No doubt, 2018 has been a rocky year, not just for Spectrecoin but for Cryptocurrency in general. Bitcoin itself has seen a major price decline yet the acceptance of crypto has grown in many more ways than the years before. The so called bear market is the biggest reason for the shift from pure speculation towards root growing use cases. During the last year a lot of projetcs suffered from lack of funding and had to shut down development or completely vanished from the crypto radar. Whilst Spectrecoin used the downturning market to prepare and spend time to develop a useful product more than ever.



I want to use this space to summarize what Spectrecoin achieved during last year's price downtrend. Please have in mind, this is just a short summary as the space wouldn't be enough to list every little improvement. :)



Let me get right into it.

Pretty much now, 1 year ago the project was seeing some turbulent times which resulted in a split from the former lead dev and the core team. The reasons were the inefficiency and non-transparent work on the codebase which left the community concerned and stranded. The legitimate consequence was the return of Spectrecoin's creator @Mandica to fulfill the fundamental vision of a privacy cryptocurrency.



APRIL

With @Mandica back at the lead we saw new developers coming in. In April it was 3 to determine in what state the current codebase was and to start working towards an upcoming release of a new wallet version. We saw Lead Development Maintainer and Blockchain consultant @mammix2 as well as Ahmed Shbli (linkedin.com), who was hired for Software Design, GUI and as Qt Specialist. The third one was the specialist developer for elliptic curve cryptography and Blockchain named Ivan Radigales Creus (linkedin.com). One of the first developing tasks was the integration of Qt WebEngine to replace the Qt WebKit which was resulting in greater build stability and reproducible build quality.



After a few weeks of bug fixing and code development, we read @Mandica say: "Spectrecoin is aiming to develop into a top-tier privacy focused coin and we will not compromise on this philosophy and we will enable all users to transact anonymously." with the outcome of a busy upcoming summer.





MAY

On 29th of May, Thomas Glavinic, a writer of the german news outlet "Die Welt", published an article about blockchain technology. Mentioning Spectrecoin alongside Bitcoin, NEO, EOS and a handful others to be compared as the potentially new Amazon, Google and so on of the next century. (welt.de)

JUNE

The release of v1.4 during June got us a step closer on improving anonymity in transactions. After that wallet delivery our current lead dev @Tek got added to the team. He had been a long time supporter of the project, though surprisingly hidden, just to come out of the dark when Spectrecoin needed him most.



JULY

Additionally to this new developer extension, we saw another dev called @Helix joining the team in July with the task of build automation on his shoulders. As soon as new code was pushed on Github, the builds for multiple platforms were automated. During this time we looked forward for an upcoming hard fork in August. As well the idea of stealth staking was getting elaborated and turned out to no longer be a dream but soon to be promising reality. Soon after that it had become clear, that the 2 coin system used in Spectrecoin had to be user friendly and bug free. Since then @Tek has taken on the task to turn the wallet and its usage of XSPEC/SPECTRE to a better user experience. To truly prepare for all upcoming changes, a Spectrecoin testnet was created, for anticipated bugs and feature testing before any commit gets pushed onto the master branch of Github.



With some media attention as follow up, Coindesk (coindesk.com) was interested to hear about our next major release of stealth staking and Brian D. Colwell (briandcolwell.com) was having an in-depth talk with @Mandica.





AUGUST

August praised us with the release of v1 whitepaper (whitepaper.pdf) and a set date for the hard fork for v2, to take place on 21/08/2018 @ 2200 hours (GMT).



SEPTEMBER

Although the heat was on, September came along nicely with a new website and various Linux distros. Our very own @Helix is the one that made it possible to stake on various Linux systems, including raspberry pi.



OCTOBER

A meetup of @Mandica and our lead developer @Tek took place in London during October. Both were discussing further steps that need to be taken to achieve the goal of true privacy in the crypto sphere. One of the major subjects that were discussed was ensuring that the development fund will only be used to compensate work done for development, project management and promotion. The decision was made to establish an official legal entity also known as a not-for-profit-organisation. Considering that a month can't just pass with discussions and rumor, the very first bootstrapped Blockchain archive saw light on Github. To enable ease of wallet syncing. Not to mention the pre-configured OBFS4 for TOR that enables users in TOR blocked countries to counter their ban.



NOVEMBER

In November plans were made for an upcoming transition to more professional and audit-able accounting for Spectrecoin. Whereas @Helix successfully automated the builds for all platforms (Windows/Mac/Linux).



Considering that the genesis block was mined on 20/11/2016, Spectrecoin saw its 2nd birthday on a November Tuesday.



DECEMBER

What could be better than having a major v2.2 wallet release during Christmas season? The add of Spectrecoin on Blockfolio Signal (blockfolio.com) or a top 50 ranking for Github activity on CRYPTOMISO (cryptomiso.com)? All of the above happened in December alongside with an 8th place in "7-day GitHub Commits Rankings" from the TokenInsight website.

If you are already into Spectrecoin, then you are well aware what we can expect for it to come this year. In case this write up sparked your interest about Spectrecoin and you want to claim a small share of sat worth in XSPEC every 30 minutes, follow this link: btcpop.co. This service offers an exchange to trade XSPEC, a staking pool together with a handful other services for crypto enthusiasts.



After all, development doesn't end with 31st of December. Further into the current year, we got listed on Amsterdex (amsterdex.com) and Crex24 (crex24.com). Both user friendly and well working exchanges.

Accompanying an offered bug bounty and a release schedule for v3. And that's just the beginning...



We will happily welcome you in Spectrecoin's official Discord (discord.gg).

For questions or suggestions, please comment below.

Thank you for reading.