It’s been a month since I wrote my first articles on SmartCash (part 1 and part 2). Today we are going to take a look at what has happened since then.

The past month has been packed to the brim with events and dramas, both for SMART and Crypto in general. In this post I would like to go over some important developments and see what this means for us in the future.

If you are new to SMART, this will be a great way to get a feel for what has happened recently, while SMART veterans can look back and remember the events that seem old and forgotten by now. In Crypto Land time moves way too fast!

All Time High

Shortly after publishing my two articles, SMART decided to go for the moon.

Look at that beauty. The sexiest thing you’ll see in Crypto!

It was going up day by day, tracing that sweet exponential curve (I believe the technical term is FOMO ;). SmartCash went smashing right into the Top 100, causing an influx of attention and spreading awareness among the population. I have to say, it was glorious to watch! Congrats to the SMART team, always great when you get to see your work pay off.

All time high was at around 19 cents. Of course, it was not sustained for long, but still we went over my prediction of 10 cents by the end of this year, and then held on at 8–9 long enough to sell for anyone who wanted to sell. So, I count that as 1 out of 3 of my predictions came true. Next one is 30 cents by mid 2018 :)

As much as I would love to think that it was my writing behind all this mooning business, actually it was due to a combination of different things…

First, the SmartRewards November cycle was starting soon. Newcomers were asking questions like “Wait, so you’re telling me SMART pays 25% interest per month? Is that a mistake?” Answer: “No, it’s real, lol” (although now it’s around 13%).

Around that time, HitBTC decided to list SMART on their exchange.

Then there was a video on SMART by an influential YouTuber, Crypt0.

The last, but perhaps the most important event was the “Cryptopia situation”, which is our next stop!

The Cryptopia Drama

Right before the reward cycle was about to begin on the 25th of October and all that new attention driving up the prices, the largest exchange for SMART, Cryptopia, decided to put their wallet in maintenance mode. No new SMART deposits and withdrawals could be processed. Some people’s coins went missing for a while, sent from their wallets but not showing up on Cryptopia’s balances list.

That caused a bit of a panic as rumors started to spread that Cryptopia did that in order to participate in SmartRewards with their users coins. In reality it was caused by a technical problems with the wallet, and Cryptopia was not very fast to coordinate with the SMART developers to fix the issue.

Engage panic mode

I can only imagine the stress for the SMART developer team. But they handled it well and due to exceptional circumstances, decided to make an exception and extend the start of the new rewards cycle by 3 days.

While other, smaller exchanges reported that the issues had been resolved, Cryptopia fixed theirs almost at the same time as the chain snapshot was taken after those 3 extra days. Sadly, many missed out on the SmartRewards because of that…

So what caused the technical issues? Let’s find out.

Renewal turned off

ZeroCoin protocol, as we’ve discussed in my previous article, is a way to renew your coins and make them fungible. At the end of October, however, developers noticed something strange. The pool servers were running under high load, caused by the suspiciously high number of renewal requests. In fact, it was an attack exploiting a vulnerability in ZeroCoin protocol. The attacker managed to create 2.1 million new coins this way.

Now, before you say that SMART is broken or insecure, let’s make it clear that the ZeroCoin implementation is complicated and was not developed from scratch by the SMART team. Think of it as a module that you can plug in into your project. Many other coins, such as ZCoin and PIVX, use the same or slightly modified code. But the underlying core code is probably too complicated and doesn’t change often. So any network using this feature would have the same vulnerability.

I guess it’s Cancel for now…

In addition to the bug itself, developers mentioned that the load on the network would be too great even if everything was functioning correctly. Suspending the feature was clearly the best solution. You can read the full announcement about it here.

For myself, I was impressed how the team communicated and handled the situation. They even promised to destroy the same amount of coins that the attacker managed to create. This gives me more confidence in the project.

In other news…

It has been an incredibly active month for SmartCash.

I try to keep an eye on the updates and news about SMART, yet still I’ve learned about many things that I’ve missed while preparing this article.

Let’s try to give a brief summary about other news and events.

— A new desktop wallet was released (version 1.0.0) with an improved sync speed and better looks. More work on the web wallet and a brand new thing called BrainWallet. Just memorize a phrase and your SMART address will be generated from it!

SmartCash Linux wallet looking slicker than ever!

— New users means new languages, and now we have the website in Dutch, Greek, Finnish and Chinese!

— SMART’s core strength is its community management and projects. A better version of SmartHive voting is online now at vote.smartcash.cc. The community fund is now at 530M SMART (around $19M). You can do a lot of good in the world with that amount, if the spending is wise. Governance is very important for a project with that much resources.

— SMART has been represented at the Humanitarian Blockchain Summit in New York. I know this is very early to say, but going forward, I actually want

to be a part of a project that helps the world, not just make its users rich. SMART is in a very good position here.

— Personally, I’ve been lucky enough to win a prize for my previous articles in the SmartCash writing contest! I feel very happy and grateful. Yet another reason to be part of this awesome community! :)

I saved the best for last. The Smart Instant Pay feature is almost here. This is huge news for SMART, as it will support SMART nodes that normal users can run and (probably) earn additional rewards with. Looking at other projects with similar networks of masternodes, the most famous one being Dash, it seems that this feature would certainly attract new users. And yes, I do expect the price to reflect this very soon!

With all this happening, the future is pretty bright for SmartCash!

Enjoyed reading about SMART? Tips are very welcomed at: SNg865wP4Yu81JirZtS2Cjpd1H2oT7ahSG

If you would like to learn more about SmartCash please visit https://www.SmartCash.cc.