Dear Loyal Rupsters,

Our journey has barely begun, but we should all be proud of how far this project has come.

Our community has grown from nothing to over 1400 active members in Telegram and more than 4000 Twitter followers in the last 6 months, and as we cross each milestone, the next becomes easier to conquer.

While it doesn’t seem we’ve reached the top 5 in the BitIndia vote this time, we have done far better than other big communities, and we should all be very proud of ourselves.

The next step for RUP is bringing mining back to the people, and away from the pools. With our newest fork, everyone will be able to mine RUP on their computers.

Rupee Blockchain is about people and community coming together to solve multi billion dollar problems, such as expensive global remittances.

We’re from South Asia, but we’re for the whole world!

#TheRupeeForEveryone

Team expansion

The Rupee team had been operating in a small startup mode since the relaunch in September 2017. Since then, a lot of new team members have joined from across the globe. These are mostly Rupee enthusiasts who hold RUP coins and want to contribute their talents to the project. We have recently reorganized the team structure, professionalized our internal communication and we’re slowly but surely assigning roles and responsibilities everyone is comfortable with, reflecting the specific skills of each individual.

New update format

Since the team has more helping hands, we’ve decided to revamp our team update announcements. Instead of doing a bi-weekly, 2-slide update via Twitter, we have decided to start writing blog posts to provide the community with more detailed updates on various activities. This blog is the first of many! The frequency of these update blog posts will not be bi-weekly, instead we will publish a post as soon as we have significant updates to share with the community.

Mining code update — Lyra2REv2

The development team has successfully kicked off the Lyra2REv2 testing at the Github testnet on February 10, 2018. It can be monitored at http://165.227.75.74:3001/. The development team has circled in on April 16, 2018 as the release date for new code to implement Lyra2REv2 in the Rupee blockchain.

There are several reasons to release on April 16th. The team wants to complete the final review of the code earlier, but that is the easy part. The code update is a significant event and requires alignment with several different third-parties. The code and wallets at all our exchanges have to be updated before Lyra2REv2 can be used for mining. Given the exchanges are extremely busy these days, we wanted to allocate ample time to coordinate with the exchanges. This is the top priority of the Rupee development team right now and we will keep the community updated.

Electrum server and Android app

Team has started working on both the electrum server and the android app. The user interface is being finalized. The emphasis is on the user interface so it can facilitate the use of RUP coin on the go and enable users to make payments at merchants accepting Rupee coin. We will share the interface design screenshots soon. The app will be released after the code update in April and an exact date will be announced soon.

Website 2.0

As most of you have probably noticed, we’ve been continuously making small updates to the website. Harm van der Werf, our lead UI/UX front end developer, is leading the website 2.0 project. We are making vast improvements to the underlying technologies. Harm is leading several other improvements including, but not limited to, an email subscription option, artwork/media section and especially translations. We have decided not to roll out all the changes at once; instead we will be rolling out improvements over time.

Litepaper

Rupee Team is finalizing the content of the litepaper and design work will begin soon. The intent of a litepaper is to have 1–2 page summary of the whitepaper highlighting the key aspects from the whitepaper. We do not have a release date of the litepaper yet, but an exact date will be announced soon.

Exchanges

We have communicated to the community earlier, that we applied to all types of exchanges in the last few months. Some exchanges we applied to are Binance, Bittrex, Kucoin, OkEx, HitBTC, BitIndia, Bit-Z, Coinrail etc. We not only applied to these exchanges, we followed up with them aggressively via telegram, twitter and email. After a lot of effort with the existing exchanges, we’ve realized that some exchanges are out of our reach (listing price) and some are just too busy to respond to a smaller project like Rupee. We have not stopped our efforts with the existing established exchanges but we re-strategized to pivot towards working with upcoming exchanges. Rupee is being listed at the following two new exchanges as a result of these efforts:

Next.Exchange

Next Exchange is based in the Netherlands and is expected to release their beta platform in February. They will allow for FIAT to crypto pairings, including INR! Rupee will soon be available for trading. We highly recommend investors to apply to this platform. Kalicoin.io

Rupee Team has been in touch with the Kali coin team for a few months now. We helped Kali team with development advice and helped them strategize their ICO. The Kali coin ICO is currently live. They will list Rupee on their platform with an Indian fiat Rupee pair!

That is all for now. We will be back with more updates soon.

To #Rupsters all around the world, thanks so much!