This is an overview of all posts/announcements from the developers and in later time also notes from the Gulden Advisory Board (GAB), classified by date, which have appeared on the (previous) websites of Gulden and GAB. Renewals/changes of websites cause certain things to be lost, and that is what this reference work aims to counteract.

All announcements of new merchants and most of the links (the dead ones) are removed.

(edited with the latest announcements until 07 june 2020)

04–04-2014 Start Guldencoin

05–04-2014 Guldencoin got added to Bittrex

08–04-2014 The guldencoin team works with Litebit and Litepaid

20–04-2014 New wallet

OpenSSL Heartbleed fix

A new desktop wallet was released.

Most importantly: OpenSSL Hearbleed Fix

26–04-2014 Android wallet available

The Android wallet was released.

02–06-2014 Version1.6 of Android Wallet Released

07–08-2014 Crowdfunding for iOS wallet started

08–08-2014 crowdfunding reached 70% within the first 12 hours

18–08-2014 Wallet Version 1.2.0 released

Wallet version 1.2.0 is released. Most important changes: improved layout (Guldencoin branding, colors, icons), checkpoint added.

20–08-2014 Crowdfunding for Guldenwallet for iOS completed

The goal of 3000 euro has been reached within two weeks.

11–09-2014 Guldenwallet for iOS testflight released

25–09-2014 DGW3 algorithm + 2 other updates

DGW3 and New Magic Protocol which will make future changes to code easier.

17–12-2014 Plugin for WooCommerce Litepaid plugin users

A new WooCommerce Litepaid plugin created for users and merchants of Guldencoin

05–01–2015 Send guldencoin with Bitsms

You can now send guldencoins and sms with Bitsms.eu to anyone in the world with a wallet and mobile number.

06–01–2015 Digishield update for Guldencoin announced

GULDENCOIN TEAM Digishield will replace DGW3 as difficulty re-adjustment algorithm.

08–01–2015 New wallet version 1.3.1 released

New wallet to prepare for Digishield transition later in the month.

23–01–2015 iOS Guldenwallet approved by Apple for App Store

Guldenwallet for iOS now available at the App Store.

31–01–2015 Guldenwallet for iOS update 1.0.1

iOS Guldenwallet update which consist of bug fixes and algo modifications.

20.000 Guldencoin giveaway at Guldencoinweb

20.000 Guldencoin to be given away at Guldencoinweb.nl to users that get new users to download the iOS Guldenwallet.

01–02–2015 Succesfull Digishield transition

Digishield replaced DGW3 as difficulty re-adjustment algorithm.

07–02–2015 Podcast interview with Roel Buerra and Krypto Kings

Interesting podcast interview about Guldencoin and its future.

Watch the video

09–02–2015 Guldenbuy Launched!

Purchase Guldencoin in the Netherlands or Belgium directly

20–02–2015 Nocks launched

You can now purchase from all merchants that accept Bitcoin with Nocks.nl.

05–03–2015 De GuldencoinApp to be launched

DeGuldencoinApp being developed for Android, iPhone and Windows-phone. Release date to be confirmed.

06–03–2015 Bitbill launched

Pay all your bills easy and fast with Bitcoin or Guldencoin.

Bitbill.eu

12–03–2015 Cryptocoinsnews article on Guldencoin

Guldencoin gains widespread acceptance in the Netherlands.

Cryptocoinsnews.com

17–03–2015 2 New Developers

GULDENCOIN TEAM

We are proud to announce that 2 new developers have joined the Guldencoin Development Team.

19–03–2015 DeGuldencoinApp launched for Android and iOS

DeGuldencoinApp launched for Android and iOS.

Play.google.com

28–03–2015 Guldencoin forum is now community.guldencoin.com

Moved from SMF to Discourse with a new design.

04–04–2015 Guldencoin 1 year anniversary celebrated at Cafe Bommel

Community meetup at Cafe Bommel in Zeist.

15–04–2015 New Guldencoin homepage launched!

A new Guldencoin homepage has been launched in a more presentable and user friendly format. With a focus towards new user experience.

Guldencoin.com

04–05–2015 New community forum added

Guldencoin Zone forum will be catering for the new users to guldencoin, many experienced guldencoin members will help assist new members with any questions they have. All major development related news will also be posted from the official forums.

10–05–2015 Nocks update

Bitcoin users can now pay at any Guldencoin merchant using Nocks. This means Nocks is now usable both ways.

13–05–2015 Guldencoin wallet version 1.4 released

Mandatory wallet update which includes the code needed for the transition to DELTA, wallet design updated and new checkpoint added.

17–05–2015 Guldencoins DELTA diff algorithm goes live!

DELTA is the most advanced diff algorithm that has been developed by the Guldencoin development team to keep our blockchain running smooth and to give our dedicated miners better value.

Multi/Jump pools have changed the game and DELTA is our answer to them.

28–05–2015 Guldenbuy Affiliates program launched

You can now earn Guldencoin by referring people to Guldenbuy using your affiliate link.

11–06–2015 Article on DELTA

Cryptocoinsnews does a article about guldencoins readjustment algorithm called DELTA.

cryptocoinsnews.com

20–06–2015 Nocks introduces Nifty

Nocks Nifty is a fast payment button and payment link that you can use to request Guldencoin and bitcoin payments. You generate a Nifty link or button by filling out a price and your address. You can then share the link via social media or email or place the button on your website.

25–06–2015 You can purchase Nodes for Guldencoin at CoinNode.eU

Affordable 24/7 node’s, fully plug-and-play! plug it in your router and your good to go. We also developed webbased software thats allows you to manage all your nodes from everywhere around the world.Help to secure the blockchain, receive stakes or run your masternode’s 24/7 without high costs for optimal profits.

30–06–2015 Guldencoin community raises 150 000 NLG for Villa Ticca

In 2002 Evelyn Kremer and Mariska Versteegh met in Ecuador where they both worked as volunteers. The confrontation with the severe shortage of help for minors and single mothers in Quito struck them deeply. Aimlessly and without a future and hope they go through life. 100 children in the age of 0–12 years are being helped in Ecuador. The children are educated, fed, clothed and taken care of, and they receive medical and psychological help. The after school group ensures that the older children can continue their studies. Villa Ticca also tries to advise mothers and families about nutrition and training. Villa Ticca provides for their children a safe place!

villaticca.com

10–07–2015 Community Advertising

From the Guldencoin community is an initiative to give Guldencoin more nationwide exposure. To achieve this Guldencoin banners will be placed on popular websites such as dft.nl, beurs.nl, 9292.nl, techzine.nl, computertotaal.nl, androidplanet.nl and indeed.nl.

17–07–2015 Guldencoin statistics site

After some improvements and extensions, guldencoin statistics can now be viewed at nlgstats.nl . You can find stats on here such as the number of (mined) blocks per day per multipool, performance charts, rich list, Transactions Per Day etc. This website is developed and made ​​available by Markanth of the guldencoin community.

20–07–2015 Nocks Introduces Nimble

Nocks Nimble is a browser-extension available for Firefox and Chrome. The extension recognizes Bitcoin and Guldencoin addresses and gives you the possibility to issue a payment to this address from within your browser. This way Nocks is completely integrated into your browser.

23–07–2015 Article on bitcoinist about Nocks Nimble

bitcoinist.net

11–08–2015 New Wallets for code base 0.10/0.11 are officially launched

Guldencoin updates to latest bitcoin code base with all the new features, security patches and bug fixes.

20–08–2015 Nocks Nifty for WooCommerce

Accept Guldencoin and Bitcoin in your webshop. You can set Bitcoin or Guldencoin as your general currency so you can set fixed Bitcoin and Guldencoin prices for your products. There is also a conversion tool for EUR and USD so users pay a live exchange rate in BTC or NLG.

01–10–2015 New Android Wallet Available

New Android wallet available at the play store:

Changes include:

1. Rebranding to Gulden

2. New Checkpoint

3. UI updates

05–10–2015 Thank you

On behalf of the development team specifically I want to say thanks to everyone for their continued support and faith in Gulden. We will continue to strive to create value and of course the community has a big role to play in this, overall we are very pleased with how things are progressing.

Please look out for the updates that will be coming through next week. The Android update in particular will require moving around of funds as it will be a entirely new application.

07–10–2015 1.5.1 update officially released

PRELUDE

The initial goal for 1.5.1 was only going to be sorting out bug fixes that came across with the 0.10/0.11 code base update.

A few weeks later it became a larger more in depth project due to the name change to Gulden and other concerns.

The below tasks were achieved for 1.5.1

1. RENAMING TO GULDEN.

A lot more effort goes into a name change then what’s on the surface especially on the building process of the wallet. QR codes with Gulden wallet will scan for old Guldencoin addresses and new Gulden addresses so that all addresses are catered for going forward. The new android wallet update also includes both.

The install process also caters for moving the wallet.dat file into the new location so you don’t have to do this manually. This was very important to implement for new users to Gulden and crypto.

2. UI UPDATE.

We felt it was important to put a unique touch on 1.5.1 to showcase the direction we moving. The UI changes and rebranding along with the removal of the overview screen and the addition of the backup tab felt like a good first move. The backup wallet button is not visible in normal wallets and as the saying goes “out of sight out of mind”.

The progress bar is another added touch, instead of displaying a count down in time for the sync which would scare most users away a progress bar will now be visible during the sync process.

1.5.1 is the first changes we going to be making to the UI, we expect to have another release before the end of the year.

3. BUG FIXES.

The 2 main fixes were:

The max fee(size) has been increased to cater for addresses where a lot of transactions (mainly mining) made up the balance of a particular wallet increasing the size of transactions being sent from that address.

KGW fix for linux 32bit builds.

4. STREAMLINING OF THE BUILD PROCESS

MaNI has does a incredible job with our build server, a lot of the time for 1.5.1 was spent perfecting the process of delivering new wallet builds whenever we make changes and want to test or release. This is going to save us a lot of time in the future and we can start focusing on more functionality.

The above was a great team effort from the core developers to web design to testing.

12–10–2015 1.5.2 wallets released

THE 4 MAIN CHANGES FOR THIS UPDATE INCLUDE:

1. New wallets will show pending(unconfirmed) incoming balance in brackets next to main balance.

2. Seed migration to the new gulden.com domain

3. URI fixed for OSX

4. KGW fix released for all wallet versions.

02–11–2015 Update

I THOUGHT IT’S ABOUT TIME FOR THE COMMUNITY TO GET A UPDATE ON WHAT IS BEING DONE OVER THE NEXT WEEK.

1. To start off with the last of the translations will be coming through this week of what we feel is the main languages that need to be catered for. The homepage will end up with around 16–18 different languages once completed.

2. New iOS wallet is almost completed and testing will begin later today. This is great news as there is some new features that will be introduced and also some bug fixes.

3. Android wallet QR scanner fix for new Gulden URIs, the fix is completed and just waiting for verification from a couple of community members before we upload to the play store.

4. We have been looking at feedback from the community to address changes people would like to see in the desktop wallets, please feel free to add your input to the following location. (Lost in space)

I would just like to make a special mention to Rene who has been chatting to us on slack, he helped greatly with organising around 5 translations. Thanks Rene!

For those that haven’t and want to get quick feedback from the community and development team come sign up on slack at: https://gulden.com/join and access will be given shortly after.

05–11–2015 New version of the Android wallet available on Google Play Store

As mentioned in our previous blog post, the fix to accommodate Gulden URIs in the Android wallet is available on the Google Play Store. QR scanning newly created addresses will no longer be an issue.

10–11–2015 Gulden won’t be affected by consensus bug

Recently the consensus bug was exploited in a popular coin that caused a fork on their blockchain where most operations had to be stopped, while this is very unfortunate news for the coin involved, we would like to put our users at ease that this bug has been resolved for Gulden when we updated the codebase for 1.5.0 a few months back. We will continue to prioritize bug fixes or potential exploits as we learn of them. Blockchain security is our number one priority.

For those that are interested in the details of the consensus bug can review the below blog by Pieter Wuille. Consensus bug detailed

16–11–2015 Team statement on events that took place over the weekend:

Gulden experienced a 51% attack on the network and the attackers were able to exploit it by selling NLG on Bittrex exchange to gain some bitcoin. This was quickly picked up by the professional staff that run the Bittrex exchange and withdrawals were halted.

We knew a 51% attack was always going to be a possibility overshadowing Gulden during its early life-cycle and growth phase. Unlike established currencies like bitcoin and litecoin that have enough dedicated hash to make this almost impossible.

With adversity comes innovation and a lesson learned that we can’t leave anything to chance especially as we press forward with Gulden.

That’s why we’ve been working on a solution that will make it virtually impossible to perform a 51% attack on currency that still growing up and doesn’t have adequate hash rate. During the next 2 weeks we will be providing more details on this so please keep an eye out on the blog.

INTERIM SOLUTION:

We will be adding auto-checkpointing to Gulden which will reduce the likelihood of another attack as there won’t be any financial gain.

New wallets will be released tomorrow with the checkpoint system enabled. The core development team did a incredible job getting this implemented in such a short space of time which involved lots of work and testing as most current checkpoint systems are on a older codebase (Pre 0.10).

Most of all we would like to thank the community that was online to help add additional network hash to the blockchain, we will also be running a mining campaign shortly and welcome everyone to participate.

27–11–2015 Development update

WALLET VERSION 1.5.5 RELEASED:

Over a week has passed since we updated to version 1.5.5 which includes a new auto checkpoint system and an additional failsafe developed by our team for exchanges which will make it virtually impossible to do another double spend attack on Gulden.

New wallet download

NEW IOS WALLETS WILL BE READY FOR TESTING NEXT WEEK:

The new iOS wallets will have the latest features and an additional surprise. Beta testing will begin next week and we looking forward to our users getting their hands on this wallet with the usability it will offer.

PROJECT PRIME ANNOUNCED:

Prime is a new project undertaken by the development team to secure our blockchain even further then what has been achieved already. We expect Prime to be ready early 2016 and more details will be provided closer to the time.

12–12–2015 Gulden for iOS development has been completed.

Gulden for iOS has been completed, over the next couple of weeks beta testing will begin before submitting the final product to Apple for approval.

NEW FEATURES INCLUDE:

1. Paying at any online and offline bitcoin merchants.

2. Touch ID feature added.

3. Compatible with iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 plus.

We are very excited about Gulden for iOS as it brings ease of use for mobile payments. The Android version with option to pay at all bitcoin merchants will be released early next year.

06–01–2016 Compliments of the season from the Gulden Team, we would like to start off by mentioning the first updates of 2016

GULDEN FUNDING WEBSITE FOR NEW PROJECTS LAUNCHED:

This will be the funding site for the development team in order to complete important projects.

The first project for 2016 being Gulden for Android which will allow all Android users to pay at all Gulden and Bitcoin merchants in a simple and fast manner. It will also include a completely new layout that is in line with the iOS version that was recently developed and is currently in Testflight.

At the time of this post funding for Gulden for Android has reached 72%, if you would like to fund this project and receive Gulden in return you can go to the following link.

IOS WALLET RELEASED ON TESTFLIGHT FOR TESTING:

Gulden for iOS has already been completed and is in Testflight for bug testing before we submit to Apple, this wallet also allows you to pay with ease at all Gulden and Bitcoin merchants.

Please sign up to get the iOS wallet and give us feedback.

2016 will bring about many innovative and ease of use features and products for Gulden, so stay tuned!

16–01–2016 The mobile wallet update

GULDEN FOR IOS:

I am pleased to announce that the iOS beta testing has been completed and Gulden for iOS wallet will be submitted to Apple within the next week. For those users that want to install and test out the wallet in the meantime please submit a request to the testflight link below. The iOS wallet allows you to make purchases at all Gulden and Bitcoin merchants with your Gulden.

GULDEN FOR ANDROID:

We are in the planning stage for the new Android wallet and actual coding will begin next week. The android wallet will have a similar look and feel to the iOS wallet and with the same functionality of being able to purchase at all Gulden and Bitcoin merchants with your Gulden. There is a plan to add something extra for the android wallet and this will be revealed once we have confirmation from our services team.

Other projects being worked on for the first quarter of 2016 is Prime and latest code base update. More details on these projects will be made available at a later date.

03–02–2016 Gulden for iOS has been submitted to Apple for approval

IOS UPDATE:

Gulden for iOS was submitted late yesterday evening by the Nocks team, the process of being accepted can take anything up to 6 weeks with the first bit of feedback normally within 2 week. We will keep our users updated on the progress from Apple.

Gulden for iOS allows for users to purchase at any online and offline Gulden and bitcoin merchants in a user friendly manner, if you cannot wait to download from the App store and want to try the wallet out ASAP, then you can get it from testflight using the link below to get started. (Link lost in space)

The feedback from our testers has been extremely positive on all fronts including design, ease of use and quick response/payment times.

ANDROID UPDATE:

Development has started on Android for Gulden which will be developed with the same features and feel as Gulden for iOS. We will have a more detailed update as we get closer to launch in March.

CURRENT ANDROID WALLET UPDATED:

Our developers have pushed a final release for the current Android wallet, this was released on the 23rd January 2016 and will see us through until Gulden for Android development has been completed. Make sure to get the latest version from the play store from the link below.

Android wallet download

07–02–2016 Gulden for iOS released on the App store!

Gulden for iOS has been released on the App Store, if you want a secure, fast and user friendly payment application that allows you to use Gulden at any Gulden or Bitcoin merchant then look no further. The design of this standalone wallet is unique and will be used for our new Android wallet.

PROJECT CODENAME: PRIME — FUNDING ALMOST COMPLETE:

PRIME our new project which will offer additional blockchain security from double spends and include instant payments has almost been completely funded. Thanks for the support from our users who can see we are delivering on each project.

The funding also comes with a special once off Gulden physical coin being produced by Guldens main designer and for each package you take you will also receive a physical coin and 10k Gulden, if you are interested in participating in the funding of PRIME please go to the below link.

08–04–2016 Development statement regarding third party work.

Over the last month we have been approached by various people outside of the Gulden community to either help with development of their own coin or to develop a new coin for them. In some cases a large financial incentive to do so. While we are inspired by the confidence in our development team we want it to be known that our focus is 110% on Gulden and we are unable to accommodate any requests that do not involve the Gulden project.

09–04–2016 Development Update

Yesterday we released Gulden for Android and the response from our users has been overwhelmingly positive. We have made using Gulden that much easier and widespread by enabling purchases at all Gulden and Bitcoin merchants with transaction speeds at a blink of an eye.

Our new mobile wallets, while fantastic as they are now, are just the first iterations and will form as the foundation for us to build on going forward.

MOBILE UPDATES MOVING FORWARD:

While we developed Gulden for iOS and Gulden for Android a couple months apart, all future updates will be done in tandem as we want to keep the wallet features, look and feel in sync. Our mobile wallets must never be a reason for a choice between a iOS or Android device.

FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS:

PRIME:

Funding for Prime was completed around 2 months ago and it becomes the primary focus for the team. The main objectives for Prime is to enable instant trustable payments by enabling a safe way to do zero confirmation transactions that is completely secure against double spend attacks, other minor objectives are being looked at and will be communicated in due time.

DESKTOP WALLETS:

A update to the desktop wallets will slot in during Prime and will include code and graphical changes.

THE PROJECT THAT WILL NOT BE NAMED: 🙂

More details to come during Prime development.

ADHOC:

These include bug fixes, new features and patch updates.

09–05–2016 Gulden for Android version 1.5.5.1 released

We released a small update and some minor bug fixes we picked up since the release of Gulden for Android, one of the updates include the ability of third party QR scanners to recognize the Gulden QR codes and open the Gulden for Android application directly to the payment screen with address inserted.

As mentioned before we will continue to update our wallets with new features, bug fixes and UI changes indefinitely.

17–05–2016 Development roadmap for 2016 revealed

We have revealed our projects for 2016, the below Roadmap link on the development page gives a list of projects in order that we aim to complete this year. All of our projects have a purpose of improving Gulden in all aspects from security to usability. The importance of these project cannot be underestimated as we expect large growth in Gulden users this year.

05–06–2016 Project Q unveiled — Gulden adds SEPA support to mobile wallets

Gulden users can now do wire transfers to any IBAN/SEPA QR code using the Gulden for iOS and Android app. This adds another dimension to the usability of our mobile solution which already offers payments to all Gulden and Bitcoin Merchants. This makes Gulden fully compatible with IBAN/SEPA straight from the mobile app. For more Details regarding todays update please review the below link.

20–08–2016 1.6.0 confirmed for next release.

We have changed the roadmap to put the 1.6.0 update as the next release and this will combine what was originally planned for in terms of development.

1.6.0 will form the base in which we will build on for all our wallets moving forward and we have a couple of great surprises for our users that will take usability to the next level.

From a development perspective this will be our largest and most exciting update yet and with the additional tasks we have pushed back the release date to September.

Users within our slack community will get to beta test a variety of features once we are happy with our own internal testing.

Please review our updated development roadmap using the link below.

20–09–2016 Gulden for Android performance update:

After the recent surge in Android users we have had various feedback on issues experienced on some android devices. This release resolves the following and improves the overall experience for our Android based users.

1. Leaving the wallet open for a extended period of time would cause a no response error.

2. Resetting the blockchain would result in a minute delay before the sync process would start. This is now instant.

3. Ticker perfomance improved.

4. All of the backend libraries have been updated.

The majority of our users have been very positive about the Gulden for Android wallet however we want to make sure our software works flawlessly for every user on their preferred device.

DEVELOPMENT UPDATE ON 1.6.0:

We are putting all the nuts and bolts together for our first major development update, we still on track for testing to begin at the end of September.

06–10–2016 Testing on 1.6.0 release has officially started

THE PLAN FOR TESTING IS AS FOLLOWS:

1. Internal Team testing.

2. Nocks team.

3. First group of beta testers.

4. Individual app testing for a larger group of beta testers.

5. Solve any issues/bugs that arise.

6. Announce official release date.

We have a strict testing plan in place as we cannot afford to have any serious bugs crop up for our end users. The update has a lot of new code and code changes we have to make sure is working smoothly and performing the way it is intended. The first group of beta testers are long term members in the community who we trust not to leak out any information before we move onto phase 4 of testing.

Below is the total updates excluding changes to the mobile wallets that have gone into this release and why we have to push testing to the limits.

57 files changed, 7568 insertions(+), 170 deletions(-)

We are really excited about getting 1.6.0 into YOUR lives… more updates to come.

27–10–2016 Gulden for iOS performance update:

Due to the sudden surge in new users Gulden has had in recent months we had to divert attention to improving the mobile wallets, Android already had a few releases and now it’s iOS’s turn. Current users will notice a perfomance increase immediately while new users will have a much improved first time experience. A few minor bug fixes was also added to this update.

For our users outside of the Eurozone additional currency options have been added to match what is already available on Gulden for Android.

FULL FOCUS AND ATTENTION IS BACK ON THE 1.6.0 RELEASE WHICH SHOULD ENTER PHASE 3 TESTING THIS WEEKEND.

01–12–2016 1.6.0 — It’s time

1. NEXT GENERATION QT WALLETS

Much improved UX and new interface

Our new core wallets have undergone a major facelift with practicality in mind. The beautiful user friendly design gives a familiar feel with our mobile wallets but with a lot more features and control you would expect from the core desktop wallets. The new wallets will be the base we build up from as we implement new and exciting features as discussed below.

2. NEW HD LINK FEATURE

The main feature update for this release is our own Hierarchical deterministic implementation between our new core QT desktop wallets and both our mobile wallets (iOS Soon). To put this in layman’s terms you can now share your Gulden addresses between your Desktop and Mobile wallets. This gives users peace of mind if they lose their iOS or Android phones, users will still have access to their funds on the desktop wallet. HD wallets also means less frequent backups required.

Become your own central bank for you and your family by having centralized control over your decentralized Gulden wallets.

A use case example for the new Link feature:

You are married with kids, you can create a mobile account for each one of your family members and link it to your Gulden for desktop wallet. You have complete control of all linked accounts on your Desktop wallet. In the event that one of your children loses their phone, you’ll be able to withdraw all funds from that account. Or say if your spouse is out shopping and needs more Gulden, you’re able to transfer funds from another account/s to their account. In both cases, fund are transferred almost instantly.

3. ACCOUNTS AND PRIVACY

Gulden for Desktop now uses accounts which you can add to serve different purposes. We have 2 different account creation types.

* Normal Accounts

* Mobile Accounts — which enables the link feature between your desktop and mobile device.

The additional privacy comes in for both deposits and withdrawals.

* Gulden deposits:

Gulden for desktop wallets will use a different Gulden address each time you receive Gulden, this way the depositors will have no way of knowing who else is sending you Gulden to your wallet.

Note: A depositor can continue to use the address you gave them for multiple deposits.

* Gulden withdrawals:

With accounts you can separate your payments depending on it’s intended use without the recipients of your Gulden knowing what other transactions your doing from within your wallet.

eg. You can have 1 account for family transactions and another for business transactions.

4. HD DESKTOP WALLET WITH MNEMONIC (RECOVERY PHRASE) SUPPORT

Fully backwards compatible with recovery phrases from older Android and iOS wallets.

5. GULDEN AND BITCOIN PAYMENTS ADDED TO DESKTOP WALLETS

Like our Gulden for iOS and Gulden for Android wallets you can now pay at all Gulden and Bitcoin merchants with the desktop wallets.

6. IN APP PURCHASING ADDED FOR IDEAL AND BANCONTACT USERS FOR DESKTOP AND ANDROID WALLETS

Users in the Netherlands and Belgium will be able to make in app purchases for amounts of 50 Euros or less within Gulden for Desktop and Android wallets. For larger purchases you will need to visit Nocks.co .

More purchase options to be introduced in the future.

7. WIRE TRANSFERS ADDED TO DESKTOP WALLETS

Like our Gulden for iOS and Gulden for Android wallets you can now do wire transfers to IBAN bank accounts.

8. DELTA

Our DELTA diff algorithm underwent some improvements to smooth out blocktimes, since the inception of DELTA we have been monitoring the behaviour of the Gulden blockchain with regards to block times and the changes will bring increased network performance going forward.

DELTA switch over will be at block 437500

9. ADDITIONAL CURRENCY SUPPORT ADDED TO GULDEN FOR IOS AND GULDEN FOR DESKTOP.

This brings Gulden for iOS and Desktop inline with the same supported currencies as Gulden for Android.

10. GULDEN UPDATED TO 0.13 CODEBASE FROM PREVIOUSLY UPDATED 0.11 CODEBASE

Codebase 0.13 brings thousands of bug fixes, performance enhancements and important new functionality for vendors (such as ZMQ).

FUTURE UPDATES FOR 2016.

* Gulden for iOS soon.

* Gulden for Desktop 1.6.1 — Add additional features that did not make it for this release.

* Prime development (To be completed 1st 1/4 2017)

15–12–2016 DELTA switchover — New Gulden for iOS and Android wallets available

INTERIM GULDEN FOR IOS DOWNLOAD:

The new interim Gulden for iOS wallet has been uploaded to cater for the changes to DELTA, this is not the 1.6 update for iOS which is still coming soon.

GULDEN FOR ANDROID

A new update has been released for Gulden for Android for the same reason as iOS.

DELTA UPDATE:

At block 437500 the new updated version of the DELTA diff algorithm will kick in, we are excited for the changes we have made and expect a positive impact to be made on the blockchain overall. We will monitor the changes over the next few weeks and provide feedback on DELTA’s performance. The changeover is expected to occur around 4pm GMT +1.

09–01–2017 The evolution of DELTA differential algorithm:

The 17th May 2015 DELTA was born on the Gulden blockchain, its main purpose was to prevent the extremely long block times we would experience due to the combination of ASICs and Profit switching pools targeting the Gulden blockchain. Our community being predominantly new to Digital currencies were not miners and participated and contributed in other areas of Gulden.

The development of DELTA began at a time when our longest block times started breaching over 3 hours on some days and we were averaging 130 blocks per day.

The 6th May 2015 we experienced a 1086 minute (18.1 hr) block and 23 blocks in total for the day, 11 days before DELTA went live. Our community at the time invested in mining campaigns which provided dedicated hash and helped keep the blocks coming in until we crossed the DELTA line.

DELTA GOES LIVE:

It was a day of celebration and the positive effects were noticed immediately, 11 days after our worst blockchain performance our longest block time was 46 minutes and 371 blocks for the day was achieved. The Gulden blockchain could finally keep itself moving along without the need for serious amounts of dedicated hash.

While the first implementation of DELTA was a huge improvement and kept the blockchain moving without the need for any further mining campaigns, it was still far from perfect.

As a development team we were content with leaving DELTA in its current form so we could put energy and time into other projects we needed to get out the way and revisit the DELTA implementation at a later stage.

THE GROWTH SPURT:

2016 was the year Gulden started seeing some serious growth in users especially in the last half of the year. With more users came more services and ultimately more demands on our blockchain. We started to experience an influx of support calls related to initial syncing issues brought about by > 30 minute block times which would self-correct once a block was found. The time had come to improve on DELTA to provide a better overall experience for our growing user base.

REAL GULDEN BLOCK NUMBERS VS EXPECTED NUMBERS:

The 3 goals we needed to achieve with the next DELTA update was getting Gulden in line with the expected daily block numbers, reducing the longest block times and increased hash rate which adds additional security.

With the expected 150 second (2.5 min) block average it was important to aim for the around the perfect average of 576 blocks per day and at this stage we were averaging 420 blocks daily. Our longest daily blocks ranged from 34–50 minutes.

16TH DECEMBER 2016 THE UPDATED DELTA VERSION WENT LIVE:

It didn’t take long before we noticed that both our goals for this update had been achieved. A medium of around 576 blocks daily and 17 minutes became our new longest average daily block time, the improved performance was felt by services and existing users when transacting over our blockchain. This equated to a +-23% improvement in block numbers and a massive +-60% reduction in longest block times.

This resulted in a lot more mining power (hash rate) which in turn improves security and overall health of the Gulden blockchain.

THE FUTURE FOR DELTA:

Our team strives for perfection and while we are happy with the current state of DELTA there is always ways to do things better. Part of this comes with our next major update, code named PRIME I which is expected end of March/April and more details about this project will be discussed closer to release.

06–03–2017 It’s time for us to grow!

NEW CORE TEAM MEMBER:

On the 1st June Rits will be joining the team as an iOS/macOS developer, more details on his projects will be announced on the roadmap closer to his appointment date.

It was paramount that we grew the team at the right time and more importantly with the right people. This has been made possible by the continued funding by the Gulden users at Gulden shares . Thank you!

Due to the new appointments we are now able to move away from the linear way of dealing with our projects and replace it with a multi focus approach.

Expect more updates from us in the near future regarding our projects.

25–04–2017 1.6.4

RELEASE NOTES:

Today we release an interim 1.6.4 update, there is various functionality that we needed to get out to our users and more specifically to enable merchants to build better systems. Specifically we are excited to now officially support the ability to have a completely read only HD wallet that can view all transactions/accounts that a normal HD wallet has, as well as the ability to link single read only HD accounts from a different wallet, this is a much sought after feature for our services who can use this to air gap their merchant sites and roll out more secure systems faster.

DETAILS:

CMDFLAG — Add new command line flag ‘-coinbasesignature’ to make it easy to add coinbase signatures to generated blocks (predominantly meant for testnet)

CMDFLAG — Add new command line flag ‘-accountpool’ to increase the default account look ahead size. (Needed in some cases to find accounts on rescan when large account gaps are present)

UI — Add a special warning if the users wallet.dat is readonly (instead of displaying a generic/scary ‘corrupted wallet’ message)

UI — Improvements to send dialog, improve handling when user tries to send amounts equal too or larger than available balance.

UI — New menu item for importing private keys.

UI — New menu item to allow users to easily rescan without having to use command line flags or mess around in RPC console.

UI — Improve the way rescan (and other actions that require progress) display in the program.

UI — Fix a bug where transaction screen would sometimes show transactions for all accounts instead of just the active one.

RPC — Modify createaccount command so that it can also create legacy accounts.

RPC — New commands for read only (watch) HD accounts. getreadonlyaccount, importreadonlyaccount.

RPC — New command for read only (watch) HD seeds, getreadonlyseed.

RPC — New ‘deleteaccount’ command

RPC — Modify ‘move’ command so that it can handle `-1` as input for the amount field, passing ‘-1’ will calculate the available balance in the account for the confirmation level passed and transfer all of it.

RPC — Merge a bug fix from user ‘mezrin’ for ‘dumpwallet’ command.

RPC — Fix a bug in command ‘gettransaction’ where transaction would not show if ‘rpconlylistsecuredtransactions’ flag was set to false.

CORE/RPC/UI — Support for read only (watch) HD accounts.

CORE/RPC/UI — Support for read only (watch) HD seeds.

CORE — Assorted other minor bug fixes.

PRIME:

Development on Prime is progressing nicely and we still on schedule to release near the estimated release date.

04–07–2017 A peek inside the development process

Many of you are at this point eagerly waiting to hear the latest about our upcoming PoW² release, is it done yet, when will it be ready etc. In the absence of information gossip and rumour take over, so rather than leaving things open to speculation we thought it would be better just to give a quick update.

THE 2.0 RELEASE

The core changes of PoW² itself are at this point essentially done, and ready to begin testing. And we are excited to do just that, however there are some obstacles still to overcome.

“What obstacles could those possibly be?” is probably the question that comes to your mind immediately, I mean surely this release is only PoW² so if that is done then the release is done?

Well, no, there is a lot more to a properly done major release than that, a few things to consider:

PoW² will break backwards compatibility so there needs to be a smooth transition process to ensure everyone can upgrade and as few issues as possible are experienced

Many users don’t update frequently so we need to make sure this release contains as many bug fixes as we can.

We also need to ensure that it is as forward compatible as possible with future changes that we want.

So what else needs to be done for the 2.0 release:

We should update to the latest bitcoin codebase and make sure we test and release the latest code with the most recent bug fixes — good news this is already done.

We should decide what to do about SegWit.

We should make sure that we have implemented everything in a way that works best for the coin going forward.

SEGWIT

So what does SegWit have to do with PoW²? Well nothing, and everything all at the same time. Directly they have nothing whatsoever to do with one another, however they do share two things in common.

They both require changes to the way transactions are handled, so it makes sense to consider the way these changes may interact with one another. They both potentially can be implemented in a way that breaks backwards compatibility.

The Bitcoin implementation of SegWit bends over backwards to maintain backwards compatibility, which means that several not so great tradeoffs have been made. For instance instead of decreasing the size of transactions SegWit will temporarily -increase- the size of transactions for an indefinite amount of time until backwards compatibility can be phased out.

This makes sense in their specific situation, however we are not Bitcoin and we are not subject to the same constraints so it does not make sense to simply copy what they have done (as so many other altcoins have rushed out to do) but instead to pave our own way forward.

So thats what we are doing, as we need to break backwards compatibility anyway for 2.0 we are going to take full advantage of that, which means we are going to do two other things in this release:

We are going to implement something similar to how SegWit was meant to be, with transactions that are smaller (not bigger) etc. Before all the backwards compatibility compromises were forced. We will be calling this SegSig (Segregated Signature) so that it will not be confused with PoW² Witnessing and so that people will not accidentally mistake it for a plain SegWit implementation. We are going to give a complete overhaul to the transaction/script system allowing us to implement PoW² and SegSig in as clean a way as possible, leading to even further reductions in transaction sizes (above what SegSig brings) and cleaner implementation of future innovations making it less likely we will need to break backwards compatibility in future.

“BUT WON’T THIS DELAY THE RELEASE?”

I imagine this is the next question everyone will have, and the answer is, well no not really not in any significant way at least.

These are all things that we have been working on and considering for months already so for the most part it is already done, however even if it does result in a slight delay I’m sure we can all agree that doing things right is better in the long run than making poor decisions that impact future developments.

POW² ROLL OUT

So how is this all going to roll out in reality? How soon will people be able to start witnessing? Does this mean we will need to wait months to witness after the software is released?

The Gulden 2.0 roll out will be as follows:

Phase 1 — Gulden 2.0 will be released, it will function exactly like an upgraded 1.6 at this point with no PoW² functionality present yet. Upgraded miners will signal for an upgrade, when 75% of miners are signalling the software will activate phase 2.

(Expected to last at most a week or two — depending on miners)

Phase 2 — A new special backwards compatible transaction script type will become available to upgraded (2.0) users which will allow them to create witnessing addresses. Old (1.6) users will verify these scripts but won’t be able to create or use them.

Once a minimum threshold is reached (200 or more witnessing accounts with a combined weight of 20 million or more) we will enter Phase 3.

(Expected to last at most a week or two — depending on coin holders)

Phase 3 — PoW² witnessing commences, with a few limitations that allow old (1.6) users to remain on the network (no transactions allowed yet in the witness portion of the block for instance). Witnesses and miners will automatically start signalling a percentage of how many upgraded users they are seeing, when this percentage goes over an average of 95% for a fixed time period we will enter Phase 4.

(We anticipate that this may take several months)

Phase 4 — At this point our backwards incompatible changes trigger, new transaction format/rules activate, PoW² witnesses start to include transactions in their portion of the block, witness accounts start to switch over to a new improved backwards incompatible transaction format, new accounts using the old temporary format are no longer allowed, SegSig activates etc. The remaining 5% of 1.6.x users will no longer be able to participate in the network.

Phase 5 — After some time 2.1 will be released, code to support old witness accounts can/will be safely removed with affecting block validation — leaving us with a codebase free of technical debt. Checkpointing can also be safely removed at this point.

PoW² — Innovating blockchain. Read the white paper.

22–08–2017 August Development Update

We are now quite a bit past the initial release estimate for PoW² and while we are almost ready for release we are still not quite there yet.

Understandably some are quite anxious to see the release happen, as we ourselves are too, however good development cannot be rushed so we must be patient for a bit longer.

As we understand that it can be more difficult for those outside the project without the knowledge that we have on the inside of what is going on, and that in the absence of this information some start to assume the worst, we thought we would give a bit more information to those that are waiting.

Sequence of events

I) SEGWIT — OCT 2016

As some of you may know ‘SegWit’ has been a long ongoing argument in the Bitcoin community for quite some time now.

It first came onto the Gulden radar when we released 1.6.0 last year, with quite a lot of people questioning whether we would activate it etc. — at the time we updated our codebase to contain SegWit but stopped short of activating it.

I don’t want to get into a massive discussion on this but at the time our reasoning for not activating SegWit was as follows:

1) There was no immediate pressing need for us to do so.

2) It was unclear whether it would ever activate for Bitcoin themselves in its current form or whether they would eventually give up and implement it differently.

3) The current implementation of SegWit as done by the Bitcoin team was non-optimal — for our use case.

While we can understand why the Bitcoin team did SegWit the way they did with a focus on backwards compatibility at all costs (even though there is argument to be had that perhaps they should have done it differently).

We don’t believe it makes sense for us (or really any other currency that isn’t Bitcoin) to copy it, we don’t have the same backwards compatible requirements that they do so temporarily having larger transactions just to be backwards compatible doesn’t make sense. Likewise it doesn’t make sense to us to not take the opportunity to also implement other pending improvements to the transaction format.

We did not want to activate something that was not optimal, but we also did not want to spend time creating a ‘better’ SegWit only to find that the Bitcoin people do the same and we could have just used their work for ‘free’, as a small team we need to try and work efficiently as possible and be strategic about what we spend our work time on. So while we internally had a list of things we wanted to see if/when we activated SegWit we adopted a “wait and see” attitude to see what the next move from Bitcoin would be.

II) POW² — MAY 2017

After a huge amount of work to develop and prove the concept possible in May 2017 we released the whitepaper for PoW², the idea was to finalise development and head straight to releasing PoW² as a hardfork — i.e. all older clients would no longer be able to partake in the network after a certain fixed block height, as we have done for previous updates with delta.

Part of the PoW² concept requires the creation of a new ‘address type’, and while this can technically be ‘shoe horned’ into the existing transaction format, doing so is not the best way to do it, and we want to try and avoid introducing ugly hacks like this into the codebase in favour of keeping a clean codebase.

III) SEGSIG — JUNE 2017

While working on the optimal way to implement the new address type, it became obvious that many parts of the codebase that need to change to accommodate this are the same parts that are affected by SegWit.

At around about the same time after watching SegWit for some time, it become clear that though the Bitcoin team had still failed to activate SegWit there was now a clear determination to do so and that one way or another SegWit in its current form -will- eventually be activated, we therefore had to at this point give up hope that the Bitcoin team might develop a better SegWit which makes the sort of changes we were hoping for and instead accept that if we wanted this it would have to be something we do ourselves.

And so the concept of SegSig was born, we were faced with two possible paths forward:

1) Release PoW² hardfork as originally planned. (including extensive testing)

Go through the work of having everyone including exchanges and mining pools upgrade to it.

Produce SegSig as a hardfork, which involves changing a lot of the same code as PoW²

Put our testers through extensive testing once again.

Go through the work of having everyone upgrade for a second time in a short time period.

2) Combine PoW² and SegSig together into one release, despite possible delays and release it all at once. This was not an easy decision, I am not a fan of trying to do too many things in one release as this has the potential to get out of control and normally I would prefer to try and seperate things into multiple small releases. As a developer it would have been easier for me to take option 1.

However there were multiple special factors here:

1) Both releases change similar parts of the code.

2) Both releases are major and require extensive testing — with major overlap in what needs to be tested.

3) Both releases break backwards compatibility and as such require coordinated efforts to get all services updated correctly.

Some of the main points on which this decision hinged:

1) I felt that having our testers test the same area of code twice in a row in quick proximity was likely to cause “tester fatigue” and that bugs were more likely to creep into both releases as a result, that by instead doing one release we would likely have much better quality testing.

2) Each release puts significant strain on us as the developers as well as our “support community” in order to handle the large volume of update related enquiries — I felt that a single release would ease the burden here compared to two subsequent releases.

3) Multiple mandatory releases in a row has the potential for “upsetting” third parties like exchanges, and I felt it would be beneficial to avoid putting them through this if possible.

4) A single release would be overall better in terms of use of my time and therefore in the long term better for the project.

A final thing that came up in our internal discussion was that our user base has completely exploded over the last year, and the release of the PoW² caused an even more overwhelmingly positive response than we anticipated, with installs absolutely skyrocketing.

Comparing how many users we have now to our previous releases and how much work it was to get people to upgrade even when we were smaller it started to become obvious to us that our previous plan of “PoW² as a mandatory hardfork from block xxx — everyone must upgrade before that” was no longer good enough, would not be a pleasant experience for all these users and that at this point we are large enough that we need to do better.

Taking these into consideration, and based on experiences from previous releases I came to the decision that, despite it being harder for me and despite the possibility of delays, a single release combining the two was ultimately the right thing to do.

Further it was decided that instead of a simple hardfork the upgrade would take place in multiple stages, allowing the best of both worlds — 1) People to start participating in PoW² as soon as possible 2) A period of backwards compatibility so that there is time for people to upgrade naturally (at this point we were considering also that the status of our iOS acceptance was unknown and wanted to allow as much upgrade time for iOS users as possible) and it doesn’t all have to be forced before a certain block.

IV) THE NATURE OF DELAYS ON LARGE PROJECTS

Unfortunately I must admit I underestimated the amount of work involved in doing SegSig correctly, this happened on two fronts.

1) I have been aware of some small inefficiencies in the bitcoin transaction format for quite some time and this was always on our internal roadmap and what SegSig was intended to address (other than the transaction malleability issue).

I had never spent massive amounts of time looking into the transaction format. Once I started the work to correct these small inefficiencies some other less obvious inefficiencies became apparent to me, there was a lot more scope for improvement than I thought, and as I looked into those even more appeared, and so there was a bit of feature creep.

2) Despite the changes to the transaction format itself being “relatively small” it has knock on effects for an extremely large part of the codebase, the codebase has an extensive amount of parts that make assumptions about or make use of the transaction format code and need to be adjusted for the changes, While individually these changes are easy to make, I underestimated a bit just how many of them there would be..

In terms of the multi stage upgrade, I also slightly underestimated the work involved. PoW² is already a very complex beast to implement and having the backwards compatible change complicates it a bit more. I was prepared for this but there were some unexpected ‘incompatibilities’ with the existing Bitcoin codebase that complicates this, theoretically this complication shouldn’t have existed but it’s just an implementation detail of how Bitcoin handles things — and this is unfortunately the nature of Software Development that these things happen.

V) WRAPPING UP

And so here we are, a part of me regrets not sticking to doing PoW² as a solo release, it certainly would have been easier, in the short term it would have made a lot of people happier and instead of feeling bad about “letting people down” right now I could instead be soaking up all the praise.

However a larger part of me knows that even now with the delays this would have been the wrong thing to do, in the long term picture these delays are a very short period of time and when we are enjoying the benefits that they bring in the long term I think everyone will come to appreciate the long term game we are playing.

And so, while I am sorry there are delays and while I apologise to anyone who is disappointed by these delays I am not sorry that I have taken this decision.

While we have not released yet, the finish line is in sight and we will be there soon, stay tuned for more news to come.

13–11–2017 Gulden for iOS with desktop link functionality is now available in the App Store

With this function you can use an account from your Gulden desktop app on your mobile phone. There are a ton of improvements that have made the app faster and more stable.

Gulden for iOS will now be issued by Gulden.com B.V. and no longer by Nocks.

We recommend the following methods to move your Gulden to the new version (in any case, write down your recovery phrase).

Do you have a Gulden desktop app?

Create an account in your desktop app and choose “connect to mobile Gulden app”, in the Gulden.com B.V. app you choose “link wallet”.

Send the Gulden from your old Gulden for iOS app to this mobile account.

Only have the old Gulden for iOS app?

Write down the recovery phrase and open the Gulden.com B.V. app, choose “Recover wallet” and fill out your recovery phrase. After the synchronisation your Gulden will be visible. You can now delete the old app.

06–12–2017 PoW² selected user testing has started

As announced recently, Gulden 2.0 user testing for PoW² and SegSig has begun, testing is going according to plan with the current focus being on phase 1 through to phase 5 transitions for PoW². User testing will be thorough to make sure all possible issues are taken care of before the official release. We will continue to provide more updates with our progress.

20–12–2017 What are our testers testing for the Gulden 2.0 update?

We have had this question come up from many community members so we thought it would be a good time to break down the parts involved. The 2.0 update involves tens of thousands of lines of code that effect every layer of the software, from the blockchain consensus, the transaction script layer to the network layer and UI. While the bulk of the code has been written and reviewed there is simply no replacement for repeated real world testing by multiple parties and this is what the testing phase is all about.

1. Phase 1 to 5 upgrade script for PoW2 and SegSig compatibility.

The above process eliminates the need for an immediate messy hard fork; allowing time for everyone to upgrade cleanly while also bringing the witnessing functinality into use as fast as possible. With the amount of services reliant on Gulden we have to keep downtime to an absolute minimum.

2. Witnessing balance in practice compared to theory.

The development team have come up with a new testnet called fastnets where each person can run their own simulations alongside our main testnet. This gives our testers the ability to fast track the results of witnessing.

3. SegSig introduces a completely new transaction format with up to 58% smaller transactions.

This new format needs to be tested in multiple ways to ensure that it works in all cases and for all transaction types and that no unexpected issues are introduced.

4. When it comes to user interface design nothing beats real user feedback.

As we reach the final part of testing our UX team and developers will be working closely with users to ensure that the interface is one that all users can use and not just the technically minded.

5. iOS and Android 2.0 compatibility testing.

6. Aside from SegSig and PoW², version 2.0 also introduces dozens of other bug fixes and various new upstream functionality.

While the main focus is on SegSig/PoW² it is important that all other functionality is also retested to not let any surprise issues through.

22–01–2018 January Development Update

Gulden 2.0:

The Gulden 2.0 release is still being tested with bugs being fixed and retested until we are 100% confident each one can be written off the list. This process is time consuming but worth the peace of mind that when 2.0 is ready for release, your Gulden will be safe and secure with all functions working as intended across all platforms.

Android and iOS:

Both mobile platforms are being worked on by our dedicated iOS and Android developers. We expect to have an update for both fairly soon.

Influx of new users and seeder issue experienced:

Since december last year we have had a major growth spurt in users which put some strain on our network. Particularly users that have setup dedicated nodes to participate on our network weren’t being discovered by our DNS seeders, this resulted in a few new users experiencing initial syncing issues. We have improved the situation experienced with changes to the code base as well as bulking up our DNS seeders. We also found a better way to cater for nodes that don’t have a static IP address.

IBAN amendments:

When sending Gulden to your IBAN through your wallet you will need to make sure you have verified your IBAN account at Nocks.com by adding your first and last name to the verification process. Presently the wallets do not include the first and last name fields but will be made available in a future update.

23–02–2018 February Development Update

A quick thanks to all community members who are patiently waiting for the 2.0 release, we know the wait is difficult but it will be worth it.

Gulden 2.0

Testing on Gulden 2.0 continues, with both SegSig and PoW² looking pretty stable and solid.

January revealed some performance issues in the underlying codebase that are not directly related to PoW² but have been made more obvious by it; One specific example being that the wallets struggle with large number of transactions, in the past this affected only a small group of users, but with a larger userbase participating in witnessing it has become clear that this will need to be addressed.

It also became obvious in the last testing phase that we needed better tools for our testers to use in order to test various parts of the system, a lot of work has been put into improving the RPC and UI to make this possible.

It also became evident that we need to improve the RPC in preparation for fantastic community initiatives like GDash; When we initially started on PoW² we envisaged that at first we would put out a basic in wallet witnessing system and that later we would put out further releases expanding it to support witnessing from other devices like RPi and other user friendly options. Our community however has surpassed all our expectations and eagerly rushed ahead to develop several of these options, it is fantastic to see how vibrant and solid our community has become.

This however means we need to have full support from the get go, there has been some additional work to ensure that pretty much all aspects of the witnessing system will be ready for the first release.

February has seen us address all of the above, as well as other things, at this point the dev team is busy putting the finishing touches on the UI; watch out for some sneak previews to follow!

With this finalised we will be doing one more testing drive, the most extensive one yet after which we hope to be ready to release, though as usual we put quality above all else and will not release something until we are 100% sure it is ready.

A new era for the codebase

During the PoW² development we have also come to the exciting realisation that it is time to change the way we do things.

In the past we treated Gulden as “Bitcoin with some changes”, all Gulden code was written with this mind set in mind, with a lot of care and attention paid to keeping the code as similar to Bitcoin as possible. Including all sorts of clever tricks to avoid doing renames in the codebase etc.

This had the advantage of allowing us to keep up with Bitcoin changes as easily as possible, and is the sensible way to do things when the amount of changes is small. However it did also make all coding work more difficult.

As the amount of differences we have made has grown, the advantage of this has become less and less, and the work to do it more and more. We have come to the realisation that at this point, toward the end of PoW² and SegSig development — we can proudly say that Gulden is no longer “Bitcoin with some changes” but rather we are our own project.

And so the time has come to cast aside this old way of doing things and instead fully embrace the new. From now on we will no longer attempt to track the Bitcoin codebase but instead we will be freed up to improve on it wherever we want, this will help us develop faster and better quality in the future, there are many changes we want to make and some of them are already underway.

We will still keep track of what the Bitcoin project is doing and keep an eye on improvements and bug fixes they make, and adopt them where appropriate, so there will be no loss of benefit in that regard.

New developer

Some of you will have seen our advert for a network developer; an appropriate person for the role has been identified, and with the above codebase restraints out the way is hard at work on several projects we have had planned for quite some time now.

These projects are necessary in order for the Gulden project to grow further, in the December/January growth spurt it became evident that the Gulden network is outgrowing what the Bitcoin codebase is capable of and that further change would be necessary.

We are very excited to have another developer to assist with the core code, and are hopeful that after the success of these initial projects we will be able to keep him around to help with various other ongoing projects.

Mobile wallets

Our mobile developers are still hard at work behind the scenes improving the code in the mobile wallets, once the code is up to standard new mobile releases will be more frequent with lots of usability improvements to follow; watch this space.

28–02–2018 iOS Development Update

The upcoming iOS release will feature both technical and user-facing improvements. Our iOS codebase still contained a lot of legacy code and cruft from the original Breadwallet source code from which we forked. Significant improvements have been made in this area which allows us to implement new features at a higher pace in the future, and at the same time improve stability and robustness of the app. On top of this, the upcoming release will feature full iPhone X and iOS 11 support and several usability improvements.

21–03–2018 4 innovative projects, your choice.

With our 2.0 development which includes PoW², SegSig and Sonic coming to a close, we thought it would be a good time to start laying out what we have in store for the future.

During the course of the 2.0 development, the team have come up with various projects that we know will benefit our users, and today we not only present these projects but you also get to vote on which of these 4 projects we develop first.

You can review the 4 options here and voting starts the 30th of March until the 4th of April. Inform yourself before voting.

23–04–2018 April Development Update

PoW²/SegSig

Today we will be releasing the final test builds to our testing group. This build is the complete package with only bug hunting and potential UI changes left to do.

Sonic

Sonic which will also be included in the 2.0 release has development and testing concluded. The results have been impressive with the average sync time dropping by +-65% on all setups compared to the current version.

We also picked up an issue with the sync when Windows Defender was enabled on all Windows operating systems which caused up to 3 times the sync period compared to Windows systems with it disabled, with Sonic this has been resolved, and on our tests this has reduced the syncs on those systems by +-85%. On some of our higher end test systems we are recording times of just over 13 minutes for a complete sync.

iOS

The new iOS wallet is in the final testing phase and scheduled to be released on the App Store in May.

02–05–2018 Development moves to our public Gulden repository

As of this weekend the team has decided to push all the development for PoW², SegSig and Sonic to our public repository — https://github.com/Gulden/gulden-official. All future development will be done directly to this location.

The main reason we worked on a private repository in the past were for technical reasons that have now fallen away, to control beta testing so that our releases could be a surprise and to prevent others from compiling unfinished updates and running it.

However we feel transparency and giving other independent developers the opportunity to add their own commits outweighs the above as users should only be downloading their wallets from the official Gulden homepage.

The other side benefit is our community can see how much effort is being put into developing Gulden on a daily basis.

This change is a continuation of the new policy from our previous announcement https://dev.gulden.com/february-development-update/. While in the past a separate development repository was necessary where an easier to merge but more complicated to work with (experts only) version of the code base lived, this was then transformed for each release using a series of scripts to provide a “public friendly” version for the public facing codebase. Now that we have moved away from being a direct Bitcoin fork we have been able to simplify things so that this is no longer necessary and development can be more streamlined.

28–06–2018 Gulden 2.0 release

WHEN SHOULD I UPGRADE?

After extensive development the Gulden team is excited to announce the release of 2.0.0, the first release of many in our 2.0 product line which will see frequent updates going forward.

As mentioned in our previous development update which can be reviewed here Gulden.com/segsig, there is an automated 5 phase process that needs to take place. Witnessing itself will activate in phase 3, approximately two weeks from now.

In this version it’s possible to create a witness account but not yet fund it, this will be possible in phase 2 for which a new version (2.0.1) will be released within the next 2 weeks.

Power Users and enthusiasts who want to experience witnessing in action on our testnet environment should sign up to the Gulden slack and join the #testnet channel.

Miners need to update as soon as possible, exchanges do not need to update until we are ready for phase 3 activation and should contact us if they need more information.

WHAT IS INCLUDED IN THE 2.0 RELEASE?

PoW²

On the 18th May 2017 the white paper for PoW² was made available on dev.gulden.com/pow2 for the public to review. Including the main advantages PoW² is bringing for Gulden.

SegSig

Advantages of Segregated Signature — The 58% factor:

1. 58% space saving on all transactions.

2. 58% increased transaction throughput. No block size or frequency changes needed.

3. Combined with our planned project Epoch, users will be able to run Gulden nodes on the most modest hardware well into the future.

4. Overhaul to the transaction script system which allowed us to implement PoW² and SegSig as clean as possible along with other benefits.

Post the 2.0 update a technical write up of SegSig will be made available in the release notes.

Sonic

With the Gulden blockchain growing constantly, it resulted in the initial synchronization of our desktop wallets taking longer over time. We decided to advance Sonic development to be included in the 2.0 release.

All tests have shown an above 66% improvement in sync times across all operating systems. Speed matters and more updates will be made to further improve the sync process.

Release notes: Github.com/Gulden/gulden-official/releases/tag/v2.0.0.0

SUPPORT AND TESTING

We thought this would be the appropriate time to thank our community involved in Support and Testing who provide incredible value in making sure user queries are dealt with as effectively and timely as possible. Our bug hunters going all out on the 2.0 testing to make certain we deliver a smooth update on release.

The following members of the community deserve a special mention for going above and beyond expectations. The passion and care they have shown in their respective roles in support and or testing has made a positive impact on Gulden as a whole.

Aat de Kwaasteniet, Matthias Bentein, Harm Jan van Kammen, Jeroen Bakker, Vincent van der Kroef, Martin Kollaard, Bart Hulshof, Bastijn Koopmans, Jeroen Aarden, Nick Toet, Onno Geenen.

THE FUTURE

Unity

Some say Unity is strength and more than 50% of our community agreed when they decided on Unity as our next project in our March 2018 vote.

The 4 projects added to our roadmap that was put up for vote can be reviewed here https://dev.gulden.com/whats-next/ . The other 3 projects Alias, Nomad and Epoch development order will be decided by the team and made public shortly after.

PoW² II

This project is a continuation from PoW² and will be worked on in tandem with Unity.

The main feature of PoW² II is to have safe zero confirm instant transactions. It will be revealed in the PoW² II portion of the white paper how this implementation will be achieved.

The project itself, while complex, will not require the same amount of development time as 2.0 which had over 40000 lines of code changes and 3 projects combined into 1.

Team Growth

In 2018 we added 2 full time developers to the team, 1 for iOS and another for core development. Both developers are highly skilled and compliment the skills matrix needed to accomplish the goals we have in place for Gulden.

20–07-2018 PoW² Phase 2 activation

It’s official, phase 2 is activating! 2116 blocks (roughly 3 and a half days) from now phase 2 will go live on the main network, funding of witness accounts will at that point become possible and shortly after that (once enough accounts are funded) witnessing will activate!

In preparation we ask that all users who have not already done so start to update their wallets to the latest 2.0 version, and update over the coming week if any further updates become available, in order to assure the network is as healthy as possible when the moment arrives. While phase 2 and 3 are backwards compatible and older versions will continue to work, version 2.0 is at this point the much better tested version and offers much more stability to the network and things will function smoother with the majority of users upgraded. If you know of any websites that might use Gulden please ask them to also ensure that they have upgraded.

The exception to the above is more complicated services (exchanges like bittrex for example) and similar who do not need to update at this point and may have legitimate reason to want to spend more time testing before they do update, the Gulden team will make special contact to assist these sorts of services when the time is right — in the meantime phase 3 is backwards compatible so everything will continue to function correctly. Therefore please do not contact or bother exchanges about the update, leave that in the hands of the developers.

8–8–2018 PoW² explored — A post-launch look at some of the security implications

29–09–2018 September Development Update

Looking back on the last few months

On 28 June version 2.0 was released, after a huge effort to get miners and users to upgrade on 20 July witnessing started operating on the network for the first time.

Since then, and as is expected with such a complicated release, there have been several inevitable minor bug fixes; and of course a lot of time spent answering questions and helping services to upgrade etc.

The development team have been monitoring ‘Phase 3’ in operation and though some very minor possible improvements to consider for ‘Phase 4’ have been noted; overall we are incredibly happy with how well things are working.

I think we should all be very proud of this achievement; every community member who assisted, some in small ways and some in very large ways, without each and every contribution we would not have the success we have today.

In addition to witnessing ‘Phase 3’ also activated our accelerated synchronization project (codename Sonic) which has also been working fantastically. While it has received little attention in the shadow of the larger PoW² release, this project was both very important for Gulden in its own right as well as somewhat special; as it was written almost entirely by Willem and not myself, and therefore forms the first but almost certainly not last major contribution by Willem to the codebase.

It is very important to the project that the team grows over time, so we are very happy to have found a suitable candidate who seems to be nicely fitting the role.

Development vote — Unity

Back in March we asked the community to help decide on which project out of numerous exciting ones they deem the most strategically important, the overwhelming winner of this vote was the Unity project — a unified backend for all of our wallets.

This was an excellent choice, and is going to be very important going forward in allowing us to develop new features faster, with better testing and even higher quality.

Looking forward

When we released on 28 June, we released not just with ‘Phase 3’ fully coded and tested, but also ‘Phase 4’ coded and extensively tested. The idea as everyone is likely aware has always been that ‘Phase 3’ is temporary and that we will move to ‘Phase 4’ as soon as possible within a rather ambitious timeframe.

Despite this readiness, after such a long development cycle and with the entire upgrade process being a lot more strain than expected (in terms of third party support and miner upgrades etc.) — a tough but ultimately correct decision was taken by dev team to not try and push too hard but rather to take a little bit longer on Phase 4 to be sure.

There were many factors here, some of which I’ll briefly go over:

1) To allow people some time to get used to witnessing via ‘Phase 3’

2) To try reduce additional strain on various key community members before the next upgrade cycle

3) To allow us to observe ‘Phase 3’ a bit more so that any possible improvements for ‘Phase 4’ can be considered and implemented for ‘Phase 4’

4) Looking at the bigger picture

I’ll elaborate on number 4 as this is the most important going forward.

As ‘Phase 4’ is already coded (with a few loose ends to tie up) the bulk of the work to be ready for ‘Phase 4’ is to add support to our Android and iOS wallets — these currently operate in backwards compatibility mode during ‘Phase 3’ but will need to be fully upgraded during ‘Phase 4’.

The ‘Phase 4’ changes are extensive and high difficulty, and duplicating and testing these changes on both mobile wallets is a huge daunting task in its own right.

A few things were therefore considered:

* Almost all of this work is in the backend

* The next project on the roadmap is Unity — which is going to throw a large part of the mobile backend code away

* The most difficult part of Unity (SPV support for the core) was already well underway with Willem starting on this after Sonic completion and well before the PoW² release.

* Our Android client is in need of a replacement or major update

The ultimate conclusion was that it made little sense to spend effort and time on writing difficult ‘Phase 4’ support for the mobile wallets, extensively test the code, and then throw it away shortly afterwards when Unity is completed. To also extensively update Android when it is about to be replaced with Unity made little sense…

And so the decision was taken that in order to activate ‘Phase 4’ we also need to complete Unity.

Today I report that this was certainly the correct choice; Unity project has been moving fast with a basic Android prototype already up and running.

The roadmap from here

Early beta testing for select Android users will begin in the coming week, with an aim to get it release ready and to replace the existing Android app with it as soon as possible. Android beta testing will serve not only to test the new Android app — but also to test the Unity backend.

This is the immediate focus and users can expect to see results here in the very near future.

In the meantime work on iOS support for Unity will also commence, and finalization work of ‘Phase 4’ will also take place in parallel. Once all mobile wallets are stable on Unity there will be a final round of testing for ‘Phase 4’ with testing taking place on all platforms and then ‘Phase 4’ will go active, this is currently expected to be completed in the next month or two.

01–01–2019 Gulden.com 1.1.19

#111444

It’s so much fun to work on Gulden. I’m just thankful that I get to do this every day. There are hard times, of course. Moments when you don’t know the answer right away or have the solution. Moments where you need to be patient, because development takes time. But those are just challenges and dealing with those challenges is exciting.

I’ve been working on the new Gulden.com website with a lot of talented people. Developers that perfect the code, a UX-designer that reviewed every pixel and an illustrator that converted my ideas to images. And in between I bothered our Lead Developer with my summaries of his projects.

The previous Gulden.com website was in desperate need of replacement, we can all agree on that. It was 2.5 years old. Last year, the project looked a lot different compared to now and there is so much to tell. Gulden has grown on so many levels. The development, the community and all the projects revolving around Gulden. It’s not a simple cryptocurrency anymore, it’s a blockchain. And the cryptocurrency is just the first of many applications. A blockchain that is capable of so much more and a website that fits that profile.

The new Gulden.com website will go live on the first day of the New Year.

11–01–2019 First crypto platform with iDeal certificate

This is an original message from Nocks Payments B.V.

The Dutch startup Nocks, which conveniently combines accepting payments for companies and trading in cryptocurrency Gulden, expands with a license as cPSP. It is the first time that a cryptocurrency-focused company can present itself as an iDeal partner.

Entrepreneurs will soon also be able to accept iDeal payments through Nocks.

Recently, a license requirement for cryptocurrency companies was also announced. The requirements of customer identification have long been met by various companies in the industry, but an actual law would also allow for further professionalization.

“For a long time now, Nocks has had a strict KYC policy whereby we handle the identification of our customers in advance. So that they can then make use of our trading services. Anti-fraud and risk are important parts of our business and require constant attention. Thanks to the knowledge and experience we have gained in recent years, we were able to complete our registration as a payment institution with DNB last year and can now also start as a payment service provider. That you need iDeal to be competitive is a no-brainer. So we are very happy with obtaining our iDeal certificate. Thus Co-founder & CEO Roel Boer.

For the time being, the most important part of the company is Nocks’ trading platform, on which you can trade Gulden with euros. Users can convert Gulden to euros there.

“We started out as a cryptocurrency trading platform. As a result, we come from a corner of the market that regulators, among others, have little or no insight into. We still need a lot of information, clarification & consultation. Understandable and in our opinion 100% necessary for a piece of professionalization in the cryptocurrency space & all the services we provide to our users withocks. Whether that is trading in cryptocurrency or for our business customers processing their payments.

18–01–2019 Ethereum Classic’s 51% Attack Wasn’t Unexpected

22–03–2019 Interview: “Er zou een keurmerk voor cryptovaluta moeten komen” (Dutch)

27–03 2019 Gulden for Android (Unity)

17–04–2019 VERSLAG EERSTE GAB MEETING

GETTING TO KNOW EACHOTHER

Tuesday April the 9th was a milestone in 5 year old history of Gulden: the first face to face meeting of the Gulden Advisory Board and Gulden.com BV, represented by Rijk Plasman. This first meeting was mainly to get to know eachother and speak out what both parties expect from eachother with one shared goal: our beloved Gulden. We have to start by saying that we cannot share the complete notes of the meeting with the community , as stated before there are parts of the meeting that cannot be shared with the community (yet) because of various reasons.

Some of the points that were discussed were:

WHAT DO THE GAB AND GULDEN.COM EXPECT FROM EACHOTHER?

Rijk Plasman let’s the GAB know that from now on all development time spent is talked about with the GAB first, where the GAB decides where the priority of the development team should be. When the GAB has own ideas they can get feedback from developers on the impact of the idea and the estimated development time it will take. Based on this info the GAB can decide in what order new ideas are developed. Action point: The GAB will create an overview of all future projects Gulden.com could develop. From the developers side an estimation of difficulty and estimated resources will be made. Based on that overview the GAB can make a decision on where to spend development time on.

GEENSTIJL COLLABORATION

The content of the GeenStijl Fundraiser page (which is currently live and donations are going in the right direction) and directly linked to that the details of the Meetup that is going to be held on April the 19th. We also discussed the fargoing details of the collaboration with GeenStijl and what applications can (and will) be developed to help them and other publishers. For Example: …

Rijk also explained what their use-case is that they mentioned earlier this year. It is a use-case that could also be used by GeenStijl and other publishers (or websites in general). We cannot give any details about it to make sure nobody else runs off with the idea. The whitepaper is still being worked on. The person responsible happens to be the same guy who is part of the people developing the Unity update and prepping Phase 4, so choices had to be made regarding priority of work.

MONETARY POLICY

Some members from the GAB wanted to know more about the monetary policy behind the Gulden. They wanted to know the point of view from the developers side. Why was choosen for the current setup back in 2014 when Gulden was created. What would be the impacts if certain variables would be changed in the future. No decisions whatsoever where made. It was just an open discussion where everybody could share their opinion.

POSITIONING OF GULDEN

What are the unique selling points of Gulden and how do we use these USP’s to position Gulden in the market? How to we attract new users? Gulden used to be known for its user friendliness and it still is very easy to start with Gulden, even if you have no experience in Crypto. The Unity update even makes that better. The Android app is ready and the iOS update is nearly finished. The focus after that has to go to the implementation of Unity in the Desktop app. The GAB also addresses to the developers that the usability of the Desktop app falls behind, especially the Witness-part is not up to standard when it comes to the usability users are used to when using Gulden software.

A STABLE TOKEN RUNNING ON THE GULDEN BLOCKCHAIN

One of the ideas put on the table was to create a stable coin running on the Gulden Blockchain, working together with Nocks. Both the GAB and Rijk had several ideas that could be created once such an application was ready for the Gulden blockchain. It has been put on the list of future developments. That list will be researched further and after that decisions will be made on where the development time goes to first.

NLG ON MORE EXCHANGES

One of the discussions at the GAB table was the call from the community to list NLG on more exchanges. And the sometimes unrealistic view some people can have on this matter. Gulden only wants to be on quality exchanges and not on every single exchange that is out there. In the community there is a repeating discussion about on what exchanges NLG should be listed. With all serious exchanges there has been contact by Gulden.com. Some exchanges do not want to list us. Some exchanges do want to list us (but ask a ridiculous listing fee, which is not going to be paid by Gulden.com because we have better goals to spend that money, like development). What we can share is that Gulden.com is currently talking to Blockport about working together. Details on this cannot be shared, for the simple reason that talks are still going. Members of the GAB will be part of the following talks with Blockport.

A succesful first meeting where a solid foundation has been established for future cooperation.

28–05 2019 Phase 4, Android & iOS Development Update

In March we released our new Android app utilizing the new unified backend. While the development team has been very busy since then, on the outside things might seem a bit quiet and people might be wondering what we have been doing, so here is a quick update.

Android

The new Android app exceeded our expectations on launch, performing better than expected for version 1.0 of a completely new app. However even with this being the case, with so many different android versions and devices out there in the wild, there are always going to be some things that appear only after release.

And so part of the team has been monitoring Google Play for any issues that present themselves, as well as listening to various feedback from reviews and has put out multiple releases to improve on what we already have.

We are now 2 months post release and the app we have on the store is really doing great now, it is far more stable than the old app as well as similar competing apps on the store. At this point we can take most of the development focus off Android temporarily — however don’t worry there will still be periodic new releases with plenty more improvements to come.

We can however use your help.

Although we believe the vast majority of our users are happy with the new app, if you aren’t please let us know why so we can improve… A small but vocal minority of users have given us negative reviews over things that our out of our control e.g. forgetting their own passwords. Due to the way that the Play store will give a larger weighting to recent reviews going forward these few reviews can have a very negative impact for us and chase away future prospective users.

So we ask that all users who appreciate this app take a moment to do something positive for the project and to give us a fair rating on the play store, even if you have done so in the past the fact that it is an updated rating is important and will be good for Gulden as a whole. If you are feeling particularly generous an honest review to go with it is even better.

Node.js/Electron

Last month the core team also quietly put out another exciting development. As it is not really user facing at this point we didn’t make a large fuss of it at the time, but it is there for the more technically inclined to tinker with.

A prototype “proof of concept” electron app using the unified backend.

The primary purpose of developing this was to enable the core team to better test the unified backend going forward, allowing us to develop with it on the desktop without having to use mobile devices or emulators.

However this also presents interesting opportunities in terms of being able to develop other new applications using Electron in future, potentially support additional new platforms more rapidly, for third parties to write apps (not necessarily wallet apps) that make use of it and so on. It also makes Gulden more accessible to the large and growing number of node.js developers out there. So we are very excited by this development.

The speed and ease at which we were able to get a proof of concept up and running also showcases the power that having a unified backend brings to the table.

iOS

In the meantime the iOS team has been hard at work porting the iOS app onto the unified backend as well, and have been making great progress.

The current iOS app is already great and we won’t release the new app until it is as good or better than the old one, so it may take a bit longer, but we are well on the way to completion in the coming month(s).

Phase 4 witnessing

With the iOS team rapidly making progress, and Android now running smoothly, the core team have shifted their full attention onto Phase 4.

The bulk of the work for Phase 4 is already completed, including our brand new transaction format ‘SegSig”. However with a completely new transaction format it brings we cannot be too careful with testing, we are therefore hard at work on unit tests and functional tests to ensure everything is properly covered. There are various edge cases in the code that need some improvements, manual programmer testing and code review.

Once a new iOS build is released, we hope to have the Phase 4 betas ready shortly thereafter, we will then be able to do a (hopefully short) beta test of Phase 4 across Desktop/Android/iOS simultaneously before releasing.

26–06–2019 SECOND GAB MEETING

Present: ⁃ Annemieke ⁃ Matthias ⁃ Harm Jan ⁃ Bart ⁃ Paul ⁃ Nick ⁃ Rijk

Absent: ⁃ Marc

Opening: — Word of welcome and informal talk — Introduction of the Agenda:

1 — Changing the algorithm 2 — Rewards 3 — Rijk’s role within the community 4 — Table round

1: CHANGING THE ALGORITHM

Rijk points out that is key that mining within the Gulden network is — and stays — stable. Currently the hashrate has a big variation, mainly caused by the current division of multi/jump-pools versus dedicated Gulden miners. The Blockchain is then at risk of getting “stuck / slowing down” which is very much unwanted. A solution would be to change the algorithm that is used in the mining of Gulden. Due to this change non-dedicated miningpools will not be able to mine Gulden with the mining equipment they use. With the new algorithm it will be possible for the average Gulden usere to mine Gulden without having to invest in expensive equipment. One could compare it with the user friendly way it is for users to become a Witness in the Gulden network. Option 1: ⁃ Change the algorithm to an algorithm that is already being (succesfully) used by another crypto. F.e. Zcash Option 2: ⁃ Argon2: An algorithm that has already proofed itself in the application of password protection. It has multiple advantages, it is lightweight and easy to implement. Option 3: ⁃ A Gulden specific alteration on the Argon2 algorithm. Risk: Not proven , needs more development and testing. Option 4: ⁃ Develop a completely unique and own Gulden algorithm that works together with witness. Advangtage: it is unique and specifically built to meet the needs of Gulden. Disadvangate: developing this from scratch takes a lot of time. Estimation is at least a year.* Annotation: Option 4 can also be developed next to the current development, even if at first one of the other option is choosen. During the meeting all 4 options were discussed into detail between the GAB and the DEVs and the GAB has unanimously voted for the use of the Argon2 algorithm (option 2). With this algorithm it is possible to mine with a normal desktop computer. This makes mining available to “normal” Gulden users. There is currently no other coin that uses this algorithm. This does have impact on the people that are dedicated Gulden miners that purchased hardware and are not mining in pools. The GAB estimates that the numer of dedicated Gulden miners is very low at this moment. By changing the algorithm and making mining available to a much bigger group of people, the number of dedicated Gulden miners will increase rapidly. We expect a stabilsation of the hashrate and as a result of that a more healthy blockchain. Especially looking at the number of people that are currently a witness in the Gulden network, and the fact that the number of witnesses largely exceeds all the expectations. The few dedicated Gulden miners, which bought specific hardware, can still use the hardware to mine other crypto.

2: REWARDS

The GAB has decided unanimously that the rewards need to be divided in another way. This is a decision that is connected to the things decided in item 1. (Algorithm). There will be no deduction in the number of Gulden in het block reward, but the Gulden in the block reward will be distributed differently. — Witness rewards go up to 30 nlg per block. — Miners are the most important factor in the blockchain and therefor will still get the highest reward. The reward will be lowered though, to 50 NLG per block. Both parties (GAB and Gulden.com BV) have concerns about the current rate of Gulden and the costs that are involded in the development. The burnrate of the development budget is currently way to high to keep development going in the long run. After a long debate at the table a unanimous decision was made to –as long as it is needed- distribute 20 NLG of the blockreward to Gulden.com B.V. This (temporary) decision was made to guarantee the future development of Gulden. We are basically creating a situation where the Gulden blockchain itself is paying the developers of Gulden.com BV for further development of wallets, applications and so forth.

3: RIJK’S ROLE IN THE COMMUNITY

Rijk has announced to the GAB that, from the moment that the decisions above are shared with the community, he will only focus on further development of Gulden. He will leave the Gulden community (Slack etc) per direct. The collaboration between Gulden.com B.V. and the GAB will remain as is.

4: TABLE ROUND

Bart: Will we continue with 7 GAB members or fill up to 9? In the initial document by Aat an idealistic number of members was stated as 7 or 9. Offcourse this was only a suggestion and this suggestion was used as a guide line to forming the GAB. The members all voted for the continuation of the GAB with the current 7 people. We experienced that 7 people is a good number of people to base decision on and it causes less problems with planning meetings were everybody can attend. Paul: When will we have our next online meeting? 8 Juli — 20:00

18–07–2019 WITNESS IN PHASE 4: THE CHANGES

When phase 4 is released, it will bring new functionality to everybody who is operating as a witness. In this post we would like explain what this new functionality is. (Thanks to Malcolm for the summary and Aat for the stAatistics)

COMPOUNDING OF EARNINGS

Option to automatically add the rewards you receive for being a witness to the existing locked balance of your witness account, this added amount increases your witness account weighting as if it were there from the accounts creation.

OPTIMISE YOUR ACCOUNT

The UI will provide a convenient single and simple to use interface (a single button you can press) to perform split/merge for you as appropriate without having to worry about the details yourself.

EXTEND YOUR ACCOUNT

Add more time and/or amount to an already locked account (restrictions apply)

ROTATE

You can change your witnessing key, for example in case you given it to a service like g-dash and don’t want that anymore, or have reason to believe your witnessing device was hacked, etc.

HIGHER REWARDS

Due to the decision to change the blockreward, witnesses will receive 30nlg reward in phase 4, in stead of the 20nlg one would receive in phase 3. Community member Aat created a nice overview of what expected rewards will be when phase 4 starts (based on the current witness accounts statistics, which are subject to change)

19–08–2019 An introduction to SIGMA the new ‘CPU friendly’ algorithm for Gulden

26–09–2019 REPORT ONLINE MEETING GAB & RIJK PLASMAN

Present: Bart, Marc, Annemieke, Matthias, Nick and Rijk

Absent: Harm Jan and Paul