GINcoin’s #1 block got mined exactly one year ago — give or take some time due to how imperfect time tracking is and leap years and all that nonsense. Anyway, we have been secretly brewing something and found our anniversary a fitting time for the reveal. So let’s dig in.

Breaking the 4 minute barrier

Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash

Before 1954, doing a mile run in under 4 minutes was considered impossible. Since the record got shattered, it’s been broken 1400 times.

Before GIN Platform launched, the masternode market was underserviced. With no products dedicated to helping users manage their nodes with little to no effort, creating and maintaining a masternode was far from a pleasant experience. Creating a platform dedicated to masternode management didn’t seem like an attainable goal, either.

GINcoin and the GIN Platform were created to lower the barrier to entry for masternode enthusiasts — our version of the 4 minute barrier.

Not long after that, more and more masternode coins started adding hosting services to their value proposition in order to bolster the utility of the coin. A lot of them had no other choice if they were to attract or keep some of their investors. Most, however, disappeared just as quickly as they had appeared.

We’re expecting this trend to continue. We’re also seeing more and more coins offering masternode hosting services for pennies just so they can create some hype and positive momentum for their project. Good luck…

When we launched, 1 year ago, we weren’t bent on creating what you can now see and use. Our mission was to solve a problem and break through a plateau of innovation. That mission has not changed. But we have found that the plateau and problem we started with were just the beginning.

What thermodynamics, economics, technology, and the future of masternodes have in common

Running the biggest masternode management platform alongside our other ventures opened our eyes to a problem that’s not only widespread, but… infuriatingly old.

The first law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system. Substitute “energy” with “value” and you get the problem we’ve spotted — most blockchain projects cater to other blockchain projects and their communities. That can only limit the total value brought inside the ecosystem. This is something that used to happen in the Tech Startup boom of the 2010s, by the way (when there were startups that made money off of other startups alone). That’s neither healthy nor conducive to proper growth.

Why build a terrarium when you can terraform a planet? | Photo by Anete Lūsiņa on Unsplash

The second problem we’ve set our sights on was more future-focussed — there is no established way of running a distributed and decentralised app. Add it to the problem above, and the result points to a solution — use Masternodes as a means to generate value for both the outside world and their own ecosystem. This is what the GEA protocol does and what the GIN team will be focussing on moving forward.

You can read all about the GEA protocol, Freighters and what this means for GINcoin masternodes in the GINcoin Freighter Fleet (whitepaper). The repository will also serve as the go-to place for all information related to node management and freighters.

Payload and pay-off

The GIN Freighter Fleet will be able to run any workload, be it a continuously running job like a VPN daemon or a job that runs to completion, like counting to 100, as a Cargo on one of or multiple of its Freighters. Briefly put, your GIN masternodes will be able to work for more than just the GIN network. And generate more value in the process.

Such an ecosystem can have more usecases than we can currently list (or even think of) — from machine learning and data mining to decentralised networking services, GEA will usher in the creation of a decentralised and distributed supercomputer. Powered, of course, by GIN.

Not this kind of GIN | Photo by Jez Timms on Unsplash

Roadmap and plans for the future

GEA and GIN’s roadmap is tough to pin down as far as time is concerned. But we do know what we’ll be delivering:

Private Alpha Freighter Network (20 nodes) running test workloads Public Beta Freighter Network Hosting of masternodes as workloads on the Beta network On-chain protocol implementation, market regulated price of services New types of workloads and 3rd-party providers (DAMs)

We also know what we won’t be doing, at least for a while — shared nodes. For reasons you can read at length in our legal co-founder’s note, shared nodes are just not a viable venture for any of the involved parties (the tech provider, the manager and the seat-owners). And when compared to GEA, it looks even less promising. So we have decided to park that initiative for the foreseeable future.

The GIN Foundation

All coin-related activities and development have been relegated to the GIN Foundation — that includes the GEA protocol as well. The Foundation will be headed by one of the first and most active community members — Mr. Spenser Mooney (aka Spoonzus).

Proof of Concept — Call for Pioneers

As a proof of concept for the GEA protocol, we’re calling to arms 20 masternode holders — 10 with nodes on the GIN platform, 10 off the platform. You can apply here (form); older nodes have priority over newer ones and the kick-off for the alpha program is scheduled to start one week from now (3rd of March 2019).