Q1 Review and Look Ahead
Dear Community, We are taking the time to write today, to give a quarter 1 review and a look ahead to quarter 2 and the future. In Q1, there was a lot of internal work being done. Below is the following sections of what the team has worked on in Q1.
Team Restructuring
The process of team restructuring is just about complete. Both Paris Founders are still very much a part of this team, but they are taking a step back to concentrate on Flowdesk growth. This idea was proposed
by Guilhem, and everyone is on the same page, there are no internal fights or anything like that. We are all behind x-cash! Guilhem is still the CEO, but it was decided for Zach to step up and make day-to-day decisions for a more efficient direction of the coin. The majority of x-cash infrastructure is still compensated by the Paris team. They will stop by in the Discord occasionally or as time permits, as they still have roles, just not as many as before. New personnel has been added from the community as well to help x-cash grow and plan for the future. Zach also took the time this month to “re-energize” the team. That information will stay private, but the bulk of it was a 5-page speech outlining the future of x-cash.
No one has left the team, Dennis took some time off to take care of a personal issue, and he will be back soon enough. Existing members of the team are very capable of running x-bank and even adding
features while Dennis is out.
We are also working on a new xcash.foundation website, and we will publish another article on the new personnel once we have the website done.
Coding
The team has been really busy this past month or two. One of the topics is the new xcash.foundation website. It will include new wording, to keep with trends in the markets, and will have the full contributors list with pictures or avatars, as well as many other adjustments. We have numerous tasks that team members are doing in parallel. For example, we have been looking at new exchanges with @x-$1 and @CACO, and also have been working on concrete simple and fitting plans on marketing with @Zurg. These will be pushed out once we have the new website. In the pipeline, we have two that we believe will help our growth with minimal expenditure. Zach has been busy with the test net development and improvement. We just published an update to merge the test net to the master (v1.1.1). Updated were geared more towards the delegates, and you can check out the full changelog here.
https://discord.com/channels/470575102203920395/746277791556698182/947325332841725982
Zach is also making progress on the GUI wallet. @miaumiau has been resolving many angular issues and adding numerous improvements for the wallet. We have also been trying to work on phase X (get the c++ code into the angular wallet to remove the RPC dependency) Zach made some progress on this, but it is still a work in progress and not enough for a full wallet at this point (one of the issues is that we can’t get tx but did everything else!) If the team gets stumped, we might do a big RFC on this, so watch this for if you are out there and want to make some x-cash by helping us out.
@Lovro has been extremely busy with rewriting x payments to use slash commands, as this is a requirement starting from April of 2022. He plans on working with DPOPS connectivity and many other related projects to come throughout this year. Look for his article on the x-payment road map soon.
He has also built a python library for development using xcash. It includes wallet, daemon and dpops functions.
@Twinkie has been working on the monitoring/profiling systems for x-bank and x-payments, which will help us better understand what our programs are using resource-wise and what we can optimize to increase efficiency.
@franciscom has been working on many things as he has a good knowledge of technologies and can bounce around to where his expertise is needed. His main area has been x-bank testing and fixes, and other areas that will be revealed in the future.
Next Protocol
The next protocol instant payment's development is close to completion (as you saw from the video released last summer). We are working on trying to resolve a decentralized signing process for releasing payments (there is a persisting issue where just one delegate can freeze the wallet). The idea of just the seed nodes holding the wallet is not acceptable, as this will be the system for smart contract x-cash as well, so it needs to be done properly. Zach has been working on the voting as time permits, but we know this is the least exciting protocol for normal users, therefore it’s a low priority. There is a new idea for a protocol that we haven’t brought up before, that Zach will be researching as well.
Key features of this protocol would be:
- XCASH namespace creation. This will allow for users to purchase .xcash names in the namespace and send transactions to an easy to remember name instead of a address.
- namespace entries can be registered with any available delegate. Each delegate can set their own price, and users will be able to register with the current block producer, or wait for a cheaper one.
- Integration of Public TX 2.0 That will allow you to create wallets that can only receive public or only receive private transactions (using .pxcash and .sxcash namespaces). This can be important for business use.
The protocol is currently being researched and developed by zach, as we thought the community would enjoy this protocol rather than voting, while we are still researching instant payments. The protocol will be deployed to an internal testnet first, and then will be deployed to the public testnet after.
Conclusion
As one can see, we are working very hard and have a lot of exciting things coming up.
Once again, I want to thank everyone who continually supports this project, and for the testnet delegates that are voluntary running nodes without any compensation (besides the monthly contest). We could not have done DPOPS without you, and are very thankful you are here for the testnet and upcoming protocol. If you see or know anything that can be improved, please reach out to us. X-CASH team wants to hear your thoughts and ideas on how this project can be improved and advanced. Remember, this is an open-source project and all contributions are welcome.
