Vision Statement

A common sentiment is brewing online; a shared desire for the internet that might have been. After decades of corporate encroachment, you don't need to be a power user to realize that something has gone very wrong.
In the early days of the internet, the future was bright. In that future, when you sent an instant message, it traveled directly to the recipient. When you needed to pay a friend, you announced a transfer of value to their public key. When an app was missing a feature you wanted, you opened up the source code and implemented it. When you took a picture on your phone, it was immediately encrypted and backed up to storage that you controlled. In that future, people would laugh at the idea of having to authenticate themselves to some corporation before doing these things.
What did we get instead? Rather than a network of human-sized communities, we have a handful of enormous commons, each controlled by a faceless corporate entity. Hey user, want to send a message? You can, but we'll store a copy of it indefinitely, unencrypted, for our preference-learning algorithms to pore over; how else could we slap targeted ads on every piece of content you see? Want to pay a friend? You can—in our Monopoly money. Want a new feature? Submit a request to our Support Center and we'll totally maybe think about it. Want to backup a photo? You can—inside our walled garden, which only we (and the NSA, of course) can access. Just be careful what you share, because merely locking you out of your account and deleting all your data is far from the worst thing we could do.
You rationalize this: "MEGACORP would never do such a thing; it would be bad for business." But we all know, at some level, that this state of affairs, this inversion of power, is not merely "unfortunate" or "suboptimal" – No. It is degrading. Even if MEGACORP were purely benevolent, it is degrading that we must ask its permission to talk to our friends; that we must rely on it to safeguard our treasured memories; that our digital lives are completely beholden to those who seek only to extract value from us.
At the root of this issue is the centralization of data. MEGACORP can surveil you—because your emails and video chats flow through their servers. And MEGACORP can control you—because they hold your data hostage. But centralization is a solution to a technical problem: How can we make the user's data accessible from anywhere in the world, on any device? For a long time, no alternative solution to this problem was forthcoming.
Today, thanks to a confluence of established techniques and recent innovations, we have solved the accessibility problem without resorting to centralization. Hashing, encryption, and erasure encoding got us most of the way, but one barrier remained: incentives. How do you incentivize an anonymous stranger to store your data? Earlier protocols like BitTorrent worked around this limitation by relying on altruism, tit-for-tat requirements, or "points" – in other words, nothing you could pay your electric bill with. Finally, in 2009, a solution appeared: Bitcoin. Not long after, Sia was born.
Cryptography has unleashed the latent power of the internet by enabling interactions between mutually-distrustful parties. Sia harnesses this power to turn the cloud storage market into a proper marketplace, where buyers and sellers can transact directly, with no intermediaries, anywhere in the world. No more silos or walled gardens: your data is encrypted, so it can't be spied on, and it's stored on many servers, so no single entity can hold it hostage. Thanks to projects like Sia, the internet is being re-decentralized.
Sia began its life as a startup, which means it has always been subjected to two competing forces: the ideals of its founders, and the profit motive inherent to all businesses. Its founders have taken great pains to never compromise on the former, but this often threatened the company's financial viability. With the establishment of the Sia Foundation, this tension is resolved. The Foundation, freed of the obligation to generate profit, is a pure embodiment of the ideals from which Sia originally sprung.
The goals and responsibilities of the Foundation are numerous: to maintain core Sia protocols and consensus code; to support developers building on top of Sia and its protocols; to promote Sia and facilitate partnerships in other spheres and communities; to ensure that users can easily acquire and safely store siacoins; to develop network scalability solutions; to implement hardforks and lead the community through them; and much more. In a broader sense, its mission is to commoditize data storage, making it cheap, ubiquitous, and accessible to all, without compromising privacy or performance.
Sia is a perfect example of how we can achieve better living through cryptography. We now begin a new chapter in Sia's history. May our stewardship lead it into a bright future.
 

Overview

Today, we are proposing the creation of the Sia Foundation: a new non-profit entity that builds and supports distributed cloud storage infrastructure, with a specific focus on the Sia storage platform. What follows is an informal overview of the Sia Foundation, covering two major topics: how the Foundation will be funded, and what its funds will be used for.

Organizational Structure

The Sia Foundation will be structured as a non-profit entity incorporated in the United States, likely a 501(c)(3) organization or similar. The actions of the Foundation will be constrained by its charter, which formalizes the specific obligations and overall mission outlined in this document. The charter will be updated on an annual basis to reflect the current goals of the Sia community.
The organization will be operated by a board of directors, initially comprising Luke Champine as President and Eddie Wang as Chairman. Luke Champine will be leaving his position at Nebulous to work at the Foundation full-time, and will seek to divest his shares of Nebulous stock along with other potential conflicts of interest. Neither Luke nor Eddie personally own any siafunds or significant quantities of siacoin.

Funding

The primary source of funding for the Foundation will come from a new block subsidy. Following a hardfork, 30 KS per block will be allocated to the "Foundation Fund," continuing in perpetuity. The existing 30 KS per block miner reward is not affected. Additionally, one year's worth of block subsidies (approximately 1.57 GS) will be allocated to the Fund immediately upon activation of the hardfork.
As detailed below, the Foundation will provably burn any coins that it cannot meaningfully spend. As such, the 30 KS subsidy should be viewed as a maximum. This allows the Foundation to grow alongside Sia without requiring additional hardforks.
The Foundation will not be funded to any degree by the possession or sale of siafunds. Siafunds were originally introduced as a means of incentivizing growth, and we still believe in their effectiveness: a siafund holder wants to increase the amount of storage on Sia as much as possible. While the Foundation obviously wants Sia to succeed, its driving force should be its charter. Deriving significant revenue from siafunds would jeopardize the Foundation's impartiality and focus. Ultimately, we want the Foundation to act in the best interests of Sia, not in growing its own budget.

Responsibilities

The Foundation inherits a great number of responsibilities from Nebulous. Each quarter, the Foundation will publish the progress it has made over the past quarter, and list the responsibilities it intends to prioritize over the coming quarter. This will be accompanied by a financial report, detailing each area of expenditure over the past quarter, and forecasting expenditures for the coming quarter. Below, we summarize some of the myriad responsibilities towards which the Foundation is expected to allocate its resources.

Maintain and enhance core Sia software

Arguably, this is the most important responsibility of the Foundation. At the heart of Sia is its consensus algorithm: regardless of other differences, all Sia software must agree upon the content and rules of the blockchain. It is therefore crucial that the algorithm be stewarded by an entity that is accountable to the community, transparent in its decision-making, and has no profit motive or other conflicts of interest.
Accordingly, Sia’s consensus functionality will no longer be directly maintained by Nebulous. Instead, the Foundation will release and maintain an implementation of a "minimal Sia full node," comprising the Sia consensus algorithm and P2P networking code. The source code will be available in a public repository, and signed binaries will be published for each release.
Other parties may use this code to provide alternative full node software. For example, Nebulous may extend the minimal full node with wallet, renter, and host functionality. The source code of any such implementation may be submitted to the Foundation for review. If the code passes review, the Foundation will provide "endorsement signatures" for the commit hash used and for binaries compiled internally by the Foundation. Specifically, these signatures assert that the Foundation believes the software contains no consensus-breaking changes or other modifications to imported Foundation code. Endorsement signatures and Foundation-compiled binaries may be displayed and distributed by the receiving party, along with an appropriate disclaimer.
A minimal full node is not terribly useful on its own; the wallet, renter, host, and other extensions are what make Sia a proper developer platform. Currently, the only implementations of these extensions are maintained by Nebulous. The Foundation will contract Nebulous to ensure that these extensions continue to receive updates and enhancements. Later on, the Foundation intends to develop its own implementations of these extensions and others. As with the minimal node software, these extensions will be open source and available in public repositories for use by any Sia node software.
With the consensus code now managed by the Foundation, the task of implementing and orchestrating hardforks becomes its responsibility as well. When the Foundation determines that a hardfork is necessary (whether through internal discussion or via community petition), a formal proposal will be drafted and submitted for public review, during which arguments for and against the proposal may be submitted to a public repository. During this time, the hardfork code will be implemented, either by Foundation employees or by external contributors working closely with the Foundation. Once the implementation is finished, final arguments will be heard. The Foundation board will then vote whether to accept or reject the proposal, and announce their decision along with appropriate justification. Assuming the proposal was accepted, the Foundation will announce the block height at which the hardfork will activate, and will subsequently release source code and signed binaries that incorporate the hardfork code.
Regardless of the Foundation's decision, it is the community that ultimately determines whether a fork is accepted or rejected – nothing can change that. Foundation node software will never automatically update, so all forks must be explicitly adopted by users. Furthermore, the Foundation will provide replay and wipeout protection for its hard forks, protecting other chains from unintended or malicious reorgs. Similarly, the Foundation will ensure that any file contracts formed prior to a fork activation will continue to be honored on both chains until they expire.
Finally, the Foundation also intends to pursue scalability solutions for the Sia blockchain. In particular, work has already begun on an implementation of Utreexo, which will greatly reduce the space requirements of fully-validating nodes (allowing a full node to be run on a smartphone) while increasing throughput and decreasing initial sync time. A hardfork implementing Utreexo will be submitted to the community as per the process detailed above.
As this is the most important responsibility of the Foundation, it will receive a significant portion of the Foundation’s budget, primarily in the form of developer salaries and contracting agreements.

Support community services

We intend to allocate 25% of the Foundation Fund towards the community. This allocation will be held and disbursed in the form of siacoins, and will pay for grants, bounties, hackathons, and other community-driven endeavours.
Any community-run service, such as a Skynet portal, explorer or web wallet, may apply to have its costs covered by the Foundation. Upon approval, the Foundation will reimburse expenses incurred by the service, subject to the exact terms agreed to. The intent of these grants is not to provide a source of income, but rather to make such services "break even" for their operators, so that members of the community can enrich the Sia ecosystem without worrying about the impact on their own finances.

Ensure easy acquisition and storage of siacoins

Most users will acquire their siacoins via an exchange. The Foundation will provide support to Sia-compatible exchanges, and pursue relevant integrations at its discretion, such as Coinbase's new Rosetta standard. The Foundation may also release DEX software that enables trading cryptocurrencies without the need for a third party. (The Foundation itself will never operate as a money transmitter.)
Increasingly, users are storing their cryptocurrency on hardware wallets. The Foundation will maintain the existing Ledger Nano S integration, and pursue further integrations at its discretion.
Of course, all hardware wallets must be paired with software running on a computer or smartphone, so the Foundation will also develop and/or maintain client-side wallet software, including both full-node wallets and "lite" wallets. Community-operated wallet services, i.e. web wallets, may be funded via grants.
Like core software maintenance, this responsibility will be funded in the form of developer salaries and contracting agreements.

Protect the ecosystem

When it comes to cryptocurrency security, patching software vulnerabilities is table stakes; there are significant legal and social threats that we must be mindful of as well. As such, the Foundation will earmark a portion of its fund to defend the community from legal action. The Foundation will also safeguard the network from 51% attacks and other threats to network security by implementing softforks and/or hardforks where necessary.
The Foundation also intends to assist in the development of a new FOSS software license, and to solicit legal memos on various Sia-related matters, such as hosting in the United States and the EU.
In a broader sense, the establishment of the Foundation makes the ecosystem more robust by transferring core development to a more neutral entity. Thanks to its funding structure, the Foundation will be immune to various forms of pressure that for-profit companies are susceptible to.

Drive adoption of Sia

Although the overriding goal of the Foundation is to make Sia the best platform it can be, all that work will be in vain if no one uses the platform. There are a number of ways the Foundation can promote Sia and get it into the hands of potential users and developers.
In-person conferences are understandably far less popular now, but the Foundation can sponsor and/or participate in virtual conferences. (In-person conferences may be held in the future, permitting circumstances.) Similarly, the Foundation will provide prizes for hackathons, which may be organized by community members, Nebulous, or the Foundation itself. Lastly, partnerships with other companies in the cryptocurrency space—or the cloud storage space—are a great way to increase awareness of Sia. To handle these responsibilities, one of the early priorities of the Foundation will be to hire a marketing director.

Fund Management

The Foundation Fund will be controlled by a multisig address. Each member of the Foundation's board will control one of the signing keys, with the signature threshold to be determined once the final composition of the board is known. (This threshold may also be increased or decreased if the number of board members changes.) Additionally, one timelocked signing key will be controlled by David Vorick. This key will act as a “dead man’s switch,” to be used in the event of an emergency that prevents Foundation board members from reaching the signature threshold. The timelock ensures that this key cannot be used unless the Foundation fails to sign a transaction for several months.
On the 1st of each month, the Foundation will use its keys to transfer all siacoins in the Fund to two new addresses. The first address will be controlled by a high-security hot wallet, and will receive approximately one month's worth of Foundation expenditures. The second address, receiving the remaining siacoins, will be a modified version of the source address: specifically, it will increase the timelock on David Vorick's signing key by one month. Any other changes to the set of signing keys, such as the arrival or departure of board members, will be incorporated into this address as well.
The Foundation Fund is allocated in SC, but many of the Foundation's expenditures must be paid in USD or other fiat currency. Accordingly, the Foundation will convert, at its discretion, a portion of its monthly withdrawals to fiat currency. We expect this conversion to be primarily facilitated by private "OTC" sales to accredited investors. The Foundation currently has no plans to speculate in cryptocurrency or other assets.
Finally, it is important that the Foundation adds value to the Sia platform well in excess of the inflation introduced by the block subsidy. For this reason, the Foundation intends to provably burn, on a quarterly basis, any coins that it cannot allocate towards any justifiable expense. In other words, coins will be burned whenever doing so provides greater value to the platform than any other use. Furthermore, the Foundation will cap its SC treasury at 5% of the total supply, and will cap its USD treasury at 4 years’ worth of predicted expenses.
 
Addendum: Hardfork Timeline
We would like to see this proposal finalized and accepted by the community no later than September 30th. A new version of siad, implementing the hardfork, will be released no later than October 15th. The hardfork will activate at block 293220, which is expected to occur around 12pm EST on January 1st, 2021.
 
Addendum: Inflation specifics
The total supply of siacoins as of January 1st, 2021 will be approximately 45.243 GS. The initial subsidy of 1.57 GS thus increases the supply by 3.47%, and the total annual inflation in 2021 will be at most 10.4% (if zero coins are burned). In 2022, total annual inflation will be at most 6.28%, and will steadily decrease in subsequent years.
 

Conclusion

We see the establishment of the Foundation as an important step in the maturation of the Sia project. It provides the ecosystem with a sustainable source of funding that can be exclusively directed towards achieving Sia's ambitious goals. Compared to other projects with far deeper pockets, Sia has always punched above its weight; once we're on equal footing, there's no telling what we'll be able to achieve.
Nevertheless, we do not propose this change lightly, and have taken pains to ensure that the Foundation will act in accordance with the ideals that this community shares. It will operate transparently, keep inflation to a minimum, and respect the user's fundamental role in decentralized systems. We hope that everyone in the community will consider this proposal carefully, and look forward to a productive discussion.

I think some of the console tools available with HW wallets today are greatly under utilized. Here's a quick write-up on how to create and sign a TXN very similar to 43d27...1fc06 found on the SLIP-14 wallet. I'll be using TrezorCTL, Electrum, and HWI for the signing. I won't go much into the setup or install, but feel free to ask if you have questions about it. Note, you don't have to use all three of these. Any one will produce a valid signed TXN for broadcast. I just showed how to do it three ways. Whats more some of the Electrum and HWI steps are interchangeable.
ColdCard also has a utility called ckcc that will do the sign operation instead of HWI, but in many ways they are interchangeable. KeepKey and Ledger both have libraries for scripted signing but no one-shot, one-line console apps that I know of. But HWI and Electrum of course work on all four.

TrezorCTL

This is the what most would think of to use to craft and sign TXNs, and is definitely very simple. The signing uses a script called build_tx.py to create a JSON file that is then used by the btc sign-tx command. The whole process is basically:

1. tools/build_tx.py | trezorctl btc sign-tx -

This just means, take the output of build_tx and sign it. To copy 43d27...1fc06, I wrote a small script to feed build_tx, so my process looks like:

1. ~/input.sh | tools/build_tx.py | trezorctl btc sign-tx -

But it's all very simple. Note... I used TrezorCTL v0.12.2 but build_tx.py version 0.13.0 ¹.

input.sh

```

!/bin/bash

secho() { sleep 1; echo $*}
secho "Testnet" # coin name secho "tbtc1.trezor.io" # blockbook server and outpoint (below) secho "e294c4c172c3d87991b0369e45d6af8584be92914d01e3060fad1ed31d12ff00:0" secho "m/84'/1'/0'/0/0" # prev_out derivation to signing key secho "4294967293" # Sequence for RBF; hex(-3) secho "segwit" # Signature type on prev_out to use secho "" # NACK to progress to outs secho "2MsiAgG5LVDmnmJUPnYaCeQnARWGbGSVnr3" # out[0].addr secho "10000000" # out[1].amt secho "tb1q9l0rk0gkgn73d0gc57qn3t3cwvucaj3h8wtrlu" # out[1].addr secho "20000000" # out[1].amt secho "tb1qejqxwzfld7zr6mf7ygqy5s5se5xq7vmt96jk9x" # out[2].addr secho "99999694" # out[2].amt secho "" # NACK to progress to change secho "" # NACK to skip change secho "2" # txn.version secho "0" # txn.locktime ```

Electrum

Electrum is one of the better GUI wallets available, but it also has a pretty good console interface. Like before you need your Trezor with the SLIP-14 wallet loaded and paired to Electrum. I'll assume Electrum is up and running with the Trezor wallet loaded to make things simple.
Like with TrezorCTL, Electrum feeds on a JSON file, but unlike TrezorCTL it needs that JSON squished into the command line. This is a simple sed command, but I won't bore you with the details, but just assume that's done. So the process in Electrum (v4.0.3) looks like:

1. electrum serialize (create psbt to sign)
2. electrum --wallet signtransaction (sign said psbt)

Still pretty simple right! Below is the JSON I smushed for #1

txn.json

{ "inputs": [{ "prevout_hash":"e294c4c172c3d87991b0369e45d6af8584be92914d01e3060fad1ed31d12ff00", "prevout_n": 0, "value_sats": 129999867 }], "outputs": [{ "address": "2MsiAgG5LVDmnmJUPnYaCeQnARWGbGSVnr3", "value_sats": 10000000 },{ "address": "tb1q9l0rk0gkgn73d0gc57qn3t3cwvucaj3h8wtrlu", "value_sats": 20000000 },{ "address": "tb1qejqxwzfld7zr6mf7ygqy5s5se5xq7vmt96jk9x", "value_sats": 99999694 }]}

HWI

HWI is an unsung hero in my book. It's a very small clean and simple interface between HW wallets and Bitcoin Core. It currently supports a good range of HW wallets. It keeps itself narrowly focused on TXN signing and offloads most everything else to Bitcoin Core. Again, I'll assume you've imported your Trezor keypool into Core and done the requisite IBD and rescan. And if you don't have the RPC enabled, you can always clone these commands into the QT-console.
To sign our TXN in HWI (v1.1.2), we will first need to craft (and finalize) it in Bitcoin Core (0.21.1). Like in Electrum, we will have to use simple sed to smush some JSON into command arguments, but I'll assume you have that covered. It will take an inputs.json and an outputs.json named separately.

1. bitcoin-cli createpsbt (create psbt)
2. bitcoin-cli -rpcwallet= walletprocesspsbt (process psbt)
3. hwi -f signtx (sign psbt)
4. bitcoin-cli -rpcwallet= finalizepsbt (get a signed TXN from psbt)

A little more involved, but still nothing too bad. Plus this gives you the full power of Bitcoin Core including integrations with LND (lightning).

inputs.json

[{ "txid": "e294c4c172c3d87991b0369e45d6af8584be92914d01e3060fad1ed31d12ff00", "vout": 0 }]

outputs.json

[{ "2MsiAgG5LVDmnmJUPnYaCeQnARWGbGSVnr3": 0.10000000 },{ "tb1q9l0rk0gkgn73d0gc57qn3t3cwvucaj3h8wtrlu": 0.20000000 },{ "tb1qejqxwzfld7zr6mf7ygqy5s5se5xq7vmt96jk9x": 0.99999694 }]

Conclusion

This may all seem like very low level coding, but is surprisingly simple once you get a knack for it. Whats more, all these platforms support testnet which allows you to practice with valueless coins until you get the hang of it. And, like many things in bitcoin, this is all (mostly) python, which is one of the easier languages to learn.
Enjoy
<sup>Footnotes
1 - https://github.com/trezotrezor-firmware/issues/1296</sup>

https://github.com/gridcoin-community/Gridcoin-Research/releases/tag/5.0.0.0
Finally! After over ten months of development and testing, "Fern" has arrived! This is a whopper. 240 pull requests merged. Essentially a complete rewrite that was started with the scraper (the "neural net" rewrite) in "Denise" has now been completed. Practically the ENTIRE Gridcoin specific codebase resting on top of the vanilla Bitcoin/Peercoin/Blackcoin vanilla PoS code has been rewritten. This removes the team requirement at last (see below), although there are many other important improvements besides that.
Fern was a monumental undertaking. We had to encode all of the old rules active for the v10 block protocol in new code and ensure that the new code was 100% compatible. This had to be done in such a way as to clear out all of the old spaghetti and ring-fence it with tightly controlled class implementations. We then wrote an entirely new, simplified ruleset for research rewards and reengineered contracts (which includes beacon management, polls, and voting) using properly classed code. The fundamentals of Gridcoin with this release are now on a very sound and maintainable footing, and the developers believe the codebase as updated here will serve as the fundamental basis for Gridcoin's future roadmap.
We have been testing this for MONTHS on testnet in various stages. The v10 (legacy) compatibility code has been running on testnet continuously as it was developed to ensure compatibility with existing nodes. During the last few months, we have done two private testnet forks and then the full public testnet testing for v11 code (the new protocol which is what Fern implements). The developers have also been running non-staking "sentinel" nodes on mainnet with this code to verify that the consensus rules are problem-free for the legacy compatibility code on the broader mainnet. We believe this amount of testing is going to result in a smooth rollout.
Given the amount of changes in Fern, I am presenting TWO changelogs below. One is high level, which summarizes the most significant changes in the protocol. The second changelog is the detailed one in the usual format, and gives you an inkling of the size of this release.

Highlights

Protocol

Note that the protocol changes will not become active until we cross the hard-fork transition height to v11, which has been set at 2053000. Given current average block spacing, this should happen around October 4, about one month from now.
Note that to get all of the beacons in the network on the new protocol, we are requiring ALL beacons to be validated. A two week (14 day) grace period is provided by the code, starting at the time of the transition height, for people currently holding a beacon to validate the beacon and prevent it from expiring. That means that EVERY CRUNCHER must advertise and validate their beacon AFTER the v11 transition (around Oct 4th) and BEFORE October 18th (or more precisely, 14 days from the actual date of the v11 transition). If you do not advertise and validate your beacon by this time, your beacon will expire and you will stop earning research rewards until you advertise and validate a new beacon. This process has been made much easier by a brand new beacon "wizard" that helps manage beacon advertisements and renewals. Once a beacon has been validated and is a v11 protocol beacon, the normal 180 day expiration rules apply. Note, however, that the 180 day expiration on research rewards has been removed with the Fern update. This means that while your beacon might expire after 180 days, your earned research rewards will be retained and can be claimed by advertising a beacon with the same CPID and going through the validation process again. In other words, you do not lose any earned research rewards if you do not stake a block within 180 days and keep your beacon up-to-date.
The transition height is also when the team requirement will be relaxed for the network.

GUI

Besides the beacon wizard, there are a number of improvements to the GUI, including new UI transaction types (and icons) for staking the superblock, sidestake sends, beacon advertisement, voting, poll creation, and transactions with a message. The main screen has been revamped with a better summary section, and better status icons. Several changes under the hood have improved GUI performance. And finally, the diagnostics have been revamped.

Blockchain

The wallet sync speed has been DRASTICALLY improved. A decent machine with a good network connection should be able to sync the entire mainnet blockchain in less than 4 hours. A fast machine with a really fast network connection and a good SSD can do it in about 2.5 hours. One of our goals was to reduce or eliminate the reliance on snapshots for mainnet, and I think we have accomplished that goal with the new sync speed. We have also streamlined the in-memory structures for the blockchain which shaves some memory use.
There are so many goodies here it is hard to summarize them all.
I would like to thank all of the contributors to this release, but especially thank @cyrossignol, whose incredible contributions formed the backbone of this release. I would also like to pay special thanks to @barton2526, @caraka, and @Quezacoatl1, who tirelessly helped during the testing and polishing phase on testnet with testing and repeated builds for all architectures.
The developers are proud to present this release to the community and we believe this represents the starting point for a true renaissance for Gridcoin!

Summary Changelog

Accrual

Changed

Most significantly, nodes calculate research rewards directly from the magnitudes in EACH superblock between stakes instead of using a two- or three- point average based on a CPID's current magnitude and the magnitude for the CPID when it last staked. For those long-timers in the community, this has been referred to as "Superblock Windows," and was first done in proof-of-concept form by @denravonska.

• Network magnitude unit pinned to a static value of 0.25
• Max research reward allowed per block raised to 16384 GRC (from 12750 GRC)
• New CPIDs begin accruing research rewards from the first superblock that contains the CPID instead of from the time of the beacon advertisement

Removed

• 500 GRC research reward limit for a CPID's first stake
• 6-month expiration for unclaimed rewards
• 10-block spacing requirement between research reward claims
• Rolling 5-day payment-per-day limit
• Legacy tolerances for floating-point error and time drift
• The need to include a valid copy of a CPID's magnitude in a claim
• 10-block emission adjustment interval for the magnitude unit

Beacons

Added

• One-time beacon activation requires that participants temporarily change their usernames to a verification code at one whitelisted BOINC project
• Verification codes of pending beacons expire after 3 days
• Self-service beacon removal

Changed

• Burn fee for beacon advertisement increased from 0.00001 GRC to 0.5 GRC
• Rain addresses derived from beacon keys instead of a default wallet address
• Beacon expiration determined as of the current block instead of the previous block

Removed

• The ability for developers to remove beacons
• The ability to sign research reward claims with non-current but unexpired beacons

Unaltered

As a reminder:

• Beacons expire after 6 months pass (180 days)
• Beacons can be renewed after 5 months pass (150 days)
• Renewed beacons must be signed with the same key as the original beacon

Superblocks

Added

• Magnitudes less than 1 include two fractional places
• Magnitudes greater than or equal to 1 but less than 10 include one fractional place

Changed

• A valid superblock must match a scraper convergence

Removed

• Superblock popularity election mechanics

Voting

Added

• Yes/no/abstain and single-choice response types (no user-facing support yet)

Changed

• To create a poll, a maximum of 250 UTXOs for a single address must add up to 100000 GRC. These are selected from the largest downwards.
• Burn fee for creating polls scaled by the number of UTXOs claimed
  • 50 GRC for a poll contract
  • 0.001 GRC per claimed UTXO
• Burn fee for casting votes scaled by the number of UTXOs claimed
  • 0.01 GRC for a vote contract
  • 0.01 GRC to claim magnitude
  • 0.01 GRC per claimed address
  • 0.001 GRC per claimed UTXO
• Maximum length of a poll title: 80 characters
• Maximum length of a poll question: 100 characters
• Maximum length of a poll discussion website URL: 100 characters
• Maximum number of poll choices: 20
• Maximum length of a poll choice label: 100 characters

Removed

• Magnitude, CPID count, and participant count poll weight types
• The ability for developers to remove polls and votes

Detailed Changelog

[5.0.0.0] 2020-09-03, mandatory, "Fern"

Added

• Backport newer uint256 types from Bitcoin #1570 (@cyrossignol)
• Implement project level rain for rainbymagnitude #1580 (@jamescowens)
• Upgrade utilities (Update checker and snapshot downloadeapplication) #1576 (@iFoggz)
• Provide fees collected in the block by the miner #1601 (@iFoggz)
• Add support for generating legacy superblocks from scraper stats #1603 (@cyrossignol)
• Port of the Bitcoin Logger to Gridcoin #1600 (@jamescowens)
• Implement zapwallettxes #1605 (@jamescowens)
• Implements a global event filter to suppress help question mark #1609 (@jamescowens)
• Add next target difficulty to RPC output #1615 (@cyrossignol)
• Add caching for block hashes to CBlock #1624 (@cyrossignol)
• Make toolbars and tray icon red for testnet #1637 (@jamescowens)
• Add an rpc call convergencereport #1643 (@jamescowens)
• Implement newline filter on config file read in #1645 (@jamescowens)
• Implement beacon status icon/button #1646 (@jamescowens)
• Add gridcointestnet.png #1649 (@caraka)
• Add precision to support magnitudes less than 1 #1651 (@cyrossignol)
• Replace research accrual calculations with superblock snapshots #1657 (@cyrossignol)
• Publish example gridcoinresearch.conf as a md document to the doc directory #1662 (@jamescowens)
• Add options checkbox to disable transaction notifications #1666 (@jamescowens)
• Add support for self-service beacon deletion #1695 (@cyrossignol)
• Add support for type-specific contract fee amounts #1698 (@cyrossignol)
• Add verifiedbeaconreport and pendingbeaconreport #1696 (@jamescowens)
• Add preliminary testing option for block v11 height on testnet #1706 (@cyrossignol)
• Add verified beacons manifest part to superblock validator #1711 (@cyrossignol)
• Implement beacon, vote, and superblock display categories/icons in UI transaction model #1717 (@jamescowens)
• neuralnet: Add integrity checking to researcher accrual snapshot registry #1727 (@jamescowens)
• Add workaround for scrypt assembly on macOS #1740 (@cyrossignol)
• gui: Build onboarding/beacon wizard #1739 (@cyrossignol)
• doc: Add CONTRIBUTING.md from bitcoin #1723 (@div72)
• rpc: Implement inspectaccrualsnapshot and parseaccrualsnapshotfile #1744 (@jamescowens)
• scraper: Add disk based state backing for verified beacon list in scraper #1751 (@jamescowens)
• Add ability to recover beacon in block version 11+ #1768 (@cyrossignol)
• refactor: Add transaction context to contract handlers #1777 (@cyrossignol)
• gui: Add context for when BOINC is attached to a pool #1775 (@cyrossignol)
• doc: Clarify what to do if PR in multiple categories (for CONTRIBUTING.md) #1798 (@RoboticMind)
• qt: Add option to choose not to start the wallet minimized #1804 (@jamescowens)
• superblock: Add check for OutOfSyncByAge to SuperblockValidator::Validate #1806 (@jamescowens)
• contract: Standardize contract validation and add block context #1808 (@cyrossignol)
• add seed.gridcoin.pl to default config #1812 (@wilkart)
• gui: Implement sidestake send display #1813 (@jamescowens)
• gui: Add pool/investor pages to researcher wizard #1819 (@cyrossignol)
• ci: Port lint scripts from Bitcoin #1823 (@div72)
• doc: Create basic readme in contrib #1826 (@RoboticMind)
• gui: Implement TransactionRecord::Message #1829 (@jamescowens)
• rpc: Add private_key_available to beaconstatus #1833 (@a123b)
• gui: Validate email address in researcher wizard #1840 (@a123b)
• rpc: Add "getrawwallettransaction" RPC function #1842 (@cyrossignol)
• consensus: Set block version 11 threshold height for mainnet #1862 (@cyrossignol)

Changed

• Upgrade LevelDB from v1.17 to v1.20 #1562 (@cyrossignol)
• Re-enable scrypt optimizations #1450 (@denravonska)
• Derive CScript from prevector type (optimization) #1554 (@cyrossignol)
• Disable quorum for grandfathered blocks to speed up sync #1568 (@cyrossignol)
• Refactor hashBoinc for binary claim contexts #1558 (@cyrossignol)
• integrated_scraper_2 branch tracking PR #1559 (@jamescowens)
• Upgrade depends - OpenSSL to 1.1.1d #1581 (@jamescowens)
• Ubuntu 19.10 fixes #1590 (@denravonska)
• Force a re-parse of legacy claims in generated blocks #1592 (@cyrossignol)
• Improve the "versionreport" RPC output #1595 (@cyrossignol)
• Overhaul the core tally and accrual system #1583 (@cyrossignol)
• Overhaul the superblock quorum system #1597 (@cyrossignol)
• Add more data to the "superblocks" RPC output #1599 (@cyrossignol)
• Update Windows Build doc #1606 (@barton2526)
• Change the order of calls in gridcoinresearchd.cpp to optimize rpc shunt path #1610 (@jamescowens)
• Change staking tooltip to display frequency #1611 (@jamescowens)
• Enhancements to ETTS #1442 (@jamescowens)
• Standardize money values as integers #1614 (@cyrossignol)
• Clean up and optimize legacy coin age code #1616 (@cyrossignol)
• Some scraper cleanups #1620 (@jamescowens)
• Reorganize accrual code and fix 6-month cutoff #1630 (@cyrossignol)
• Update Copyright years #1633 (@barton2526)
• Change team whitelist delimiter to <> for CPID detection #1634 (@cyrossignol)
• Change team whitelist separator to <> to accomodate more team names #1632 (@jamescowens)
• Change Curl download speed type to support older environments #1640 (@cyrossignol)
• Optimize logo SVGs used for tray icons #1638 (@cyrossignol)
• Tweak consolidateunspent rpc function #1644 (@jamescowens)
• ETTS and staking icon enhancements #1650 (@jamescowens)
• Implement new transaction fees for block version 11 #1652 (@jamescowens)
• Optimize in-memory storage of superblock data #1653 (@cyrossignol)
• Miscellaneous superblock API improvements and housekeeping #1654 (@cyrossignol)
• Update openssl to 1.1.1f compatibility #1660 (@jamescowens)
• Optimize bdb to avoid synchronous flush of database #1659 (@jamescowens)
• Add support for CPID input to "lifetime" RPC function #1668 (@cyrossignol)
• Overhaul the contract handling system #1669 (@cyrossignol)
• Make the autostart mainnet/testnet aware #1671 (@jamescowens)
• Remove slashes from User Agent in peers tab #1674 (@div72)
• Refactor contracts for polymorphic binary payloads #1676 (@cyrossignol)
• Overhaul the beacon system #1678 (@cyrossignol)
• Replace boost::optional with non-owning pointers #1680 (@cyrossignol)
• Optimize proof-of-stake validation #1681 (@cyrossignol)
• Updated Slack link #1683 (@NeuralMiner)
• Update build-unix.md #1686 (@Quezacoatl1)
• Replace deprecated QT methods #1693 (@Pythonix)
• Made protocol.h more similar to bitcoin #1688 (@Pythonix)
• Touch up some details for block version 11 #1697 (@cyrossignol)
• More tweaks for block version 11 #1700 (@cyrossignol)
• Finish the conversion to the BCLog class based logger #1699 (@jamescowens)
• Move claim version transitional code in miner for proper signature #1712 (@cyrossignol)
• doc: Update threads in coding.txt #1730 (@div72)
• qt: Include QPainterPath in trafficgraphwidget.cpp #1733 (@div72)
• doc: Update doc/build-unix.md #1731 (@div72)
• gui: Show peers tab on connections icon click #1734 (@div72)
• refactor: Change return type of IsMine to isminetype && move wallet files to wallet directory #1722 (@div72)
• build: Updates boost to 1.73.0 for depends #1673 (@jamescowens)
• doc: Update Unit Test Readme #1743 (@RoboticMind)
• wallet: Change Assert To Error Message In kernel.cpp #1748 (@RoboticMind)
• scraper: Shorten display representation of verification codes #1754 (@cyrossignol)
• log: Change ".B." to Clear Message #1758 (@RoboticMind)
• util: Fix braindamage in GetDefaultDataDir() #1737 (@jamescowens)
• scraper: Improve scraper processing of beacon verifications #1760 (@jamescowens)
• scraper: Add instrumentation to convergencereport #1763 (@jamescowens)
• rpc: Improve rpc stress test script #1767 (@tunisiano187)
• Generalize enum serialization #1770 (@cyrossignol)
• scraper: Improve handling of ETags in http class and tweak verified beacon logic #1776 (@jamescowens)
• scraper: Improve ProcessNetworkWideFromProjectStats and other tweaks #1778 (@jamescowens)
• researcher: Automate beacon advertisement for renewals only #1781 (@cyrossignol)
• gui: Tweak behavior of beacon page in researcher wizard #1784 (@cyrossignol)
• Prepare for block version 11 hard-fork on testnet #1787 (@cyrossignol)
• scraper: Modify UpdateVerifiedBeaconsFromConsensus #1791 (@jamescowens)
• gui: Optimize OverviewPage::updateTransactions() #1794 (@jamescowens)
• ci: Adopt ci changes from Bitcoin #1795 (@div72)
• consensus: switch snapshot accrual calculation to integer arithmetic #1799 (@cyrossignol)
• voting: Overhaul the voting system #1809 (@cyrossignol)
• contract: Optimize contract replay after chain reorganization #1815 (@cyrossignol)
• contract: Reimplement transaction messages as contracts #1816 (@cyrossignol)
• staking: Sign claim contracts with coinstake transaction #1817 (@cyrossignol)
• gui: Change research wizard text #1820 (@div72)
• net: Update protocol version and clean up net messaging #1824 (@cyrossignol)
• rpc, wallet: Corrections to GetAmounts #1825 (@jamescowens)
• gui: Tweak some minor researcher wizard details #1830 (@cyrossignol)
• gui: Change GetEstimatedStakingFrequency text #1836 (@jamescowens)
• scraper: Scraper global statistics cache optimization #1837 (@jamescowens)
• doc: Update Vulnerability Response Process #1843 (@RoboticMind)
• scraper: Optimization of manifest and parts sharing between ConvergedScraperStatsCache, mapManifest, and mapParts #1851 (@jamescowens)
• consensus: Update Checkpoints #1855 (@barton2526)
• docs: Update docs to build off master #1856 (@barton2526)
• gui: Fix and improve GUI combo box styles #1858 (@cyrossignol)
• build: Tweak Gridcoin installer for Fern release #1863 (@jamescowens)

Removed

• Remove old research age checks (rebase #1365) #1572 (@cyrossignol)
• Remove PrimaryCPID check from diagnostics dialog #1586 (@cyrossignol)
• Remove missed label for PrimaryCPID from diagnostics #1588 (@cyrossignol)
• Remove legacy quorum messaging system (@neural network) #1589 (@cyrossignol)
• Remove old remnants of legacy smart contract experiments #1594 (@cyrossignol)
• Remove block nonce for version 11 #1622 (@cyrossignol)
• Delete obsolete contrib/Installer and Upgrader directories #1623 (@jamescowens)
• Remove redundant LoadAdminMessages() calls #1625 (@cyrossignol)
• Remove some legacy informational RPC commands #1658 (@cyrossignol)
• Remove informational magnitude field from binary claims #1661 (@cyrossignol)
• Remove fDebug3,4, and net and convert to BCLog::LogFlags #1663 (@jamescowens)
• Remove qt5.7.1 depends support build System #1665 (@iFoggz)
• Remove unused jQuery library #1679 (@cyrossignol)
• Remove unused NetworkTimer() function and global state #1701 (@cyrossignol)
• Refactor claim context objects into contracts #1704 (@cyrossignol)
• Clean old assets up #1718 (@div72)
• Remove legacy "rain" RPC (not by-project rain) #1742 (@cyrossignol)
• Temporarily disable voting system on testnet #1769 (@cyrossignol)
• gui: Remove legacy GUI transaction description for contracts #1772 (@cyrossignol)
• gui: Remove transaction fee setting #1780 (@cyrossignol)
• trivial: Cleanup unused legacy functions #1793 (@cyrossignol)
• mining, rpc: Remove kernel-diff-best and kernel-diff-sum #1796 (@jamescowens)
• refactor: Remove libs subdirectory #1802 (@div72)
• scraper: cleanup unused/unnecessary functions #1803 (@jamescowens)
• gui: Remove useless "Detach databases at shutdown" #1810 (@jamescowens)
• test: Remove testnet condition for standard transactions #1814 (@cyrossignol)
• consensus: Remove transitional testnet code #1854 (@cyrossignol)

Fixed

• Fix "Owed" amount in output of "magnitude" RPC method #1569 (@cyrossignol)
• Add support for paths with special characters on Windows #1571 (@cyrossignol)
• Fix lingering peers.dat temp files and clean up remaining paths #1582 (@cyrossignol)
• Fix incorrect beacon length warning in GUI transaction list #1585 (@cyrossignol)
• Fix default config file line endings on Windows #1587 (@cyrossignol)
• Reenable Travis builds for MacOS #1591 (@jamescowens)
• Correct peer detail info background color #1593 (@jamescowens)
• Fix exception in debug3 mode #1598 (@cyrossignol)
• Fix deadlock in "getmininginfo" RPC function #1596 (@cyrossignol)
• Fix accuracy of statistics in "network" RPC output #1602 (@cyrossignol)
• Fix heights for quorum vote weight calculations #1604 (@cyrossignol)
• Fix deadlock in log archiver when rename fails #1607 (@cyrossignol)
• Fix a spurious segmentation fault during client load on Windows with fast CPUs #1608 (@jamescowens)
• Fix lock order debugging and potential deadlocks #1612 (@jamescowens)
• Add dependencies #1613 (@Scalextrix)
• Fix std namespace pollution #1617 (@denravonska)
• Add missing condition for newbie accrual computer #1618 (@cyrossignol)
• Track first reward blocks in research accounts #1619 (@cyrossignol)
• Fix lingering beacon warning after advertisement #1627 (@cyrossignol)
• Fix accrual calculation for new, zero-magnitude CPIDs #1636 (@cyrossignol)
• Fix diagnostics, add ETTS test, fix tooltipcolor, add missing lock, and add email=investor check #1647 (@jamescowens)
• Fix help message of two RPC methods #1656 (@div72)
• Fix legacy accrual for newbie with non-zero past reward #1667 (@cyrossignol)
• Fix GUI autostart on Windows for paths with wide characters #1670 (@cyrossignol)
• Qualify boost bind placeholders with their full namespace #1672 (@Ponce)
• Fix suffix when copying txids #1677 (@div72)
• Unnecessary if-statement removed #1685 (@Pythonix)
• Fix consolidatemsunspent Help Message #1687 (@Pythonix)
• Fix gettransaction help message #1691 (@Pythonix)
• Fix GetNewMint To Look for Stakes #1692 (@RoboticMind)
• Suppress deprecated copy warnings for Qt with GCC 9+ #1702 (@cyrossignol)
• Fix exclusion error on stats processing and misplaced ENDLOCK logging entry #1710 (@jamescowens)
• Removed unnecessary comparison #1708 (@Pythonix)
• Fixed typo #1707 (@Pythonix)
• Fix out-of-bounds exception for peers tab version slashes #1713 (@cyrossignol)
• Fix transition for v1 superblocks when reorganizing #1714 (@cyrossignol)
• Touch up transition to version 2 transactions #1715 (@cyrossignol)
• Avoid mutating transactions in ConnectBlock() #1716 (@cyrossignol)
• Skip beacon advertisement when already pending #1726 (@cyrossignol)
• Fix Windows cross-compilation in newer environments #1728 (@cyrossignol)
• Fix out-of-bounds access in IsMineInner() #1736 (@cyrossignol)
• Fix a couple of block version 11 issues #1738 (@cyrossignol)
• Fix null pointer dereference in GUI researcher model #1741 (@cyrossignol)
• accrual: Reset research accounts when rebuilding accrual snapshots #1745 (@cyrossignol)
• scraper: Correct update for verified beacons #1747 (@jamescowens)
• accrual: Refactor tally initialization for snapshot rebuild #1749 (@cyrossignol)
• rpc: Fix "cpid" field in "beaconconvergence" RPC output #1750 (@cyrossignol)
• accrual: Fix snapshot accrual superblock state transitions #1752 (@cyrossignol)
• scraper: Correct stale verified beacon logic #1753 (@jamescowens)
• rpc: Correct possible divide by zero in getblockstats #1755 (@jamescowens)
• gui: Fix issues with researcher wizard flow #1756 (@cyrossignol)
• wallet: Stop Error When Starting From Zero #1759 (@RoboticMind)
• Don't count empty email as explicit investor #1761 (@cyrossignol)
• accrual: Fix snapshot accrual superblock state transitions #1764 (@cyrossignol)
• rpc: Cleanup Help Message and Fix Typo #1771 (@RoboticMind)
• scraper: Fix scraper etag header case sensitivity #1773 (@cyrossignol)
• consensus: Use explicit time to check if superblock needed #1774 (@cyrossignol)
• gui: Fix scroll area dark theme styles #1785 (@cyrossignol)
• rpc, gui: Fix three divide by zero possibilities #1789 (@jamescowens)
• rpc: Fix balance pre-check in "rainbymagnitude" RPC #1792 (@cyrossignol)
• accrual: Fix outdated comment and correct grammar #1800 (@RoboticMind)
• gui: Fix stuck cursor on labels #1801 (@div72)
• beacon: Fix research wizard beacon renewal status #1805 (@cyrossignol)
• gui: Fix translations for port numbers #1818 (@cyrossignol)
• util: Create parent directory #1821 (@div72)
• mining: Fix coinstake/claim signature order #1828 (@cyrossignol)
• voting: Remove double increment in loop #1831 (@cyrossignol)
• neuralnet, scraper: Fix compilation with gcc5 and older libcurl #1832 (@a123b)
• wallet: Fix smallest coin selection for contracts #1841 (@cyrossignol)
• gui: Fix display of polls with no votes yet #1844 (@cyrossignol)
• gui: add indentation to diagnostic status bar labels #1849 (@jamescowens)
• voting, gui: Fix formatting and alignment of vote shares and percent #1850 (@jamescowens)
• wallet, rpc: Fix for self-transactions in listtransactions #1852 (@jamescowens)
• accrual: Clear any accrual snapshots when syncing from pre-v11 #1853 (@cyrossignol)
• accrual: Fix reset of accrual directory if starting sync below research age height #1857 (@jamescowens)
• gui: Fix researcher wizard layout on macOS with native theme #1860 (@cyrossignol)

There are already good resources out there such as:
https://medium.com/dappworks/full-guide-convert-reddits-moon-cryptocurrency-into-e349ec1992d0#:~:text=Click%20on%20arrow%20button%20in,Click%20%E2%80%9CSEND%20MOONS%E2%80%9D
Hopefully, the guide below can help fill in any blanks or give you an alternate route. Please note this is a long and fairly complex process and runs the risk of loosing MOONs and small amounts of Ethereum and Dai which are used in the transfer process. I take no responsibility for individuals using this guide and it is up to you to research other resources and do your due diligence.
​

1. Post engaging content, comments or memes...
2. Hope that you get upvotes
3. The more upvotes you get, the more MOONS (a cryptocurrency token) at the end of the month you get
4. These MOONS are tokens on the Rinkeby Test Network, not the main Ethereum blockchain
5. Now time to convert these MOONS to Ethereum, Bitcoin, fiat etc
6. Please note that I am not responsible for any loss of funds beyond this point to proceed with caution!!!
7. You will want to link your reddit MOONS account to a Metamask account
8. Download Metamask if you haven't already (it's a Chrome app)
9. Find out the seed phrase for your Reddit Moons Wallet (don't share this with anyone and keep it safe!). Do this by opening the reddit app and clicking on 'Vault' on the left hand menu
10. Then click the three little dots next to Vault (at the top)
11. Now click Recovery Phrase
12. Write this down with pen and paper
13. Now open Metamask and import your seed phrase to link the account (Note that your MOONS will probably not appear yet, will get to that later)
14. Next up we are going to want to go to the exchange where we can swap our MOON tokens for Eth (although it is not as straightforward a process as you might think)
15. https://xmoon.exchange/
16. You will see that this exchange has three sections. The first allows us to exchange MOONS (on the Rinkeby blockchain) to XMOONS (on the XDai blockchain, where Gas fees are paid in XDai rather than Eth). The second section allows us to exchange XMOONS for XDai. The third section allows us to exchange XDai for good old fashioned Ethereum (on the actual Ethereum blockchain).
17. Before we get started with any exchanging, we need to configure metamask a bit.
18. First up we are going to make Metamask show the MOONS that we have. To do this, change the network from 'Main Ethereum Network' to 'Rinkeby Test Network' at the top dropdown menu. Now click 'Add Token' and custom token. Now input the following:
19. Token contract address: 0xDF82c9014F127243CE1305DFE54151647d74B27A
20. Click next once
21. Now click back (weird I know)
22. In the decimals of precision enter 18
23. You should now be able to see the correct number of MOONS and this should match the amount you saw on your vault in Reddit
24. In preparation for later we are also going to want to add the xDai network to our metamask
25. To do this click on that drop down at the top of top of metamask again and click Custom RPC
26. Now enter exactly what is shown here https://www.xdaichain.com/for-users/wallets/metamask/metamask-setup
27. Still with me? Now we are going to get to exchanging
28. Switch metamask back to Rinkeby Test Network and on xmoon.exchange click 'connect' and follow the instructions shown on metamask
29. We are also going to need some Rinkeby Ethereum (don't worry it's free since its just a test network, go to https://faucet.rinkeby.io/ to get some (don't need much)
30. Now click MOON to xMOON and convert the amount you want to!
31. This process can take quite a while (took me 30 mins) so grab a coffee
32. To check if you have xMOONs now, change your metamask over to xDai network
33. They should appear on the xmoon.exchange site
34. Next we want to convert these xMoon's into xDai, however, we have to have some xDai in there in the first place to pay for the gas (remember that this xDai blockchain uses xDai to pay for gas not Eth!). To do this, buy some Dai (20 USD should do) in your favourite way (normal exchange, DeFi, etc.) and transfer it to your Metamask account Eth account (ON THE MAIN ETHEREUM BLOCKCHAIN, DON'T USE RINKEBY!). Also transfer around 10 USD worth of Eth to your metamask to cover any gas fees on the Main Ethereum Blockchain side of things.
35. Great, now while keeping Metamask on the Main Ethereum Blockchain, click DAI to xDAI and convert around10-20 USD.
36. Once this xDai has shown up (again could take a while), switch metamask back over to xDai blockchain and click xMOON to xDai (this should be fairly quick)
37. Now click xDai to Dai (might take a while again, don't panic like I did!)
38. You should now have Dai on the Ethereum blockchain held in your metamask (which you can see once you switch metamask back over to Main Ethereum)
39. Feel free now to do with the Dai whatever you wish! Send to an exchange and swap to BTC or Eth, keep a hold of in metamask etc etc

​
Please feel free to offer comments and corrections in the comments :)
​
Edit 1: Typo fix!

Edit: TL;DR added in the comments
 
Hey all, I've been researching coins since 2017 and have gone through 100s of them in the last 3 years. I got introduced to blockchain via Bitcoin of course, analyzed Ethereum thereafter and from that moment I have a keen interest in smart contact platforms. I’m passionate about Ethereum but I find Zilliqa to have a better risk-reward ratio. Especially because Zilliqa has found an elegant balance between being secure, decentralized and scalable in my opinion.
 
Below I post my analysis of why from all the coins I went through I’m most bullish on Zilliqa (yes I went through Tezos, EOS, NEO, VeChain, Harmony, Algorand, Cardano etc.). Note that this is not investment advice and although it's a thorough analysis there is obviously some bias involved. Looking forward to what you all think!
 
Fun fact: the name Zilliqa is a play on ‘silica’ silicon dioxide which means “Silicon for the high-throughput consensus computer.”
 
This post is divided into (i) Technology, (ii) Business & Partnerships, and (iii) Marketing & Community. I’ve tried to make the technology part readable for a broad audience. If you’ve ever tried understanding the inner workings of Bitcoin and Ethereum you should be able to grasp most parts. Otherwise, just skim through and once you are zoning out head to the next part.
 
Technology and some more:
 
Introduction
 
The technology is one of the main reasons why I’m so bullish on Zilliqa. First thing you see on their website is: “Zilliqa is a high-performance, high-security blockchain platform for enterprises and next-generation applications.” These are some bold statements.
 
Before we deep dive into the technology let’s take a step back in time first as they have quite the history. The initial research paper from which Zilliqa originated dates back to August 2016: Elastico: A Secure Sharding Protocol For Open Blockchains where Loi Luu (Kyber Network) is one of the co-authors. Other ideas that led to the development of what Zilliqa has become today are: Bitcoin-NG, collective signing CoSi, ByzCoin and Omniledger.
 
The technical white paper was made public in August 2017 and since then they have achieved everything stated in the white paper and also created their own open source intermediate level smart contract language called Scilla (functional programming language similar to OCaml) too.
 
Mainnet is live since the end of January 2019 with daily transaction rates growing continuously. About a week ago mainnet reached 5 million transactions, 500.000+ addresses in total along with 2400 nodes keeping the network decentralized and secure. Circulating supply is nearing 11 billion and currently only mining rewards are left. The maximum supply is 21 billion with annual inflation being 7.13% currently and will only decrease with time.
 
Zilliqa realized early on that the usage of public cryptocurrencies and smart contracts were increasing but decentralized, secure, and scalable alternatives were lacking in the crypto space. They proposed to apply sharding onto a public smart contract blockchain where the transaction rate increases almost linear with the increase in the amount of nodes. More nodes = higher transaction throughput and increased decentralization. Sharding comes in many forms and Zilliqa uses network-, transaction- and computational sharding. Network sharding opens up the possibility of using transaction- and computational sharding on top. Zilliqa does not use state sharding for now. We’ll come back to this later.
 
Before we continue dissecting how Zilliqa achieves such from a technological standpoint it’s good to keep in mind that a blockchain being decentralised and secure and scalable is still one of the main hurdles in allowing widespread usage of decentralised networks. In my opinion this needs to be solved first before blockchains can get to the point where they can create and add large scale value. So I invite you to read the next section to grasp the underlying fundamentals. Because after all these premises need to be true otherwise there isn’t a fundamental case to be bullish on Zilliqa, right?
 
Down the rabbit hole
 
How have they achieved this? Let’s define the basics first: key players on Zilliqa are the users and the miners. A user is anybody who uses the blockchain to transfer funds or run smart contracts. Miners are the (shard) nodes in the network who run the consensus protocol and get rewarded for their service in Zillings (ZIL). The mining network is divided into several smaller networks called shards, which is also referred to as ‘network sharding’. Miners subsequently are randomly assigned to a shard by another set of miners called DS (Directory Service) nodes. The regular shards process transactions and the outputs of these shards are eventually combined by the DS shard as they reach consensus on the final state. More on how these DS shards reach consensus (via pBFT) will be explained later on.
 
The Zilliqa network produces two types of blocks: DS blocks and Tx blocks. One DS Block consists of 100 Tx Blocks. And as previously mentioned there are two types of nodes concerned with reaching consensus: shard nodes and DS nodes. Becoming a shard node or DS node is being defined by the result of a PoW cycle (Ethash) at the beginning of the DS Block. All candidate mining nodes compete with each other and run the PoW (Proof-of-Work) cycle for 60 seconds and the submissions achieving the highest difficulty will be allowed on the network. And to put it in perspective: the average difficulty for one DS node is ~ 2 Th/s equaling 2.000.000 Mh/s or 55 thousand+ GeForce GTX 1070 / 8 GB GPUs at 35.4 Mh/s. Each DS Block 10 new DS nodes are allowed. And a shard node needs to provide around 8.53 GH/s currently (around 240 GTX 1070s). Dual mining ETH/ETC and ZIL is possible and can be done via mining software such as Phoenix and Claymore. There are pools and if you have large amounts of hashing power (Ethash) available you could mine solo.
 
The PoW cycle of 60 seconds is a peak performance and acts as an entry ticket to the network. The entry ticket is called a sybil resistance mechanism and makes it incredibly hard for adversaries to spawn lots of identities and manipulate the network with these identities. And after every 100 Tx Blocks which corresponds to roughly 1,5 hour this PoW process repeats. In between these 1,5 hour, no PoW needs to be done meaning Zilliqa’s energy consumption to keep the network secure is low. For more detailed information on how mining works click here.
Okay, hats off to you. You have made it this far. Before we go any deeper down the rabbit hole we first must understand why Zilliqa goes through all of the above technicalities and understand a bit more what a blockchain on a more fundamental level is. Because the core of Zilliqa’s consensus protocol relies on the usage of pBFT (practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance) we need to know more about state machines and their function. Navigate to Viewblock, a Zilliqa block explorer, and just come back to this article. We will use this site to navigate through a few concepts.
 
We have established that Zilliqa is a public and distributed blockchain. Meaning that everyone with an internet connection can send ZILs, trigger smart contracts, etc. and there is no central authority who fully controls the network. Zilliqa and other public and distributed blockchains (like Bitcoin and Ethereum) can also be defined as state machines.
 
Taking the liberty of paraphrasing examples and definitions given by Samuel Brooks’ medium article, he describes the definition of a blockchain (like Zilliqa) as: “A peer-to-peer, append-only datastore that uses consensus to synchronize cryptographically-secure data”.
 
Next, he states that: "blockchains are fundamentally systems for managing valid state transitions”. For some more context, I recommend reading the whole medium article to get a better grasp of the definitions and understanding of state machines. Nevertheless, let’s try to simplify and compile it into a single paragraph. Take traffic lights as an example: all its states (red, amber, and green) are predefined, all possible outcomes are known and it doesn’t matter if you encounter the traffic light today or tomorrow. It will still behave the same. Managing the states of a traffic light can be done by triggering a sensor on the road or pushing a button resulting in one traffic lights’ state going from green to red (via amber) and another light from red to green.
 
With public blockchains like Zilliqa, this isn’t so straightforward and simple. It started with block #1 almost 1,5 years ago and every 45 seconds or so a new block linked to the previous block is being added. Resulting in a chain of blocks with transactions in it that everyone can verify from block #1 to the current #647.000+ block. The state is ever changing and the states it can find itself in are infinite. And while the traffic light might work together in tandem with various other traffic lights, it’s rather insignificant comparing it to a public blockchain. Because Zilliqa consists of 2400 nodes who need to work together to achieve consensus on what the latest valid state is while some of these nodes may have latency or broadcast issues, drop offline or are deliberately trying to attack the network, etc.
 
Now go back to the Viewblock page take a look at the amount of transaction, addresses, block and DS height and then hit refresh. Obviously as expected you see new incremented values on one or all parameters. And how did the Zilliqa blockchain manage to transition from a previous valid state to the latest valid state? By using pBFT to reach consensus on the latest valid state.
 
After having obtained the entry ticket, miners execute pBFT to reach consensus on the ever-changing state of the blockchain. pBFT requires a series of network communication between nodes, and as such there is no GPU involved (but CPU). Resulting in the total energy consumed to keep the blockchain secure, decentralized and scalable being low.
 
pBFT stands for practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance and is an optimization on the Byzantine Fault Tolerant algorithm. To quote Blockonomi: “In the context of distributed systems, Byzantine Fault Tolerance is the ability of a distributed computer network to function as desired and correctly reach a sufficient consensus despite malicious components (nodes) of the system failing or propagating incorrect information to other peers.” Zilliqa is such a distributed computer network and depends on the honesty of the nodes (shard and DS) to reach consensus and to continuously update the state with the latest block. If pBFT is a new term for you I can highly recommend the Blockonomi article.
 
The idea of pBFT was introduced in 1999 - one of the authors even won a Turing award for it - and it is well researched and applied in various blockchains and distributed systems nowadays. If you want more advanced information than the Blockonomi link provides click here. And if you’re in between Blockonomi and the University of Singapore read the Zilliqa Design Story Part 2 dating from October 2017.
Quoting from the Zilliqa tech whitepaper: “pBFT relies upon a correct leader (which is randomly selected) to begin each phase and proceed when the sufficient majority exists. In case the leader is byzantine it can stall the entire consensus protocol. To address this challenge, pBFT offers a view change protocol to replace the byzantine leader with another one.”
 
pBFT can tolerate ⅓ of the nodes being dishonest (offline counts as Byzantine = dishonest) and the consensus protocol will function without stalling or hiccups. Once there are more than ⅓ of dishonest nodes but no more than ⅔ the network will be stalled and a view change will be triggered to elect a new DS leader. Only when more than ⅔ of the nodes are dishonest (66%) double-spend attacks become possible.
 
If the network stalls no transactions can be processed and one has to wait until a new honest leader has been elected. When the mainnet was just launched and in its early phases, view changes happened regularly. As of today the last stalling of the network - and view change being triggered - was at the end of October 2019.
 
Another benefit of using pBFT for consensus besides low energy is the immediate finality it provides. Once your transaction is included in a block and the block is added to the chain it’s done. Lastly, take a look at this article where three types of finality are being defined: probabilistic, absolute and economic finality. Zilliqa falls under the absolute finality (just like Tendermint for example). Although lengthy already we skipped through some of the inner workings from Zilliqa’s consensus: read the Zilliqa Design Story Part 3 and you will be close to having a complete picture on it. Enough about PoW, sybil resistance mechanism, pBFT, etc. Another thing we haven’t looked at yet is the amount of decentralization.
 
Decentralisation
 
Currently, there are four shards, each one of them consisting of 600 nodes. 1 shard with 600 so-called DS nodes (Directory Service - they need to achieve a higher difficulty than shard nodes) and 1800 shard nodes of which 250 are shard guards (centralized nodes controlled by the team). The amount of shard guards has been steadily declining from 1200 in January 2019 to 250 as of May 2020. On the Viewblock statistics, you can see that many of the nodes are being located in the US but those are only the (CPU parts of the) shard nodes who perform pBFT. There is no data from where the PoW sources are coming. And when the Zilliqa blockchain starts reaching its transaction capacity limit, a network upgrade needs to be executed to lift the current cap of maximum 2400 nodes to allow more nodes and formation of more shards which will allow to network to keep on scaling according to demand.
Besides shard nodes there are also seed nodes. The main role of seed nodes is to serve as direct access points (for end-users and clients) to the core Zilliqa network that validates transactions. Seed nodes consolidate transaction requests and forward these to the lookup nodes (another type of nodes) for distribution to the shards in the network. Seed nodes also maintain the entire transaction history and the global state of the blockchain which is needed to provide services such as block explorers. Seed nodes in the Zilliqa network are comparable to Infura on Ethereum.
 
The seed nodes were first only operated by Zilliqa themselves, exchanges and Viewblock. Operators of seed nodes like exchanges had no incentive to open them for the greater public. They were centralised at first. Decentralisation at the seed nodes level has been steadily rolled out since March 2020 ( Zilliqa Improvement Proposal 3 ). Currently the amount of seed nodes is being increased, they are public-facing and at the same time PoS is applied to incentivize seed node operators and make it possible for ZIL holders to stake and earn passive yields. Important distinction: seed nodes are not involved with consensus! That is still PoW as entry ticket and pBFT for the actual consensus.
 
5% of the block rewards are being assigned to seed nodes (from the beginning in 2019) and those are being used to pay out ZIL stakers. The 5% block rewards with an annual yield of 10.03% translate to roughly 610 MM ZILs in total that can be staked. Exchanges use the custodial variant of staking and wallets like Moonlet will use the non-custodial version (starting in Q3 2020). Staking is being done by sending ZILs to a smart contract created by Zilliqa and audited by Quantstamp.
 
With a high amount of DS; shard nodes and seed nodes becoming more decentralized too, Zilliqa qualifies for the label of decentralized in my opinion.
 
Smart contracts
 
Let me start by saying I’m not a developer and my programming skills are quite limited. So I‘m taking the ELI5 route (maybe 12) but if you are familiar with Javascript, Solidity or specifically OCaml please head straight to Scilla - read the docs to get a good initial grasp of how Zilliqa’s smart contract language Scilla works and if you ask yourself “why another programming language?” check this article. And if you want to play around with some sample contracts in an IDE click here. The faucet can be found here. And more information on architecture, dapp development and API can be found on the Developer Portal.
If you are more into listening and watching: check this recent webinar explaining Zilliqa and Scilla. Link is time-stamped so you’ll start right away with a platform introduction, roadmap 2020 and afterwards a proper Scilla introduction.
 
Generalized: programming languages can be divided into being ‘object-oriented’ or ‘functional’. Here is an ELI5 given by software development academy: * “all programs have two basic components, data – what the program knows – and behavior – what the program can do with that data. So object-oriented programming states that combining data and related behaviors in one place, is called “object”, which makes it easier to understand how a particular program works. On the other hand, functional programming argues that data and behavior are different things and should be separated to ensure their clarity.” *
 
Scilla is on the functional side and shares similarities with OCaml: OCaml is a general-purpose programming language with an emphasis on expressiveness and safety. It has an advanced type system that helps catch your mistakes without getting in your way. It's used in environments where a single mistake can cost millions and speed matters, is supported by an active community, and has a rich set of libraries and development tools. For all its power, OCaml is also pretty simple, which is one reason it's often used as a teaching language.
 
Scilla is blockchain agnostic, can be implemented onto other blockchains as well, is recognized by academics and won a so-called Distinguished Artifact Award award at the end of last year.
 
One of the reasons why the Zilliqa team decided to create their own programming language focused on preventing smart contract vulnerabilities is that adding logic on a blockchain, programming, means that you cannot afford to make mistakes. Otherwise, it could cost you. It’s all great and fun blockchains being immutable but updating your code because you found a bug isn’t the same as with a regular web application for example. And with smart contracts, it inherently involves cryptocurrencies in some form thus value.
 
Another difference with programming languages on a blockchain is gas. Every transaction you do on a smart contract platform like Zilliqa or Ethereum costs gas. With gas you basically pay for computational costs. Sending a ZIL from address A to address B costs 0.001 ZIL currently. Smart contracts are more complex, often involve various functions and require more gas (if gas is a new concept click here ).
 
So with Scilla, similar to Solidity, you need to make sure that “every function in your smart contract will run as expected without hitting gas limits. An improper resource analysis may lead to situations where funds may get stuck simply because a part of the smart contract code cannot be executed due to gas limits. Such constraints are not present in traditional software systems”. Scilla design story part 1
 
Some examples of smart contract issues you’d want to avoid are: leaking funds, ‘unexpected changes to critical state variables’ (example: someone other than you setting his or her address as the owner of the smart contract after creation) or simply killing a contract.
 
Scilla also allows for formal verification. Wikipedia to the rescue: In the context of hardware and software systems, formal verification is the act of proving or disproving the correctness of intended algorithms underlying a system with respect to a certain formal specification or property, using formal methods of mathematics.
 
Formal verification can be helpful in proving the correctness of systems such as: cryptographic protocols, combinational circuits, digital circuits with internal memory, and software expressed as source code.
 
“Scilla is being developed hand-in-hand with formalization of its semantics and its embedding into the Coq proof assistant — a state-of-the art tool for mechanized proofs about properties of programs.”
 
Simply put, with Scilla and accompanying tooling developers can be mathematically sure and proof that the smart contract they’ve written does what he or she intends it to do.
 
Smart contract on a sharded environment and state sharding
 
There is one more topic I’d like to touch on: smart contract execution in a sharded environment (and what is the effect of state sharding). This is a complex topic. I’m not able to explain it any easier than what is posted here. But I will try to compress the post into something easy to digest.
 
Earlier on we have established that Zilliqa can process transactions in parallel due to network sharding. This is where the linear scalability comes from. We can define simple transactions: a transaction from address A to B (Category 1), a transaction where a user interacts with one smart contract (Category 2) and the most complex ones where triggering a transaction results in multiple smart contracts being involved (Category 3). The shards are able to process transactions on their own without interference of the other shards. With Category 1 transactions that is doable, with Category 2 transactions sometimes if that address is in the same shard as the smart contract but with Category 3 you definitely need communication between the shards. Solving that requires to make a set of communication rules the protocol needs to follow in order to process all transactions in a generalised fashion.
 
And this is where the downsides of state sharding comes in currently. All shards in Zilliqa have access to the complete state. Yes the state size (0.1 GB at the moment) grows and all of the nodes need to store it but it also means that they don’t need to shop around for information available on other shards. Requiring more communication and adding more complexity. Computer science knowledge and/or developer knowledge required links if you want to dig further: Scilla - language grammar Scilla - Foundations for Verifiable Decentralised Computations on a Blockchain Gas Accounting NUS x Zilliqa: Smart contract language workshop
 
Easier to follow links on programming Scilla https://learnscilla.com/home Ivan on Tech
 
Roadmap / Zilliqa 2.0
 
There is no strict defined roadmap but here are topics being worked on. And via the Zilliqa website there is also more information on the projects they are working on.
 
Business & Partnerships
 
It’s not only technology in which Zilliqa seems to be excelling as their ecosystem has been expanding and starting to grow rapidly. The project is on a mission to provide OpenFinance (OpFi) to the world and Singapore is the right place to be due to its progressive regulations and futuristic thinking. Singapore has taken a proactive approach towards cryptocurrencies by introducing the Payment Services Act 2019 (PS Act). Among other things, the PS Act will regulate intermediaries dealing with certain cryptocurrencies, with a particular focus on consumer protection and anti-money laundering. It will also provide a stable regulatory licensing and operating framework for cryptocurrency entities, effectively covering all crypto businesses and exchanges based in Singapore. According to PWC 82% of the surveyed executives in Singapore reported blockchain initiatives underway and 13% of them have already brought the initiatives live to the market. There is also an increasing list of organizations that are starting to provide digital payment services. Moreover, Singaporean blockchain developers Building Cities Beyond has recently created an innovation $15 million grant to encourage development on its ecosystem. This all suggests that Singapore tries to position itself as (one of) the leading blockchain hubs in the world.
 
Zilliqa seems to already take advantage of this and recently helped launch Hg Exchange on their platform, together with financial institutions PhillipCapital, PrimePartners and Fundnel. Hg Exchange, which is now approved by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), uses smart contracts to represent digital assets. Through Hg Exchange financial institutions worldwide can use Zilliqa's safe-by-design smart contracts to enable the trading of private equities. For example, think of companies such as Grab, Airbnb, SpaceX that are not available for public trading right now. Hg Exchange will allow investors to buy shares of private companies & unicorns and capture their value before an IPO. Anquan, the main company behind Zilliqa, has also recently announced that they became a partner and shareholder in TEN31 Bank, which is a fully regulated bank allowing for tokenization of assets and is aiming to bridge the gap between conventional banking and the blockchain world. If STOs, the tokenization of assets, and equity trading will continue to increase, then Zilliqa’s public blockchain would be the ideal candidate due to its strategic positioning, partnerships, regulatory compliance and the technology that is being built on top of it.
 
What is also very encouraging is their focus on banking the un(der)banked. They are launching a stablecoin basket starting with XSGD. As many of you know, stablecoins are currently mostly used for trading. However, Zilliqa is actively trying to broaden the use case of stablecoins. I recommend everybody to read this text that Amrit Kumar wrote (one of the co-founders). These stablecoins will be integrated in the traditional markets and bridge the gap between the crypto world and the traditional world. This could potentially revolutionize and legitimise the crypto space if retailers and companies will for example start to use stablecoins for payments or remittances, instead of it solely being used for trading.
 
Zilliqa also released their DeFi strategic roadmap (dating November 2019) which seems to be aligning well with their OpFi strategy. A non-custodial DEX is coming to Zilliqa made by Switcheo which allows cross-chain trading (atomic swaps) between ETH, EOS and ZIL based tokens. They also signed a Memorandum of Understanding for a (soon to be announced) USD stablecoin. And as Zilliqa is all about regulations and being compliant, I’m speculating on it to be a regulated USD stablecoin. Furthermore, XSGD is already created and visible on block explorer and XIDR (Indonesian Stablecoin) is also coming soon via StraitsX. Here also an overview of the Tech Stack for Financial Applications from September 2019. Further quoting Amrit Kumar on this:
 

There are two basic building blocks in DeFi/OpFi though: 1) stablecoins as you need a non-volatile currency to get access to this market and 2) a dex to be able to trade all these financial assets. The rest are built on top of these blocks.

 

So far, together with our partners and community, we have worked on developing these building blocks with XSGD as a stablecoin. We are working on bringing a USD-backed stablecoin as well. We will soon have a decentralised exchange developed by Switcheo. And with HGX going live, we are also venturing into the tokenization space. More to come in the future.”

 
Additionally, they also have this ZILHive initiative that injects capital into projects. There have been already 6 waves of various teams working on infrastructure, innovation and research, and they are not from ASEAN or Singapore only but global: see Grantees breakdown by country. Over 60 project teams from over 20 countries have contributed to Zilliqa's ecosystem. This includes individuals and teams developing wallets, explorers, developer toolkits, smart contract testing frameworks, dapps, etc. As some of you may know, Unstoppable Domains (UD) blew up when they launched on Zilliqa. UD aims to replace cryptocurrency addresses with a human-readable name and allows for uncensorable websites. Zilliqa will probably be the only one able to handle all these transactions onchain due to ability to scale and its resulting low fees which is why the UD team launched this on Zilliqa in the first place. Furthermore, Zilliqa also has a strong emphasis on security, compliance, and privacy, which is why they partnered with companies like Elliptic, ChainSecurity (part of PwC Switzerland), and Incognito. Their sister company Aqilliz (Zilliqa spelled backwards) focuses on revolutionizing the digital advertising space and is doing interesting things like using Zilliqa to track outdoor digital ads with companies like Foodpanda.
 
Zilliqa is listed on nearly all major exchanges, having several different fiat-gateways and recently have been added to Binance’s margin trading and futures trading with really good volume. They also have a very impressive team with good credentials and experience. They don't just have “tech people”. They have a mix of tech people, business people, marketeers, scientists, and more. Naturally, it's good to have a mix of people with different skill sets if you work in the crypto space.
 
Marketing & Community
 
Zilliqa has a very strong community. If you just follow their Twitter their engagement is much higher for a coin that has approximately 80k followers. They also have been ‘coin of the day’ by LunarCrush many times. LunarCrush tracks real-time cryptocurrency value and social data. According to their data, it seems Zilliqa has a more fundamental and deeper understanding of marketing and community engagement than almost all other coins. While almost all coins have been a bit frozen in the last months, Zilliqa seems to be on its own bull run. It was somewhere in the 100s a few months ago and is currently ranked #46 on CoinGecko. Their official Telegram also has over 20k people and is very active, and their community channel which is over 7k now is more active and larger than many other official channels. Their local communities also seem to be growing.
 
Moreover, their community started ‘Zillacracy’ together with the Zilliqa core team ( see www.zillacracy.com ). It’s a community-run initiative where people from all over the world are now helping with marketing and development on Zilliqa. Since its launch in February 2020 they have been doing a lot and will also run their own non-custodial seed node for staking. This seed node will also allow them to start generating revenue for them to become a self sustaining entity that could potentially scale up to become a decentralized company working in parallel with the Zilliqa core team. Comparing it to all the other smart contract platforms (e.g. Cardano, EOS, Tezos etc.) they don't seem to have started a similar initiative (correct me if I’m wrong though). This suggests in my opinion that these other smart contract platforms do not fully understand how to utilize the ‘power of the community’. This is something you cannot ‘buy with money’ and gives many projects in the space a disadvantage.
 
Zilliqa also released two social products called SocialPay and Zeeves. SocialPay allows users to earn ZILs while tweeting with a specific hashtag. They have recently used it in partnership with the Singapore Red Cross for a marketing campaign after their initial pilot program. It seems like a very valuable social product with a good use case. I can see a lot of traditional companies entering the space through this product, which they seem to suggest will happen. Tokenizing hashtags with smart contracts to get network effect is a very smart and innovative idea.
 
Regarding Zeeves, this is a tipping bot for Telegram. They already have 1000s of signups and they plan to keep upgrading it for more and more people to use it (e.g. they recently have added a quiz features). They also use it during AMAs to reward people in real-time. It’s a very smart approach to grow their communities and get familiar with ZIL. I can see this becoming very big on Telegram. This tool suggests, again, that the Zilliqa team has a deeper understanding of what the crypto space and community needs and is good at finding the right innovative tools to grow and scale.
 
To be honest, I haven’t covered everything (i’m also reaching the character limited haha). So many updates happening lately that it's hard to keep up, such as the International Monetary Fund mentioning Zilliqa in their report, custodial and non-custodial Staking, Binance Margin, Futures, Widget, entering the Indian market, and more. The Head of Marketing Colin Miles has also released this as an overview of what is coming next. And last but not least, Vitalik Buterin has been mentioning Zilliqa lately acknowledging Zilliqa and mentioning that both projects have a lot of room to grow. There is much more info of course and a good part of it has been served to you on a silver platter. I invite you to continue researching by yourself :-) And if you have any comments or questions please post here!