Salutations, Lethean community! As we head into the final stretch of the first quarter of 2019, we are making progress towards the launching of many exciting developments. Today we will go over the progress of many of these developments, as well as provide some insight into the number of people visiting our site and using our Browser VPN.
Development Corner
We are in the process of finalizing the next wallet update, which should be released next week. We are aiming to meet or beat Monero to the implementation of CryptoNight variant 4 with this release. This wallet release will correct a few bugs that were present in the previous release, but will not contain Bulletproofs, as our developers have been diligently working on ensuring the release of the VPN at this time. Furthermore, the GUI release will automatically launch in “lite mode” for new users, which is to say it will default to using the remote node, sync.lethean.io. Users that have previously downloaded the wallet will keep their current settings. We will be working with exchanges to ensure minimal downtime during this update.
Our developers have been keeping an eye on the developments that Monero is making, and have reviewed and discussed additional implementations that are being proposed, specifically CryptoNote+. However, at this time, our developers will be holding off on CryptoNote+ implementation, as hybrid mining could allow nefarious acts to be performed as well as time requirements for dual signing of blocks, which could discourage miners. We will be monitoring early adopters of CryptoNight+ very closely to see how early adopters react. You can find more information about CryptoNote+ by visiting https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/021.pdf.
Marketing
Partnerships
We are in the process of finalizing a partnership which we believe will have a large impact on Lethean’s accessibility to a larger audience. Additionally, this partnership will provide us with more exposure for our project. We are not fully ready to release the details at this time; however, you can rest assured that when we are ready to let everyone know, we will provide you with a standalone article to go over all the details.
Open Marketing Meeting
We want to invite all of our current members to an open marketing meeting as well as an open community discussion on March 8th. We will be in our internal Discord server discussing our current marketing plans, and then fielding questions from the community. The event will be held at 5:00 PM UTC. We invite everyone that would like to attend to do so. If you have any questions for us, please have them ready so that we can answer them. We look forward to speaking with you all.
Crypto Winter Initiative
Lethean is proud to be a founding member of the Crypto Winter Initiative. We are joining 5 other projects including SUQA (soon to be Secure Infinite Nodes (SIN)), Cryptonite (XCN), Triton (XTRI), Aeon Classic (XMLC), and Gossip Coin (GOSS). The purpose of the initiative is to join together and cooperatively market and develop our projects in a non-competitive way. It’s cold out there in the crypto winter, so we believe that quality projects should join together to prosper and thrive.
Browser VPN Downloads and Website Visits
We are very pleased with the current usage with our Browser VPN. As you will see in the below photos, the number of users that are downloading and using the Browser VPN is growing. We are excited to see this growth, and we look forward to seeing further adoption moving forward.
Firefox downloads in the last 90 days
Firefox downloads in the last 30 days
Google Chrome installations
Google Chrome current users
As shown by these graphs, the adoption of our Browser VPN is steadily growing. Both downloads over time and current users are increasing over the weeks. It can be seen that our Firefox version has fewer daily users compared to Chrome’s larger number; however, the trend is clearly moving upward, and the 30-day average is at 30 users per day already.
In addition to our Browser VPN growth, our Chief Strategy Officer, Matt, has been working on several projects to increase brand awareness and bring traffic to our website. Sponsored search ads for various terms such as “VPN” and “Decentralized VPN” have been added to the Google network. Competition in this space is high, so not everyone that searches will see the ad. However, clickthrough rates have been as high as 11%, showing a strong desire for people to inspect our project.
Website visits comparison in the last 14 days.
As you can see, we have had a large increase in traffic to our website recently. Although a bounce rate of 57% is a little high, it is much lower than in previous months. We also anticipate a reduction in our bounce rate after we update our website design.
Other news
Tokenomx
Our Chief Marketing Officer, Alex, visited the Tokenomx event on February 27th and 28th. The two day event was held in Bangkok, Thailand with visitors from around the world. Keynote speeches & panel discussions were inspiring throughout, filled with big names and good topics. A complete list of speakers can be found here. One notable stage appearance was Nicholas Merten of DataDash, a cryptocurrency advocate & enthusiast who operates the biggest crypto Youtube channel. Alex was able to get ahold of him for a few minutes to introduce our project to him. Generally, he is a fan of crypto projects that have P2P use cases. The short talk was very encouraging on both sides. Nicholas was pleasantly surprised by the fact that our Browser VPN is already working. Our use of a privacy-focused blockchain instead of simply being an ERC-20 token was also appreciated. Nicholas received a Lethean business card, and both he and Alex agreed to keep in touch.
Alex had numerous talks with venture capitalists, exchange owners, investors, and other project co-founders and executives. Generally, these discussions were short introductions of Lethean and small talk. However, more detailed info was given to those that were very interested in either privacy, VPN, cybersecurity, or P2P-related aspects.
Overall, Alex was able to do a large amount of networking. We look forward to seeing how these connections grow in the future.
CryptoCurry event
On February 25, Vladimir, our Project Manager, attended the CryptoCurry event. This event was very populous, having people from other cryptocurrency projects, cryptocurrency journalists, as well as investors in attendance. This event was sponsored by Coinschedule.com and was also invite-only, so we were glad that Vladimir was invited to represent Lethean. At the gathering, Vladimir explained to attendees what we do, what we have done so far, and our plans for the future. Almost every person seemed interested in these details, as it seemed that not many other crypto products have made it to where we have. Vladimir was also invited to a podcast in April to discuss Internet privacy and discuss Lethean. We are very pleased with this development, as it is a chance to talk about our goals as well as an opportunity to get the Lethean name further out into the greater public. Once the podcast is live, we will provide you with information on how it can be listened to.
Branding guidelines
Branding guidelines are nearly complete. As some of you have seen in our Discord server, we are finalizing our new branding guidelines. With the branding guidelines being nearly complete, we are well on our way to beginning the development of the website for a more fresh look. We are hoping to coincide the website redesign with our next update. However, it is possible that it will be released on the April 1st update.
Socials
As always, you can contact Lethean via any of the social networks below. If you followed our last update, and you have created a Pi node, we would love to see it. Tweet at us or show off your node on Facebook and tag us.
Email: Contact@lethean.io
