The Crown Platform Chronicles — PART I: the launch of the vision

In a series of 3 Chronicles, crowncoin_knight tells the story of how the Crown Platform was started and outlines the chronological path from the point of view of a co-founder and contributor since 2013 to 2019.

The very first and legendary Crowncoin logo

2013: four friends, the Bitcoin phenomenon

Back in 2013, four friends started to be fascinated by the bitcoin blockchain technology. One of them invested in bitcoin and dragged the three others into this experiment and venture. It was just before the Bitcoin bull run above 1000 USD started. We accumulated Bitcoin and then at 1000 we bought more, just before the price collapsed to 250 USD, which made us lose most of our value.

In December 2013, as we were watching and analyzing the ongoing excitement in the crypto space, we came up with the idea to launch our own blockchain experiment. We are from a country in the middle of Europe, with a strong history of knights and kings. We imagined how battles were fought, how the Crown was always at the center stage, we realized that thanks to the Crown, our little country actually existed for over a thousand years. What if we took this universal symbol (known and understood by billions on the globe) — which represents rule of law, strength, stability, unity and turned it around, so all users could “Build their Kingdoms”? Crown was also a currency in our country as well as in several other European countries. So it was a no brainer.

We called our experiment Crowncoin and thought that history will repeat itself, this time in a digital form. Our very first and legendary logo was created by Filip during one cold evening before Christmas in 2013. The adventure just started.

“If we want to see our future, we need to learn our history.”

2014: Looking for the developers…

Ok, we had the name and the logo. But now comes the hard part: who will make it happen from a development perspective? After long discussions in our office, we decided that we will go with the Bitcoin blockchain technology (Litecoin was our second choice). Fanda, one of the partners was pushing the PoS algorithm he knew from Peercoin, but the consensus was finally agreed to be a BTC based SHA-256. The main reason was that Bitcoin had the largest community, and we thought one day this community might be interested in looking at what we are doing…

We knew no Bitcoin developers at that time, and paying a few hundred USD for an automatically generated BTC clone some strange websites were offering looked scammy to us. After we spent over 6 months looking for someone who could help us, we were losing faith. One of us then came up with the idea to present the Crowncoin vision at one of the very first crypto conferences in Prague and Europe. We made it happen, nobody cared about our project, except for one gentleman. Alesh was planning to launch his own coin, but after seeing our logo and our philosophy, he decided to join us and offered his development team lead by Karel.

In the wave of our excitement, one of our contributors — Hynek, who was running a very small billboard company, placed the Crowncoin logo on one of the main Czech highways! We were close to launch now.

The Crowcoin vision on one of the main Czech highways towards Prague

October 2014: fair launch announced on Bitcointalk, the blockchain started to move

The code is ready! We are finally launching after nearly a year. It was important for all of us to do the launch in a fair and transparent process. Nobody was able to pre-mine. Three…two…one…GO! Crowncoin blockchain started to move, we celebrated all night long and the feeling of victory beat in our hearts.

One of the first comments when our launch was announced on Bitcointalk.org

A few weeks after our launch Crown got listed in one of the early crypto exchanges, C-CEX, and trading started.

2015: Another year passed by, contributors are losing faith again. BTC merge mining, timestamping and namestamping implemented

After a few weeks, the excitement from the successful launch was over and the hard reality hit. There was no development budget and Crown was trading for micro values. Up to 10 contributors were funding the development from their own pocket. As time was progressing, the people who were involved started to slowly leave the project. It was natural, there was no interest from the early crypto public, trading volumes were tiny, one of the original founders had to even trade with himself so Crowncoin does not get delisted from C-CEX.

At the same time, however, a talented developer and the creator of Namecoin, domob was working hard on several Crowncoin features such as BTC merge-mining connecting the Crowncoin blockchain with the Bitcoin one, so miners which were mining Bitcoin could automatically mine Crowncoin. Also, the very first forms of timestamping and namestamping were implemented on the Crowncoin core, which enabled the community to create timestamps of documents and create unique CRW address names. Mine was of course “crowncoin_knight” but I lost access to it at a later stage.

Looking back, all of this early development actually laid the foundations and basic philosophy of Crown as a free, open access and generalistic blockchain where contributors from a variety of fields are adding value to the blockchain as they pass by.

This Codex of behaviour was timestamped into the Crowncoin blockchain and served as the base for the original Crown papers drafted in 2016 and 2017 by MDZ

This was the summary of the very early stage in the life of Crowncoin. The next chronicle will outline the exciting years of 2016 and 2017 when Masternodes were implemented, Crown was listed on Bittrex and hit tens of million dollar capitalization, moving to the top 100 as its community grew fast.