A lot of activities are currently happening with this project and it is a prelude to the launch of one of their major pillars Skywire

A new development of Skycoin includes a newly designed website Wallet which went live yesterday .

The updated Skycoin desktop wallet has a beautiful new user interface and is ready for you to download at

https://www.skycoin.net/downloads/

It has the new UI but doesn't have password option yet, which will come next. Besides the UI change, the main focus was stability and features for exchange

As long as you got your seed words written down, both your coins and coinhours are safe

For now, you can compress your wallet with something like 7zip and password protect it manually.

Encryption is coming in the next release .

Skycoin Hardware wallet is almost ready to go. Skycoin has been working hard with third party wallet manufacturers (such as Ledger) to get Skycoin supported on several different hardware wallet solutions with security at the core of the design

Skycoin is also producing their proprietary hardware wallets, which is not expected to cost more than $25. This proprietary wallet will be able to store Skycoin, all Skyfibre tokens, and other popular coins.

Software wallet

The first new feature of Skycoin software development is the OTC functionality. Simply put, Skycoin OTC will allow our community to buy Skycoin directly from the Skycoin wallet. That means no dealing with exchanges and their purchasing fees. The woes of dealing with exchanges with extended withdrawal times are no more with OTC Passthrough

The rates on the Skycoin OTC will be the same as the lowest market rate across any exchange, you never have to shop around for the exchange with the best price, as that best price will be available to you right from your wallet .

Another feature in Skycoin software wallet is that it will have the ability to shapeshift your coins, free of charge. Wallets like Exodus are great but expensive . One of the best features of a wallet like Exodus is the ability to directly trade any coin you own for any coin they support, all without an exchange.

The Exodus wallet charges 1% of the transaction fee. Skycoin project think this is too much. It is not their idea to charge fees. No matter which kind of tokens you hold, as a result there will be no fee.

The New website and White paper are ready but will be released officially at a later date.

More information as to the release date is stated in this article

The Skywire custom OpenWRT router is going into production with a double-sided PCB. Check it out, along with a few patch antennas the skycoin project is testing with.



The antennas will be on people's roofs in a few months, the PCB boards for the OpenWRT routers will be shipping out before the testnet will be launching.

The Skycoin team participated in the Blockchain Unbound (free blockchain) and Coin Agenda Caribbean (Caribbean) conferences in Puerto Rico this month to elaborate their vision and introduce their future development and plans.

They were invited to join the blockchain and cryptocurrency elite speaker team, introduce Skycoin news, and promote Skycoin as one of the best projects in the field of cryptocurrency.

Synth (co-founder), Jonathan Wilson (brand communicator) and Daken Freeborn (activity manager) attended the meeting as representatives of the team.

It was an opportunity for Synth to rub minds with a lot of important personalities in the crypto space. A notable one was the meeting with Max Keiser . Max Keiser and Synth connect way back to the early days of bitcoin.

Max spoke at the very first Bitcoin conference in 2011 and has covered every major crypto event on

@keisserreport while creating more crypto millionaires more than anyone



Updates and development about this meeting and collaborations will be released soon. All I can say is it was a very positive meeting



The first official Skycoin conference has been confirmed on April 10th. The conference location is Shanghai Hongqiao Yuanyi Hilton Hotel.



This conference is the first time that Skycoin has released its external brand in seven years.

The theme of the conference is "Value Linking and Trust Revolution." The introduction of Skycoin ecology and its applications will be introduced. Skywire and its Skyminer will be an important introduction to the conference

.



This is Skycoin's first official press conference in China. The backbone members of various technical teams will gather from all over the world to Shanghai to show the latest progress of each project.

According to reports, the latest white papers and websites will also be officially released at the press conference.

This press conference invited the mainstream industry and many technology media to participate in and report on the event. This is the first major force for the operation of the 2018 brand market.



At present, the preparation for the press conference is in progress. At the same time, the community-oriented screening system is about to open.

Skycoin is conducting a large-scale airdrop in the community and participants will receive Skycoin rewards. (As of now there are 5000+ people who have signed up )

Skycoin airdrop campaign began on March 19, 2018 and will finish on March 31, 2018.

Skycoin will be paid within 30 days after the end of the airdrop event.

To participate follow this link and fill the form below

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3160669

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1OaIs7PzKoSgkPti1hHEtUyFYxqBmKxOd9lc9pm7vqx4/viewform?edit_requested=true

Skycoin is holding an official 2018 Skycoin Skyminer contest and win up to 40 $SKY!! They are awarding #Skycoin for the most creative, compact, and ridiculous #Skyminer designs! Contest ends 4/30. See https://skywug.net/forum for more info

A lot of supporters who have received their skyminers and those building their DIY miners have been testing and sending photographs of their assembled miners in anticipation of the live launch test net which is taking ahead of schedule and for whitelisting respectively



The esteemed development team is proud to announce that the Skywire testnet is ready for launch ahead of schedule. Skywire is the foundation upon which the Skycoin platform will be built. Skywire’s uses range from operating our innovative web-of-trust consensus algorithm, Obelisk, to operating an end-to-end encrypted distributed internet that all Skycoin holders will ultimately gain free access to via the Coin Hour system.

Skyminers are the hardware backbone for Skywire.

Skyminers provide computing power, networking capability, and storage capacity necessary for the Skywire network to function properly. Skyminers act as specialized VPNs and nodes on the mesh network that allows users to essentially become their own ISP, granting user freedom to engage with the encrypted network, Skywire.

Skyminers are low cost, silent, and use energy efficient hardware that truly makes them affordable to purchase and run

Skycoin is cryptocurrency 3.0 and therefore has no old-school PoW mining

Skycoin does not use POW or POS consensus, the word "miner" is being used to communicate to the public that this is the vehicle through which participants can share in emissions of Skycoin and earn Coinhours as well.



On the Skywire testnet, payouts in Skycoin will be contingent on the whitelisting of DIY units (official units are automatically whitelisted) This is because it may cause unforeseen complications early on if people are getting too creative with their DIY units. Potential payouts are capped by available system resources and available bandwidth. The amount of bandwidth that one orange pi prime can handle is 100 mbps, so a cluster of 8 needs to be handling 800 mbps before it becomes a bottleneck.

On Skywire mainnet, DIY miners will be whitelisted by Obelisk consensus and informed by testnet data. The community will make sure that specifications of compliant hardware are up to date and publicly known.

Payouts will be proportional to the contribution to the network being made by each node. This incentivizes the growth of the infrastructure. While the magnitude of infrastructure becomes the basis of intrinsic value of Skycoin, the values of Coinhours are based on the amount of available bandwidth and resources. I recommend that skywire miner operators form local clubs and actively contribute to the community.

The price of Coinhours is dictated by supply and demand. All Skyledger projects bring economic activity into our ecosystem. The majority of Skycoin emitted under the distribution plan will go towards Skywire network subsidization. This means that there will be Skycoin payouts for Skyminer node operation for the next 14-25 years. By the end of that period Skywire will serve as blood supply for a significant portion of the global economy.

Simply put, If you provide bandwidth to the Skywire network, you will earn Skycoin hours. If you consume network bandwidth, you will pay Skycoin hours.

Be sure to visit Skycoin.net and join the mailing list to get a skyminer - https://www.skycoin.net/mailing-list/

Skyminer Build tutorials:

• Assembly Manual- https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kCH5why03mozLJzYlycK75nBtIaL2Nzj/view

• Skycoin Skyminer Build Vlog-