Happy birthday, Incognito! I’m writing to you from 2022, just 3 years after the mainnet launch. To no one’s surprise, it looks like privacy is under siege.
Here are some friendly suggestions.
More stability for the network. Thanks to Slashing and Staking Flow V3, most community nodes are now healthy. So much so that in the most recent experiment, the network remained stable despite bringing some fixed nodes offline.
We’re properly moving towards full decentralization now. Time to expand committee size so fixed slots can finally give up majority?
More privacy. What use is a privacy blockchain if transactions aren’t private? With Privacy V2, you can finally claim to be a fully private platform that protects the information of its users. On-chain applications like pDEX now benefit from One-Time Address, removing the need of temporary addresses and reducing trading time.
There’s still lots to do. Surveillance will become much more sophisticated, so you have to be ready. How will you make shielding and unshielding transactions anonymous too?
More trustless connections. Bridges play an important role in the platform. After launching the mainnet with the trustless Ethereum bridge, you quickly built many centralized ones to other blockchains. But we learn that they’re useless if people don’t feel confident using them.
So instead of boasting shallow ecosystem growth, do it properly. You made a good start with trustless Ethereum, Bitcoin and Binance Smart Chain bridges. Maybe Monero next?
More PRV visibility. Incognito’s native token was designed to power any activity inside the network. It can also be used to spread awareness of Incognito’s utility.
Grow those listings on Uniswap, PancakeSwap and 1Inch. Get PRV into the hands of anyone who cares about privacy. Think of more decentralized ways to get the message out there.
More usability. We had a pretty terrible mobile app. Slow, glitchy, bloated, constantly stuck. Bad for user acquisition, painful for customer support, and distracting for developers. It’s a little better now, but there’s still some way to go.
So improve speed, improve UX, reduce reliance on app stores. Get on web. Support hardware wallets. No one cares about the tech if they can’t use it.
To conclude, a thank you to the builders.
Initiatives like pDEX V3 are big and shiny, but there’s a lot of important work being done behind the scenes to support the longer term.
The CLI tool and Golang SDK V2 by @daniel will play a crucial role in future integrations and partnerships. A brand new backend service by @lam will make building client apps easier. The node monitor by @0xkumi helps node operators monitor their node status. Tireless support by @jared is invaluable in guiding new and existing users through these bumpy stages.
And amazing people across all channels, @mike_wagner, @abduraman, @sid, @inccry, @adrian, @heavypackets, @spaddict25, @linnovations, and so many more, make Incognito one of the more pleasant places to hang out in the insane crypto world.
Happy birthday, Incognito!