As the second week of 2019 comes to a close, the Divi team is back in full stride and looking toward the future with inspiration. Let’s dive into what this week's accomplishments and what to expect for the first quarter of the year.

New Advisors

We are pleased to announce that Travis Wright and Joel Comm of the Bad Crypto Podcast have joined our team as advisors.

In addition to providing support in connecting Divi with strategic partners and connecting with our community on Social Media, we have also become sponsors of Bad Crypto and will receive frequent publicity on the show. They will be setting a masternode up, doing monthly updates on their earnings, as well as doing some masternode giveaways on their show soon.

Travis & Joel are well-respected influencers in the crypto community as well as hilarious and fun guys, so we are very excited that they have taken an interest in Divi and are joining our crew!

PayPal MOCCI

Next week will be the final week of the current sprint, and we are aiming for Friday, January 18 for the launch of the PayPal integration for MOCCI. Users will have the opportunity to upgrade to PayPal MOCCIs early before the rolling upgrades become mandatory. To avoid any disruption in rewards, we recommend that you upgrade or move to a manual deployment as soon as the update is available.

Atomic Swaps, Lightning, & SegWit

You may have read our post last week regarding Atomic Swaps and the upcoming soft-fork. We are going to postpone the soft-fork and instead, perform a hard-fork that will implement SegWit and Lightning in tandem with HTLCs/Atomic Swaps.

We made this decision for two reasons:

To limit the number of necessary upgrades to software users would be required to perform. As previously mentioned, this upgrade is not something GUI users need to worry about since they will get the updated code via an auto-update, but it’s crucial that CLI users follow these updates closely as we move closer to launching this new technology. Lightning requires SegWit, which enables cross-chain Atomic Swaps in a much more real sense. There are even implementations of Lightning that allow for the exchange of ERC-20 and BTC derivative digital assets. In addition to creative, trustless, and decentralized liquidity opportunities there are many additional benefits to creating a network of layer-two, bi-directional payment channels when it comes to real-world usage.

We will publish another blog that dives deeper into the scope of this incremental change and how users will be able to participate next week.

The current timeline for the hard-fork is around 1-1.5 months. We will provide firm dates as we come closer to finalizing the implementation.

Security audit

In last week’s post we announced that we had gone through an enterprise-level, third-party security audit performed by LedgerOps. In that blog, we promised that we would publish the results. If you would like to take a read over the findings, you can download the report now.

Quarter one goals

With so many companies in the space shuttering doors, making layoffs, and generally scaling back operations it has become more critical than ever (at least to the Divi team) to build and focus on development progress continually.

Our roadmap gives a high-level overview of our goals moving forward, but I wanted to take a moment to provide the community with a deeper insight into our short-term goals and how they apply to our long-term vision.

A genuine alternative to cash

I’m a realist, and I’ll be the first to admit that crypto, in general, isn’t ready for mainstream adoption. I believe in the power of blockchain, trustless interchange of finance, and the freedom that cryptocurrency as a use-case can provide, the operative word there being, can. I feel it is the duty of those building this industry to create solutions that are viable alternatives to the current infrastructure. If we don’t, the status quo will never change because outside of speculators and true believers (RIP Stan Lee), the average person will not take the time to dive into the rabbit hole that is crypto. Most people I have interactions with outside the space are so baffled by what I do that they recommend a completely different life path for fear that I may end up on the streets.

All this is to say that on primary focus for Q1 will be building infrastructure into the Divi blockchain that further positions us as an actual real-world currency that merchants and users alike enjoy using. Implementations like Lightning enable instant payments at scale, where HTLCs create myriad opportunities for enterprise and small business use-cases.

Furthermore, we will focus heavily on producing a mobile application that is familiar, intuitive, and fun to use.

If you can’t use it while you’re drunk, we’re doing something wrong. - Geoff McCabe

The mobile app is generally in a state of functional operation so the next weeks and months will be primarily based around polishing the functionality, look, and feel before release.

As always, if you have any questions, find us on Telegram or the Forum.