December ended a highly productive 2018 for the Skycoin project. There was strong growth in software development, hardware development and community engagement.

For an in-depth summary of the 2018 milestones, read Part I and Part II of Charles Bivin’s excellent two-piece coverage ‘The Year in Review for Skycoin.’ To hear Skycoin December updates directly from Synth, listen to his chat with Coin Interview or CryptoRich (Part I & II).

Software

Skywire

Work on the Skywire mainnet continues. Skywire mainnet represents a substantial feat of software engineering — it is not a proxy or VPN layered on top of the existing internet, rather it is an entirely new networking protocol.

The mainnet debut will mark the beginning of the software development for Skywire, as it will be improved through continuous debugging and software updates. In time, Skywire will feature a zero-configuration setup that will allow the Skyfleet plug-and-play deployment of their Skyminers to immediately begin supporting the network with resources and earning coins.

Meanwhile the testnet continues with payments to support the Skyfleet members who are running Skyminers. December testnet rewards saw 16,000 and 24,000 SKY distributed to DIY and Official Skyminers, respectively. As of December 31st there were 9432 Skywire nodes online! This compares to the 10,340 Bitcoin and 5,100 Lightning nodes currently running. Watch the growth of the Skywire nodes here and check your testnet uptime here.

Everyone in the Skyfleet community are encouraged to build DIY miners as soon as possible and not to wait until mainnet. When the mainnet launches, nodes will be re-flashed to enable direct bandwidth metering and rewards based on packets provided vs consumed.

Obelisk

Obelisk achieves network consensus between nodes based on a Web-of-Trust and public broadcast channel. This represents a completely new paradigm in blockchain consensus beyond Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake. Synth has continued to provide more insights into the technical workings of the consensus mechanism:

“We have a network of nodes identified by public keys and they publish messages. Anyone subscribed to a particular public key will connect to other people subscribed to the public key and they replicate the messages peer-to-peer like Bittorrent…

If you have a war or all the submarine cables are cut and someone sends a message over HAM radio from California to Australia and one person in the country gets it, and there are wires within the country, the message will replicate…You can have satellite of only 200kbps of bandwidth they can provide the global network consensus state to that whole country and it will replicate across land…we put a lot of work into the robustness of this messaging protocol…”

This functionality of Obelisk integrates with CXO, our immutable object system, and Skywire, our peer-to-peer wireless mesh networking protocol, to create an incredibly resilient distributed system for the transfer of Skycoins and encrypted internet traffic packets.

With the prolonged bear market and disappearance of many imitation coins, we are finally ready to implement the completed version of Obelisk which will come online in 2019 after the Skywire mainnet has been deployed.

CX

The first complete edition of the CX programming guide has been released, and covers all features of CX up to implementation v0.5.18. The programming guide can be downloaded here. Big thanks to Amaury Hernandez-Aguila for his hard work in compiling this guide and his ongoing efforts with CX.

The next big development milestone for CX will be blockchain integration. Developers will soon be able to prototype CX programs on their own Skycoin blockchain and begin to build decentralized exchanges, online poker games, video games and other applications within the Skycoin ecosystem.

We are also working on partnerships with Chinese universities where we will see CX taught as a programming language in blockchain university courses.

The programming guide for CX version 0.5.18 has now been released can be downloaded now.

Github/developer contributions

As other crypto projects are imploding, Skycoin development continues apace. GitHub contributions were strong throughout December. Work in the publically viewable repositories of Skycoin Core repo, the Skycoin hardware wallet repo and the CX repo show solid progress as we move into 2019.

Hardware

The Skywallet is the main focus of the Skycoin hardware incubator, as we aim to create a low cost yet high-quality metal-finish hardware wallet that improves the availability of secure coin storage for anyone. Hardware wallet manufacturing is complete, however software development to integrate with the desktop wallet is ongoing. Once this is complete, Skywallets will begin shipping from the Skycoin merchandise store.