Velas Monthly Ecosystem Report #005
To our fellow Velonians,
It’s with great enthusiasm that we share our latest Ecosystem Report on the back of our one year anniversary!
After years of brainstorming, discussions, blueprinting (more blueprinting), and, most importantly, execution, Velas has solidified itself as a significant contender in the rapidly growing crypto ecosystem.
While we’ve been working diligently to meet and exceed our targets over the past year, this is only the beginning. The level at which our team, community, and ecosystem have scaled to date is just a small testament to what’s possible — all of which we simply couldn’t do without you.
Before diving in, we’d like to once again thank you for your support and humbly recognize you as one of the early adopters responsible for shaping the future of blockchain and technology as we know it.
Without further ado, let’s take a look at what we’ve been up to over the course of June.
For those with no time to spare, here’s an overview of what we covered.
As we’re sure you’re accustomed to by now, Velas offers bi-weekly tech updates to keep everyone informed on what’s going on under the hood. This month is no different, and we encourage you to take 5 minutes to hear about our recent developments from the past month.
Velas Tech Report 06.04.20–06.28.20
Velas Tech Report 05.18.20–06.04.20
Velasphere
For those who might have missed it, Velas has been heads down working on a distributed file storage system — Velasphere — which offers permissionless, censorship-resistant access to the content you love most.
Over the past month, we’ve conducted an internal beta test of Velasphere in tandem with the first iterations of Vortex — a content creation platform built on top of the Velas blockchain and our newly developed storage protocol.
Using these tests, we’ll be updating the system’s architecture, leveraging our findings to offer a compelling blockchain-based application which any end-user would find indistinguishable from the products and services they use every day.
AI Research
At the heart of Velas is an AI-based consensus mechanism — AIDPOS — responsible for optimizing the protocol using learnings from past cycles using a recommendation algorithm.
Similar to traditional Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS) models, Velas allows users to delegate VLX staking power to trusted actors securing the network. However, what makes Velas design is a unique “guardian” algorithm that leverages training modules baked within full nodes to better inform the key parameters of each validation period, called epochs.
This past month, our team has made strong progress on a number of these benefits, including anomaly detection, throughput, and security. Paired with the ability to pull computing power from anyone running a Velas node, we’ve been able to train our neural network in an honest and open fashion.
The key thing to keep in mind is that instead of training our consensus mechanism in a centralized, closed silo, we’re testing each and every day on the back of an ever-growing network of Velas validators.
As an end-user, this means that the Velas blockchain is constantly learning from itself, offering faster confirmation times, lower transaction fees, and 100% up-time. Even in the event of an attack, the blockchain is able to dissect and adapt — a key component relative to 99% of other blockchains that require human intervention to resolve.
The status of our AI research is always evolving, and here at Velas, we’re constantly exploring new ways to better train our algorithms in line with the latest trends and insights from industry-standard support frameworks like Tensorflow and PyTorch applied with a decentralized touch.
Wallet
The web wallet has officially moved from pre-alpha to alpha, improving its functionality, security, and scalability while bringing it one step closer to prime time.
This comes in tandem with a suite of UI/UX improvements, including:
- Fixing formatting issues for the delegate staking header
- Reformatting language selection settings
- Added functionality to easily swap between testnet and mainnet
- Optimizing transaction histories
- Added staking translations
Outside of making the wallet easier to use, we’ve also made it safer. This is done by:
- Checking the entry of seed phrases words
- Creating separate nodes for wallet restores
- Implementing new era duration
- Troubleshooting explorer glitches
At current rates, we expect to have the desktop wallet fully finalized by the end of the year, providing a battle-tested, robust staking experience set to rival any in the industry.
Mobile Wallet App (Android Only)
To our Android users, we’re excited to announce that the Velas Wallet is now live in the Google Play Store. This means you can now view, send, and receive VLX as well as any of our 100+ other supported cryptocurrency directly from your smartphone. Please keep in mind that this is still in early access beta, so we encourage you to give us feedback on how to improve in Telegram under the Velas developers channel.
At the core of Velas is the community. As we emphasized in the intro, we want to thank our fellow Velonians that have stuck by us since day one.
We encourage Velas OG’s to help welcome new members as they join our ever-expanding community. Whether it’s shooting them a quick message to introduce yourself or sharing resources to help them get started, one more Velonian correlates to multiples more of future growth.
Here’s how we’re doing our part.
Velas AMA World Tour
Given the status of the global pandemic, it would be irresponsible for us to host the IRL events we’ve come to know and love. To this end, we hosted a suite of good old fashion “Ask Me Anything” Telegram events to keep everyone connected as we persevere through challenging times.
If you missed it, the CoinBros, our brand ambassadors, created a whole series recapping the live AMA’s with our founder, Alex Alexandrov. Here are some links to our YouTube videos with all the AMA’s that took place.
🌎🌍🌏 Velas AMA World Tour 🌎🌍🌏
Velas AMA Indonesia — https://youtu.be/gWiH7SESyXQ
Velas AMA Vietnam — https://youtu.be/KC7t1v7TSRs
Velas AMA Korea — https://youtu.be/mE0xvPVvCL4
Velas AMA Africa — https://youtu.be/h0sTLZ8LofA
Velas AMA India — https://bit.ly/3fi1PUF
For the entire transcripts of the ama world tour please check out the links provided in each youtube videos description
On a more generalized note, Alex sat down with a leading influencer BitBoy and his co-host CryptoJChains to chat about his crypto roots stemming from 2011 and getting Bitcoin at $6 all the way today. They touch on his background buying and now running CoinPayments, where Velas is now, where it’s heading and why you should care. This was an incredibly informative interview to learn more about the man behind the project and we strongly encourage you to take the time to listen in its entirety.
🎙🎙🎙 Beards & Bitcoin Podcast 🎙🎙🎙
BitBoy Crypto recently came out with a video on the Top 5 Altcoins in 2020 and named us #1 on his list with over 40k views in less than a month. It is an honor to have influencers like BitBoy Crypto to name us a top Altcoin for 2020. If you guys would like to view the entire video click on the link below.
🥇🥇🥇 Top 5 Altcoins To Buy for 1000x (Or More!)🥇🥇🥇
Women in Blockchain
This month our Project Lead Shirly sat down with Michelle O’Conner from Uphold and Olga Bersheva from CryptoMood. They all talked about their first experience with blockchain and much more. To watch the full video click on the link below.
Asia update
June was the most active month in recent memory for Velas Asia. As many of you will have noted, our AMA World Tour featured stops in Vietnam, India, Indonesia, and Korea, and we were excited to engage directly with literally thousands of community members both old and new who were eager to learn more about Velas.
Several of our communities have grown significantly the past three months and the numbers are pretty impressive. Taken collectively they demonstrate the strong growth our project continues to experience throughout Asia.
Indonesia: 500%
India: 200%
Vietnam: 90%
This month we are looking forward to being featured in two notable publications in both China and Taiwan and are preparing to launch a bounty program for the Korean market in August. This activity will of course complement our continued work with influencers and local media throughout the region.
Finally, we were pleased to welcome our newest community to the Velas family when we established Velas Philippines earlier this month. As we continue to experience strong growth we are actively looking for a Japanese Community Manager. If you think you or someone you know would be a good candidate, please reach out to the Asian Marketing Director Alexander, he would love to hear from you!
The Continuous Expansion of our Velas Community
Just one year ago, we started the Velas community with a small tribe of visionaries. Now, just 365 days later, we’re proud to say that we have over 45k Velonian members across a global community which is growing stronger and stronger by the day.
This global focus has allowed us to plant our roots in every major crypto hub in the world, something which we’re constantly looking to expand in terms of partnerships, ambassadors, and enthusiasts alike.
If you or someone you know would be a good representative of the Velas ecosystem, please reach out so we can discuss a way for you to better amplify your enthusiasm for the project.
Team gallery
Last but not least, we’re excited to share our latest round of top-tier listings for VLX.
Our goal is and always will be to provide deep liquidity from trusted exchanges. To this end, June was our biggest one yet with listings on two top-25 exchanges, Bittrex and HitBTC.
Bittrex Listing
At the beginning of the month, we listed on Bittrex global. VLX is now slotted alongside every major cryptocurrency you could think of, along with enjoying a new audience of traders to better aide in future price discovery.
Users can find our VLX/USDT & VLX/BTC trading pairs here.
HitBTC Listing
In parallel with Bittrex, VLX was listed on HitBTC — a leading cryptocurrency exchange which has been known to incubate top tokens before they go parabolic. HitBTC has been around since 2013 and offers a great reputation for our token holders to enjoy even more options to buy, sell, and trade VLX.
Check out our VLX/BTC & VLX/USDT trading pair here.
As our team and community continue to grow, we’re constantly fielding discussions with top tier exchanges to strengthen liquidity for VLX.
Got an exchange you think would be a good fit for us? Let us know in Telegram!
Looking Forward
All in all, June has further established our cadence of meeting deadlines and prioritizing innovation. As the interest in crypto slowly starts bubbling again, we can feel rising anticipation for the next wave of users coming closer each day.
If you’ve made it this far, you’re one of the few individuals in the world who’s right on track with each and every move we’re making here at Velas. We encourage you to use this information to your advantage and share the aspects that excite you the most with your colleagues.
Until next month, we’ll keep shipping — so you keep staking!
