CryptoNight Variant 2 Implementation

& Marketing Updates

Clues

We have some exciting news to share with our community in the coming week. We are sharing some hints about the upcoming news on our Discord, Telegram, subreddit, and Telegram announcement channels. As of right now, we are on Clue number three. If you would like to participate in the challenge, we have a 20K Lethean reward for the person that solves the most recent clue. You can find more information in the pinned message on our Telegram channel.

Dev Corner

The release schedule was interrupted last week by the urgent hard fork. Accordingly, we are targeting a new release by November 12 which includes a handful of fixes for general and proxy functionality in the graphical (GUI) wallet. As usual we will post information on the release across our news and social media channels.

Outside of ongoing proxy functionality development and fixing, the development team has significantly prioritized the task of increasing network hash rate. Last week’s attacks were ultimately 51% attacks. In order to decrease the likelihood and affordability of future attacks, it is critical to increase the number of people mining Lethean (LTHN). To that end, we have removed the pool fees for the official pool. We will also be releasing some new features for miners in the coming weeks. Currently we are exploring in-browser mining, simplifying the instructions to begin mining LTHN, and reintegration of in-wallet pool mining as it existed in earlier versions of our wallet (1.4.1 and below).

Hard fork information

If you have not read our most recent press release about the recent mandatory software upgrade (hard fork), we strongly encourage you to do so. You can read the article by visiting this link.

The press release details what occurred, why the hard fork was implemented, and how to upgrade your wallet.

If you are not using version 3.0.0.b4 or later of the wallet and daemon software, your blockchain and wallet are not in sync. Please update to the latest release as soon as possible.

Added fixes during the hard fork

Difficulty algorithm upgrade to LWMA-3 including bug fixing of exploit in previous algorithm

Reduction of the median time past (MTP) window to keep block times more consistent between nodes and reduce the potential of a future attack

Enforcing limits on ‘old’ blocks entering the chain (courtesy of Masari)

A couple upstream fixes from Monero involving transaction and timestamp processing

For all changes included in this release, please see the changelog.

As an additional note, after completing the hard fork, we discovered an issue that arose when the daemon was synced from block 0. In the case that the daemon was synced from scratch like this, the daemon would calculate the difficulty of blocks starting at 166133 as being approximately two times higher than they actually were at the time. This ultimately lead to issues with the current blockchain not following the proper chain due to different nodes having different ideas about what the current block’s difficulty should be. This issue was resolved as of the latest wallet version, 3.0.0.b4.

If you need help upgrading your wallet following this hard fork, remember that the hard fork article has information on how to do so. If you still have trouble, feel free to visit our Discord or Telegram and we will assist you as best as we can.

Wallet update:

Following the recent hard fork, it is now mandatory to update your wallet to the latest version, 3.0.0.b4, to continue sending Lethean coins. Coins sent to your address are still safe, but will not be visible or sendable until you upgrade to the new wallet, and thus the new chain. You can find the newest GUI wallet here, and the newest CLI wallet here.

Marketing updates / Seoul blockchain event

Our marketing team continues to spread Lethean brand awareness. Since the campaign began earlier this month, we have accumulated nearly 700,000 impressions as of October 28th. An approach based on targeted demographics is being taken to increase website traffic and increase overall impressions. This marketing strategy will improve brand awareness in both the VPN and cryptocurrency sectors. We are now actively focusing on reaching Chinese VPN consumers and investors. The reasoning behind the focus on the Chinese demographic will be apparent in the days to come.

Since we are committed to ensuring that we are improving both ourselves and our communication, we are conducting another survey. This survey will help us better understand how we can improve. Additionally, the information provided in this survey will help us to advertise better. The survey may be found here.

As we mentioned in our last update, our social media manager, Alex, visited the blockchain expo located in Seoul. As he is currently based in Thailand, the business trip to South Korea presented a viable opportunity to create some public awareness and interest in Lethean within the Asian community. Seoul has grown massively over the years in terms of cryptocurrency and blockchain developments, so this event (which is the first of its kind) brought many major Korean players on board. Projects such as Icon, Cortex, and Airbloc took part in the expo. Furthermore, a number of bigger Chinese and Korean exchanges had their stalls set up at this event. Demand was generally huge, as many people attended the gathering. The event itself consisted of 2 days filled with presentations, meetups, and interviews. The afterparty that followed made for a great networking experience. Alex had a lot of time for networking, and had some very interesting discussions with retail investors from China and Korea. Additionally, Alex was able to meet with venture capitalists, exchanges, and other project co-founders.

Store Shipping Cost Reduction

It was apparent that the shipping price for users outside the United States was too high for our store. To ensure that all of our community members have the ability to get Lethean merchandise without paying shipping prices that were almost as expensive as the item itself, we managed to reduce the shipping cost for users outside the United States.

The store can be found here. We hope that this change will allow those that were unable to purchase Lethean merchandise because of the higher shipping cost to now do so if they wish. We will continue to update our store with new merchandise as we move forward.

Exchange outreach update

Over the course of the last few weeks the team has been reaching out to exchanges and requesting listing. Some notable exchanges that we have submitted an application for are Poloniex, Bittrex, Bitker, and Bitfineon. We have received very positive feedback a number of these exchanges, and we look forward to providing more details as they become available.

Socials

You can keep in contact with Lethean via any of the social networks below.

Facebook

Twitter

Discord

Telegram (community)

Telegram (announcements)

Reddit

Bitcointalk

YouTube

LinkedIn

GitHub