)
Mobile + Desktop Q1 2020
A set of brand new and redesigned applications will incorporate Stealth’s new look and feel. These new apps will offer a greater ease of use, meeting the demands of modern payment applications.
Our new Mobile and Desktop apps will also introduce SPV light wallets. The updated desktop wallet will enable users to buy and sell StealthNodes through a trustless on-chain marketplace.
The release of both iOS and Android mobile testnet Applications for Junaeth will give testnet access to a wider audience. This release will enable users to test the new protocol and experience what it’s like to send/receive XST almost instantly on a mobile app.
This initial release will not include privacy features as these are destined to be implemented as the final step.
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7) Zerocash protocol (Testnet)
Q1 — Q2 2020
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. 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 smaller transactions means that the blockchain will scale more efficiently. 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 including the sender, receiver, and the amount.
As part of its approach to regulatory compliance, Stealth will also use the existing auditable non-private coin (XST). The XST coin allows for the verification of the coin supply such that irregularities in the XST supply will signal that there may be issues with the XSS (StealthSend) supply. XST (Stealth) and XSS (StealthSend) are the interconvertible private and non-private coins.
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 real-world exploits. This lifespan has given not only academics opportunities to vet the zerocash protocol, but hackers as well. For these reasons, we feel like zerocash is the safest and strongest privacy solution in existence.
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8) Junaeth mainnet launch
Q1 — Q2 2020
Junaeth’s transition to mainnet is divided into 3 stages:
1. Proof-of-stake where no aspect of Junaeth is active (master is updated to qpos-3.0, but purchases haven’t started). This traditional proof-of-stake period represents the current operational state of mainnet.
2. Purchase period, where users can buy StealthNodes and manage them, but they don’t sign blocks. The purchase period represents a future hard fork.
3. Transition to pure scheduled block production by StealthNodes (Junaeth is fully live), also a future hard fork, that occurs after the purchase period hard fork. Pure scheduled block production and traditional proof-of-stake are mutually exclusive, meaning that when Junaeth becomes operational, traditional proof-of-stake will permanently cease.
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9) StealthSend applications (Junaeth mainnet)
Mobile + Desktop Q2 2020
The applications will be updated with the new privacy features and will support XST (Stealth) and XSS (StealthSend), the interconvertible private and non-private coins.
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10) StealthSend.org
Q2 2020
This new website will be centered around our applications and will be the place to download the Stealth applications of your choice. In contrast, Stealth.org is being designed to serve as the project website, serving information pertaining to development, the team, updates and news. In short Stealth.org is about the coin and development, whereas StealthSend.org is all about the apps.
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11) New blockchain features
Q3 +
Implementation of:
> blockchain oracles
> sidechains
> onchain governance
> smart contracts
Please note that all items may be subject to change.
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The Stealth Team
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