Since our last meeting in Amsterdam, the Crown team has grown substantially and have worked towards becoming an innovative, self organizing cross-functional team. The hiring of a new Quality Assurance Manager (dzlbobo), C++ developer (vshamray) and a new DevOps Developer (crownsurfer) will help us deliver the features the community need. The team held private meetings for two days to flesh out our strategy moving forward and then held a community meetup to discuss the team’s progress.

Development

The development team have been focussing on the next wallet release, release process and enhancing our development process for the future. We have successfully introduced a private GitLab with a prioritized backlog of features, built pipelines linked up with Docker and a release board to provide visibility for the whole team. Changes have been made to ensure we adopt Agile principles with feature based development and the pursuit of continuous integration. Our vision for the future of development means allows the team to see the effort and progress, get statistics on performance and a get insight into how we can evolve our processes.

G-ME

We are determined to deliver a legally compliant, transparent platform for businesses, governments, NGOs and individuals in which community governance and social values are at the forefront. Although we are still far from achieving our goals we have added an innovative business in G-ME Track to be built on the platform and have been approached by many other interested parties since our last meeting in Amsterdam.

Friends of Cite Soleil

We have similarly helped send thousands of kids to school through the Cite Soleil Foundation with over 4,000CRW donated (see:https://goo.gl/48BQhT). They are using our platform to offer transparency in an area that has been marred by the misuse of funds. They are helping spread the adoption of our platform and believe Crown is at the forefront of the future.

Updates: revolutionary node creation pioneered by Crown!

This upcoming release March 12th will lead the path for a series of releases over the next two years which is now officially known as the Crown Platform. This release will totally change the way Masternodes and Systemnodes are created. Sending either 500 or 10k CRW will give users the option to create a Systemnode or Masternode automatically. Expect other projects to move towards adding that feature from our code in the near future. The Crown wallet will now also notify users directly in the wallet when an update is released. This should substantially reduce the confusion around new releases.

Marketing and Communications

Our online media presence has grown dramatically since November. We have more than doubled our twitter followers, started this blog, and began a new youtube series called CrownCast. We have a lot of work to do to continue building our presence and grow our community, but we have made major strides in the past few months.

New Website

Our new website is now only a few weeks away and is looking fantastic. It features a completely new, light themed, professional look. We have completely rewritten all of the content to better communicate what we are building on the platform and our values in the easiest way imaginable. We think you all will love the new look. A sneak preview:

New Exchanges

We have a series of exchanges that we are working on. This process has been incredibly competitive, but progress has been made. We will have actual news for the community in the update next week.

Team Proposals

Currently the proposal system is too young in development for certain proposals to be maintainable. We will have one core team proposal that covers development and marketing funds for the time being! Team members will be asked in the future to submit proposals for themselves or as a small team, once the governance system has been rebuilt and is more workable. A team member will be asked to monitor the Core Proposal, distribute funds and monitor spending. Again this position will be put to vote in the future.

Community Proposals

Community proposals should be project focused. We have had real problems with various ambassador proposals. As soon as ambassadors have been paid they generally become less responsive and fail to consistently report on their activities. No other project with a proposal system have used ambassadors the way they have been operating on Crown. Ambassadors on other projects become ambassadors by virtue of the projects they offer to work on. On Crown it has been reversed in which community members have generally offered to be ambassadors first and then find projects to work on. This has made progress on their proposals difficult to measure and our opinion is that it has not been efficient. This will be up to the community to decide, but we urge everyone to rethink how they vote.

Trezor integration Update

For the last few months the Crown team have been working hard to build the infrastructure needed to hold Crown on a Trezor device. Most development was spent merging Bitcore to work with Crown and was completed by the team Feb 2016. Bitcore is an interesting bit of kit as it comes with a dedicated block explorer (Insight) that Trezor uses to scan the balance of your wallet.

The next addition was the Electrum client. Trezor uses this software to sign transactions and is very important to the Crown project for various reasons. The Electrum client is currently in private testing. The software is being distributed to 3 servers total and public testing should proceed very soon.

Once the Electrum client is ready, the Crown team can push the code to Trezor for integration. Public updates will follow regarding block explorer, electrum client and Trezor. One more notable mention is the research and development work going on with copay. We hope to bring the community this great wallet asap.

Upcoming Meetings/Conferences

APAC Blockchain Conference Melbourne — March 13–15th

Coinfest Manchester — April 5–8th

Team and Community Meetup — Blockchain Hotel Germany — May 17–20th*

Meetup Media

Pictures from the event can be found here and the livestream can be rewatched here!

More news on the Major Announcement will be available next week after the release.

— The Core Team