Word on the BLOCK: January 30th

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Blocknet

7 min readJan 30, 2018

Hello everybody and welcome to the second Blocknet newsletter update of 2018! This newsletter is released twice per month to keep the community up to date on what is happening with Blocknet. You can view the previous Newsletter here.

Let’s dive in!

We are happy to present the Official Blocknet Development Roadmap, which can be viewed here.
DX UI Beta Launch is scheduled for March 1st.
Following the reveal of the redesigned Blocknet wallet on April 1st, the new wallet is scheduled to launch on June 15th.
We are pleased to announce that an official marketing and branding proposal for VSA was signed-off on Friday, January 26th. VSA will be helping Blocknet in an official capacity over the next several months. The total cost is $152,000 and is being paid from the marketing fund. As part of their agreement, VSA will be developing branding for the Blocknet DEX.

Blocknet Roadmap:

February 1st — Marketing Plan
March 1st — DX Brand Reveal & DX UI Beta Launch
March 1st — New Blocknet Website
March 15th — Blocknet Whitepaper
April 1st — Wallet Redesign Reveal
June 15th — Wallet Redesign Launch
July 1st — SPV Support

There was recently a poll on what platform the Blocknet community would like to use as the main chat platform. Discord won with 67% of the votes. We will be migrating to Discord starting today. You can access the community using this shareable link: https://discord.gg/2e6s7H8
We are creating a Support team to ensure proper assistance is available for the DX. More information can be found in the previous Newsletter. The support team will be built from of a mixture of respected community members and local talent from Austin.
Shane(shane) and Jeff(86b) will begin contributing to Blocknet on a full-time basis.
A frontend team has been brought on to support the DEX launch on March 1st.

VSA has delivered the DX UI to the Blocknet core team. This beta release is for user feedback. The UI will be integrated as a cross-platform Electron app. Additionally, the DX API is being integrated into the trading UI. Users will be able to perform manual trades via the UI and liquidity providers can begin integrating with the API.
SPV support is scheduled for July 1st, 2018.
In parallel with the roadmap, new coins will be publicly unveiled throughout the year in conjunction with the community of that coin. Please see the Coins section below for more information as well as the current list of supported coins.
The trading fee structure and allocation is currently being developed.
The team has begun DX exploit testing.
Yesterday there was a problem where a number of wallets encountered an issue that required some wallets to resync from scratch. The problem was identified and will be addressed in the next official wallet update. More information will be provided after the wallet update.

The Q1 Marketing Plan for Blocknet will be released on Thursday, February 1st.
The marketing team are looking ahead to the rest of the year and are in contact with various event organisers to find marketing opportunities through sponsorships.
An article titled “What is a decentralized exchange” aimed at newcomers to crypto and decentralized exchanges is expected in early / mid February and is being worked on by Philip(philipmarshall), Baron(redbaron), Hanni(hanniabu) and Justice(stormingj).
We are pleased to announce that an official marketing and branding proposal for VSA was signed-off on Friday, January 26th. VSA will be helping Blocknet in an official capacity over the next several months. The total cost is $152,000 and is being paid from the marketing fund.

Work on the Blocknet introduction movie, produced by Bob and Mav137, is in full swing. A final recording for the voiceover has been made and is being used for timing in the development of the animation. At the moment 50% of the 3D models are complete. There’s about 1 minute of animation with 30 seconds of that being final (rendered, composited, and edited). The aim for release is February, but quality and alignment with the marketing strategy has priority over timing.

There are three proposals submitted for Superblock 259200. Voting will close February 6th at around 6:00 am UTC+0. An introduction to Superblocks and a voting guide can be found here.

0x (ZRX)and Blocknet are now collaborating on a draft cross-chain contract.
Blocket has extended its relationship with VSA to further its marketing strategy and brand design.

XC has been added to list of DX Coins.
So far 172 coins have been addressed. 50 are currently finalized (32 unannounced, 18 announced) The 18 announced are:

98 coins are in progress for error resolution + finalization
In addition 23 coins are being reviewed for possible custom integration.
144 different coins have had orders placed on the DEX.

The price of BLOCK is currently at $36.28 (0.00365143 BTC) at time of writing.

Circulation: 4,993,274
Market Cap + Ranking: $181M USD | 18233 BTC | Rank 111
Yesterday was the highest BLOCK trading volume to-date, amounting to $11.4M.
BLOCK was recently added to the CryptoBridge exchange and can now be traded there as well as on Bittrex and Upbit. Because Bittrex is not currently accepting new users, it makes strategic sense to have BLOCK available on more than one centralized exchange. However, until the whitepaper is completed the application process for additional exchanges has been put on hold since most applications require the Whitepaper for acceptance.

Current wallet: v3.7.36
Block height: 249832
368 Service Nodes are currently active.
2679081 staked coins are currently active.
The APR 7-day average for Service Nodes is currently at 20.05% and for staking it is currently 15.6%.
Lockup percentage from Service Nodes: 36.85%
Blocknet has been added to MasterNodedPro.com; Stats can be viewed here.

Work on the facelift of the Blocknet website has been halted. Instead we are in the process of working with vendors to create an entirely new website to solidify the Blocknet brand and message.
Blocknet now has 15k Twitter followers, which is a 50% increase in the past 2 months!
In the past two weeks, since the last newsletter, Blocknet’s Telegram channel has grown 25% to 920 members.
Social Media and Websites: Website / Protocol Website / Discord / Twitter / Medium / Telegram / Reddit / Steemit / Newsletter / Facebook / BitcoinTalk / Proposal Forum

Many thanks for reading. We hope that you are excited as us with what the future holds for Blocknet. A decentralization project fundamentally requires an engaged community, and so if you would like to help with anything, having something to add, use your professional skills or have a problem, we want to know about it.

Please also be aware that a community project is run by a diverse group of people with varying time-constraints (in a number of time-zones) and personal lives, so remember to be kind and patient!

If you want to be the first see these updates, you can receive the newsletters directly to your email by subscribing here. Our next update is due on February 15th. Until then we look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

The Blocknet Team.

Word on the BLOCK: January 30th

Blocknet Roadmap:

Written by The Blocknet Protocol