Updates on Wavelet

Public release is being postponed.

If you have been following our Telegram over the past few months, I have been promising an update on Wavelet for quite some time now.

I’m here to deliver the full picture of what has been going on with Wavelet’s development. But before kicking into it, here’s a brief timeline on what has been happening over the past few months.

The Past

By the end of August 2019, we had open-sourced and gained public traction on two core Go projects that were components of Wavelet: Noise, and Life.

The first version of Wavelet had been stabilized by then and was used to successfully run a private deployment of ICC’s TradeFlow trade digitization platform by Perlin’s Trade Team.

This directly resulted in a long run of strongly positive press coverage, which resulted in the business development team kicking into high gear over the following months.

This freed up time for the development team and me to tread onwards with our internal milestones to get Wavelet ready for a public release.

Embargo

Forwarding on to December 2019, a lot of time and effort had by then been spent rigorously testing internal Wavelet deployments alongside the private deployment we had made for our trade partners.

It was around this time that we had realized a couple of key technical challenges in our testing that raised concerns for Wavelet’s public release.

I advised the business team immediately that there was a need to double down on efforts from the tech team to make the public release in Q1 2020 viable.

In an attempt to directly solve these key technical challenges, I began working on a set of solutions that then led to a radically different blockchain consensus architecture codenamed Himitsu.

Collectively as a team, we had then set an internal deadline to find a solution to these new challenges by the end of February.

This included rigorous assessment of alternative viable options for the public release; fully aware that everything retrospectively was within R&D territory.

We invested heavily to explore every possible option to enable us to publicly launch Wavelet.

The End

By the end of February, we had exhausted every possible contingency we could think of. And unfortunately, the end of Q1 was fast approaching.

This led us as a team to make an incredibly painful decision to indefinitely postpone the public deployment of Wavelet due to outstanding technical challenges.

The Way Forward

A brutally honest cost-benefit analysis was conducted by the executive team and me.

This took into account the long-term interests of the Perlin project and our community, the needs of our wider cryptocurrency ecosystem, and value-added utility for our token holders.

It was ultimately decided that our development resources would be better spent focusing on the commercial opportunities we already had in hand in international trade, shipping, supply chain, carbon, and other key verticals.

As a result, we have made the decision that Perlin will from then on build its future enterprise solutions on leading solutions such as Ethereum so that we could create real utility for our token holders faster.

While this is incredibly saddening, the extensive R&D, auditing and further extensive testing that would be needed to realize a public secure and functional deployment of Wavelet (even under Himitsu) would significantly delay our ability to take advantage of our pressing commercial opportunities.

Despite some promising progress with Himitsu and a number of other possible viable options, we do not believe any of our efforts were sufficient enough to support a public Wavelet release that could address the problems we had found earlier.

Taking Time Off

On a personal note, the last two years has been a really rocky rollercoaster for me and the team. Despite that, I am very, very proud under Perlin to have authored Noise, Life, Wavelet, Himitsu, and several other pieces of software and important research to the company and community.

Working with incredibly talented minds such as Heyang Zhou and the rest of the team, we had a singular, focused vision to fix and scale the decentralized tech space from the ground up once and for all.

For myself, I have made a combination of approximately 5,000+ code commits, pull requests, and issues under Perlin over these past two years, which has left me extremely proud but exhausted.

I have greatly enjoyed my time as Perlin’s CTO since its inception, but I would now like to take the time to breathe and begin exploring new options.

Nonetheless, I want to emphasize that I continue to have the utmost confidence in the Perlin team’s abilities and am personally excited for whatever is to come next.

I hope that it resonates with you day by day, that the team still strives to make huge progress on the business side; signing incredible deals that I see in my opinion will create enormous value for our ecosystem in the coming months and years.

To close it off, I would just like to thank you all for your support and faith in me over these past two years.

Although I am stepping away from Perlin for the time being, rest assured I will always continue to be a part of the Perlin ecosystem someway somehow.

Again, I have the greatest confidence in the abilities of the team, and I wish everyone in the community all the very best.

’Til then,

Kenta Iwasaki

PS. Dorjee and I will be doing an AMA on Tuesday 24 March @ 6pm SGT (GMT+8) on our Telegram channel https://t.me/perlinnetworkchat. We want to give you all a chance to ask questions and hear about next steps for Perlin.

Do check out the post by the Perlin Team here: https://medium.com/perlin-network/the-way-forward-for-perlin-5844df89d651

Please submit any questions you have to: https://forms.gle/sN5PPziihrMAdwS69