Crown General Update 2020
What happened at Crown in 2020 and what is coming next?
Last year I published a short update for the 5th Crown anniversary focused on explaining the Crown project progress according to three specific areas: Technical Innovation, Community Engagement, and Project Governance.
Today I would like to review the points raised one year ago in order to publicly verify the progress and analyse the situation the Crown project is in. This report aims to present ongoing project activity to our strategic partners. If you have any additional questions, feel free to reach out.
Technical Innovation
Continuous Development is always Crown’s top priority. In this section I cover the milestones of core development since the last general update.
MNPoS Consensus System
In April 2019 Crown launched its own consensus system known as Masternode and Systemnode Proof of Stake (MNPoS),
“redistributing mining power across currently more than 2400 incentivised full nodes and stabilising the Crown network after suffering the consequences of coin supply recentralisation through pool-only mined SHA256. MNPoS solved known PoS vulnerabilities and prevents staking centralisation through the introduction of a capped PoW related to a fixed collateralised stake.”
The MNPoS algorithm has been running flawlessly since and hundreds of thousands of mined blocks and processed transactions have proven the stability of the code. Current block producer counts are at around 2200.
Crown Platform NFT Registry Framework
In March 2020 Crown Core 0.14 “Emerald” was finally launched, bringing the Crown Platform NFT Framework to mainnet. The NFT Registry Framework transforms the Crown blockchain into an asset chain, allowing individuals, businesses and institutions to register unique tokens that leverage the transparency, decentralisation and permissionless nature of blockchain technology.
With Crown Core “Emerald”, the Crown project delivered an important milestone and central part of the Crown Platform mosaic, proving state of the art coding skills and financial support to fund long term and complex development goals. The NFT industry has ever since been growing and Crown is well positioned to be part of a new cycle in which not only monetary values are exchanged, but also immutable, symbolic and unique representations of digital and physical assets that can prove variables such as existence, ownership and authenticity.
Below is a short list of new applications and use cases leveraging the Crown Platform NFToken Framework:
Suums invites creators to register their works to the blockchain and be able to sell them through their platform to interested buyers.
NewsBunker allows anyone to register important news headlines and incentivises registry with CRW. While you wait for the next news, you can play SpaceCompany, an in-site resource accumulation game with in-game CRW rewards.
Crown Cards is a portal where new and experienced community members can start verifying their online identities to move up in the card tiers as they gain trust within the Crown Platform community. Online trust is essential to efficient collaborative works. Tier 2 and 3 cards need to be approved by the decentralised governance system, these community members are voted in by everyone running a masternode!
Crown Codebase Upgrade
Along with the technical innovation of in-house features and code written and implemented by Artem Brazhnikov, Innovation and Platform lead since 2017, Crown is committed to staying updated with the continuous Bitcoin innovation. Because of this, another long term development goal was defined in 2019 and will be completed later this year, once the ongoing testing results are satisfactory. Ashot Khachatrian, Crown code lead, has been merging and adapting the most important BIPs that Bitcoin has implemented in the last years. Crown Platform will, once released, support relevant features such as multiwallets, seed phrases, data transfer optimisation, as well as be compatible with newer Bitcoin ecosystem applications such as BTCPay Server for in-store payments between merchants and customers.
In short, it can be said that Crown Platform has consistently followed its development roadmap and managed to release the state of the art and in-house innovations it promised to its community and stakeholders. It is now time to go one step further and I am happy to be able to present our next development and innovation goals for 2021.
NFT Trading Framework
The NFT Registry Framework has been running on mainnet for over 6 months and first applications have been released for token issuance and querying. The applications seen until now are experimental pilots to explain and prove the potential of the NFT code. They address use cases such as certificartes, digital identities, collectibles, distributed game data storage, and permanent links and references to IPFS systems. The next step is to make these NFTokens trade-able and moveable on-chain among CRW addresses, a functionality that is part of the Framework from the beginning but which could not be implemented together with the registry due to resource restraints. This development goal is in its design phase and we would be very grateful to see it in mainnet by Q3 2021.
Blockchain interoperability
As the cryptocurrency landscape evolves, it has become more and more clear that interoperability between blockchains will be a substantial feature in the yet to come years. Crown developers have made CRW DeFi-ready by integrating CRW into the renVM multichain protocol. During Q1 2021 we will present the Crown Platform value proposition to the REN Core Team and ask for the code to be merged.
The aim of this integration is multiple. Firstly, CRW can through RenVM receive a liquid ERC-20 asset representation and be used within smart contracts, opening a broad spectrum of use cases that are harder to implement within the Bitcoin blockchain logic. Secondly, Crown developers wanted to prove their development skills and show that Crown is interoperable and compatible with the most innovative “DeFi” protocols in the space.
CO2 neutrality through on-chain certificates: The NFTree project
Crown Platform and its community stand for and support innovation at every level of society. Ecological innovation has become more and more prominent in a global model that seeks to be able to compensate its emissions in order to make life on planet earth sustainable and desirable in the long term. In order to tackle these issues and transform the Crown blockchain into an efficient and regenerative social and technical system, the following steps were taken:
1) Crown has calculated the CO2 emissions produced by the total amount of block producers (all enabled master- and systemnodes) based on energy consumption and energy source in collaboration with the most representative hosting providers.
2) Crown has contacted ecological entities that have capacity to certify CO2 offset and have a positive social impact on the life quality of the regions they operate in.
3) A team composed of Crown contributors and members of the Micorriza Association in Spain have studied the technical and environmental variables to determine the amount of trees needed to compensate the approximately 80 tons of CO2 the Crown network produces annually.
4) The Spanish Micorriza Association has created a model through which the annual CO2 offset of trees across 60 hectares of proprietary land in Spain that has been assigned for this exclusive use can compensate the defined amount of CO2 Crown emits.
5) The Crown network will vote through the Decentralised Governance and Proposal System for or against compensating the carbon footprint. In the event of a favourable outcome, Crown would become a CO2 neutral infrastructure. Here, it is more important to approach an increasingly CO2 neutral setting rather than stating that Crown is 100% neutral, which is an ideal state that we seek to approximate.
6) The CO2 certificates that prove Crown’s compensations will be on-chain NFTokens registered within a verified NFProtocol. Only the ecological actor Association Micorriza, with over 15 years ecological commitment, will be able to issue these certificates as more and more businesses or institutions decide to compensate their emissions, but other ecological actors can join in and issue CO2 certificates if they are accredited by the legal frameworks they operate in and have customers that seek to compensate with them. These NFTokens will contain information and geolocation of the trees that are doing the compensation work. All information will be available on Crown, a public and immutable blockchain. This use case will disrupt the highly centralised and inefficient CO2 certificate industry while proving the use of Crown Platform infrastructure.
Steps 1–4 are already completed, step 5 is a governance step that will go live in November 2020 and step 6 would subsequently be in mainnet by Q1 2021. The CO2 certificate use case tackles several issues and challenges at once, proving that symbiosis between technology, ecology and law is possible:
- Issuance of CO2 certificates on a CO2 neutral infrastructure.
- Decentralised and public issuance of CO2 certificates on a distributed ledger for efficient access, verification and auditing by public administrations and/or aware citizens.
- Leveraging the Crown Platform NFT Registry Framework to make data available on an immutable, public and transparent ledger to tackle real world problems such as legal demands to businesses and institutions that need to become CO2 neutral until 2050.
You can visualize the current CO2 production of the network here:
https://monitor.crownplatform.com/
Through concrete applications such as CO2 certificates, Crown Platform seeks to present a model of asset issuance that reflects the needs of global and contemporary economic, social, and ecologic challenges.
Project Governance
At the core of the Crown Platform governance lies the Decentralised Governance and Proposal System (DGPS). This governance algorithm allows to reach masternode-wide consensus each month. Over 9.5 million CRW, almost 40% of the circulating supply, are locked in Masternodes and thus have network voting rights. This amounts for over 950 possible votes, of which usually around 30% are actively cast.
The DGPS has been in place for several years and has since incentivised development, infrastructure, marketing, community management. It has also, maybe even more importantly, been the CEO of Crown since and has algorithmically served the interests and ideas of the community, that together has decided the path of Crown Platform.
During these years, the crypto-landscape has evolved sharply. Some old players have moved on, some new players have joined forces and are supporting Crown. This month I submitted a proposal to become project manager of Crown and design a Crown 2021 operative plan.
I already want to thank the community for the huge support this proposal has experienced. This plan is in the works and will be published soon after this general update, but for now I already want to make public the support that Crown Platform has by a group of very engaged and committed individuals.
Some of us have been here for years, others have recently joined in support of upcoming plans and use cases. Specially the CO2 certificate project has driven progressive interest in Crown and attracted new investors and stakeholders, some of which are ready to co-shape and back the direction we are taking within the industry. When I write “we” you can consider that I am talking about this team, but also of other long lasting contributors and co-founders that are not named here, prefer to cooperate more loosely instead of being tied to coordinated workflows, but have been and are equally as important for Crown as the ones cited below:
Core Development
Ashot Kachatryan — Code lead
Artem Brazhnikov — Innovation lead
Adrian Hernández— Auxiliary Core dev
Core Development is king at Crown and together with Ashot and Artem, who will respectively be in charge of the core development milestones for 2021, Adrian has joined the workflow to support Ashot in bug-fixing and code-reviewing. Artem is in charge of designing the NFT trading code, while Ashot is working on the codebase upgrade while he watches the code and reviews all merges and updates.
Infrastructure and System Administration
Paul Jenkinson — SysAdmin and Infra provider
AlexanderCRW — SysAdmin and project tech support
Crown Platform infrastructure includes but is not limited to securing, hosting and maintaining the Crown website, GitLab workflow environments, pipelines and artifact building, Crown storage for debugging and file hosting. Paul and Alexander have been with Crown for years. While Paul is the infrastructure provider, Alexander is an agile contributor with expertise in Crown nodes, DNS seeding, maintenance of working environments that providing technical support for the project.
Development Operations
Mark Brooker — codebase maintainer
Pablo Lara — App integrations
Alejandro Diaz — DevOps advisor
This group of contributors closely follow the coding processes, commenting them out and helping out in the testing. With a technical focus, they help to structure the codebase and documentation and help to implement new ideas and use cases. They support core development by keeping up with the reporting and making the workflow more efficient.
Project Management and Project Communication
Jose Herranz coordinates the internal communication flows and keeps all the actors in the loop. He writes updates, maintains and expands the partner network. A full node with many peers, active at Crown since 2017 and with a vast international network of contacts.
Product Management
Alexander has been support lead, sysadmin, devops, webmaster, and script-writer at Crown. He is also responsible for emergency communications with strategic partners. His broad knowledge and experience at Crown make him the best suited person to become our next product manager.
AlexanderCRW— Internal workflow management and optimisation
Business Development
Dr. Achim Illner is a veteran traditional and digital asset investor and advisor. His knowledge of the capital markets and interest for digitalisation processes go back decades when he co-founded and went public with some of the most succesful German start-ups of the late 90’s. Later, he would discover Bitcoin and has never lost his fascination since. We are very happy that Dr. Illner is now supporting Crown Platform with his broad portfolio of contacts and investing experiences.
Dr. Achim Illner — Market opportunities and financial advisory
Marketing and Design
With Kevin, Victor and David, we have a top-notch design and digital marketing team that knows how to translate our vision and product into easily understandable designs and marketing campaigns. All have proven themselves in previous efforts and continue to support Crown.
Victor Bueno — marketing expert
Kevin Maurence — Designer
Dave “midnight” — Designer
This is the team that will implement the Crown 2021 plan. We are all on Discord, feel free to reach out.
Community Engagement
The Crown community is the engine that thrives Crown. Stakeholders and contributors work together, supporting and completing each others skills. I differentiate between direct community engagement and community reach in a broader sense, the total amount of directly or indirectly reached users. Direct community engagement happens through participation in GitLab or Discord project workflows, conferences, workshops, marketing, as well as direct partners that support Crown or CRW with their various applications such as exchanges, brokers, payment gateways, hosting providers, wallets, statistics and news sites, NFT use cases and more. Community reach happens through social media feeds. We continue to update and curate our main appearances, which can all be easily accessed through the Crown Platform Link Tree:
Marketing Campaigns and new Website
Beyond updates and core communications, Crown has performed a three month intensive marketing campaign during 2020 from March until May that reached over one million users. You can read the full report here. In addition, press release distribution services were hired and the Crown Emerald informations were published on many top cryptocurrency sites such as CoinPaprika and ADVFN.
Paid marketing is only part of the game. During 2020, specially YouTube has seen a high organic growth in amount of pieces uploaded and views received. This is due to the many community videos that were released from different parts of the world. Also Twitter gained over 2k Followers since 2019 and our main discussion channel Discord has grown the userbase by over 15%.
One of the main conclussions of the report was that Crown’s image needed to adapt to mobile devices, where most traffic had its origin. Later this year a new Crown Platform website was published in a big contributor effort. This new appearance has taken into account the marketing analysis made earlier this year, leveraging the newly acquired informations. The new website displays all relevant information in a simpler way and makes it easier to start a Crown journey depending on your perspective: User, Developer, Merchant…
Crown is well known for its physical appearances at conferences. During 2019 and 2020 we supported our conference partners despite the awful covid-19 situation, specially BlockchainHotel, CoinFestUK, NONCentralCONF and UNCHAIN.Convention.
FlipsideCrypto Ratings
The Fundamental Crypto Asset Score (FCAS™) is a comparative metric used to assess the fundamental health of crypto projects. Each asset is given a score, 0–1000, and an associated letter grade. The score is comprised of three major factors: user activity, developer behaviour, and market maturity.
Crown was added to this ranking late 2019 and has been progressing since. Recently it reached a C grade specially through progress in user activity and developer behaviour. The FCAS rating is featured and supported by CoinmarketCap and for visitors a representative affirmation of the project’s fundamental health.
When putting all the progress together, made possible by everyone contributing to Crown, we can easily see that we are steadily moving forward and learning along.
Thank you for supporting the Crown project and reading until the end.
