As the second quarter of 2019 comes to an end, here it is, the first Bitgrin Quarterly Report! This report aims to provide our community with a round up of all the important milestones achieved throughout Q2 and prepare us for what the team has in store for Q3.

Some highlights of this Quarter include:

Kingfish 2.0 release(dev beta)

ASIC vs GPU Decision

July 17 Grin hard fork Implementation(without new algo)

Increased community involvement and awareness

Team size increases

First real-life Bitgrin transaction and much more…

Q2 Roadmap Breakdown

As stated in the original roadmap, the core dev team’s main focus for Q2 was to make the Bitgrin Ecosystem more stable; this entailed improving the Bitgrin node, Kingfish wallet and pools. Due to the novelty and ingenuity of Mimblewimble, there still are many bugs that are being discovered and the team has to actively come with innovative ways to tackle these, as previous code from other chains cannot be referenced or used(we’ve seen lead dev, Pharazen, patch bugs on the fly frequently in the Discord channel).

Significant Improvements to the Kingfish Wallet

Since it’s inception, Kingfish has gone through numerous iterations where new features have been added and bugs have been patched. Below are detailed some of the more important updates brought forth to Kingfish this quarter.

Kingfish Wallet(v. 1.03, 1.05…)

Improved wallet stability; Mac OS support

Added dark mode

Added transaction history page; payment notifications

Logging improvements

Kingfish 2.0(beta)*

refactoring of the Bitgrin codebase; creates a separation of concerns between nodes and wallets(no more sync issues)

improved reorg protection, p2p networking

updated slate format based on the Grin v2 slate format

many QoL improvements introduced

The main change in Kingfish 2.0 is that it’s no longer a GUI interface of the SLI wallet. Now it will run its own node. This cuts all the bugs out basically, adding hypersync everyone can just download it and be synced up in 20sec. — Smaug, core team member

Simplified Mining Postponed

The simplified mining feature for the Kingfish wallet has been postponed until further notice as the core dev team channeled their efforts to improving stability in the ecosystem.

Current Stance on the ASIC Debate.

“Regarding the ASIC debate, it looks like most community members are against ASICs on the network at the moment. We will hard fork out every time hopefully, but this is a education thing. We will make a framework to easily fork out and design the 3rd party libraries with that in mind.” — Smaug, core team member

This Quarter, core team member Smaug opened up a channel for discussion where community members shared their thoughts on whether Bitgrin ought to go ASIC resistant or not. You can find the discussion here and share your thoughts. Here are some insights that were shared in the discussion.

“The most decentralized and censorship resistant network would be one where everyone can mine at the same rate” — Smaug

“Sorry I don't have the fund to buy C31 asics, only few can, so we can expect move from decentralization to centralization” — GundamZ

“My two sats is ASICS are better for long term stability because they are generally more loyal to the network they mine. GPU miners switch back and forth to whats most profitable.” — TheEveOfAdam

The team has also decided to implement the July 17 Grin Hard Fork without the Cuckarood29 algo change.

Community Growth

The Bitgrin Weekly Newsletter has been established by community member, Crypto Gatsby, to keep others informed on new developments and community initiatives. The newsletter has +100 weekly views , and has been climbing every week.

Community members, Hagrid and Felipe, had the first real-life Bitgrin transaction where XBG was traded for Bitgrin stickers.

The official Bitgrin twitter account reaches 950 followers.

A new Bitgrin reddit page has been created called r/XBG, you can follow it here.

The team grows; Pan-K is designated moderator role and Crypto Gatsby as community manager.

Other community members express their passion for Bitgrin and share their merch/stickers.

A Glance Into This Upcoming Quarter

Q3 has in store a bunch of exciting developments from the Bitgrin Core team. These updates aim to make transacting with Bitgrin a much more seamless experience and increase its availability by getting XBG listed on new exchanges; these developments will push for wider adoption of Bitgrin. Bitgrin Pay, the mobile and light wallet will all improve the user experience while developments such as the Javascript Library will help developers create on Bitgrin.

Javascript Library

“The Javascript library will allow developers to easily integrate with BitGrin and build wallets, exchanges, games, or anything they can imagine. In thee longer term wee expect this to become the go-to library for third party developers to build out an ecosystem of high end BitGrin applications, similar to how web3 enables this for Ethereum dApps” —Pharazen

Bitgrin Pay

“BitGrinPay is a specification for a simple way to send payments to users. This can be used to simplify payments from exchanges and pools where the recipient may not be able to easily accept HTTP(S) payouts. The BitGrin GUI wallet, Kingfish, implements BitGrinPay to simply orchestrate transaction file exchanges. ” — Pharazen

This new mechanism will make transacting in Bitgrin faster and more reliable as users won’t have to manually transfer files back and forth too complete a transaction or encounter the widespread issues of transferring Bitgrin through the IP address.

Mobile & Light wallet

These wallets will allow users to hold and transact Bitgrin from their phones.

Further exchange support; only Vinex right now.

Currently we are listed on Vinex Exchange. We are looking for increased exchange support so people can more easily acquire and trade Bitgrin.

Quick Wrap Up

The Bitgrin team has made strong progress on the development front for Bitgrin this quarter and we managed see the strong enthusiasm our community has for the project. Looking forward to see what Q3 brings on as we bring XBG to the masses!

To stay up-to-date with the Bitgrin community you can continue the conversation at:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/BitGrin

Discord: https://discord.gg/Mku54g

Telegram: https://t.co/jnKORmesBi

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/xbg

Website: https://bitgrin.io/

This newsletter is curated by Crypto Gatsby, for the Bitgrin community.

*This release is intended for developer testing and feedback, with a public release (with binaries) coming after some initial testing.