Letter to PRV Holders (September 2020)

To PRV holders:

We’ve come a long way together in the 11 months since the launch of Incognito. Each month has brought new milestones, and this month is no exception. It was a month of solidifying our foundations, making things run faster and smoother across the board. Here’s a look at the month’s progress:

View PRV Holder Presentation September 2020 >

Review development progress >

Get PRV >

Monthly shield volume: +$3.1M

How can we tell if Incognito is healthy, if it’s accomplishing its purpose? Shield volume shows just how useful Incognito has been at its primary function: providing privacy to all cryptocurrencies.

In September, $3.1 million worth of crypto went Incognito, bringing the all-time total to over $21 million. That’s $21 million across 90 cryptocurrencies that people like you have saved, invested, traded, and staked privately!

Monthly trading volume: $5.1M

The Incognito pDEX is the only decentralized crypto exchange on which you can trade across blockchains without compromising your privacy. It seems access to a privacy-centric exchange is highly desired, since September boasts the largest trading volume in pDEX history!

Privacy enthusiasts like yourself collectively traded over $5.1M, a nearly 68% increase from August’s $3.1M. Our total trading volume to date is $14.3M.

Here’s a macro look at the exponential growth in trading volume over the past 11 months:

pDEX is unlike anything else, and its growth is fitting. But there is more to do, and we’re not slowing down. In addition to the benchmark metrics described above, Incognito improved in numerous other ways. Take a peek at some of the less graphable developments that occurred in September:

September development

While during the Summer we focused on adding new features and products to the Incognito lineup, in September we focused on speed, stability, and the user experience, across both layers 1 and 2.

Privacy

We’ve been working on Privacy v2 for quite some time. At the moment, your trades and transactions are completely private, as there are no ways for anyone but you to know the sender, receiver, or amount of your transactions. When Privacy v2 is completed, transaction sizes will be smaller, throughput will increase, and the types of assets traded/transacted will be shielded as well. This month, we finished that feature, called confidential assets, and are finishing up the view keys which will ensure that Incognito’s complete privacy includes asset type. Testing is ongoing for confidential assets.

Read more about confidential assets >

Interoperability

This month, the primary milestones met in interoperability were in securing the new smart contract interaction flow for the trustless Incognito-Ethereum bridge, and in further developing Portal. Portal allows for chains without a smart contract language to go Incognito. Currently Portal supports Bitcoin and Binance chains, but we’ve been working on Portal v3, a chain-agnostic bridge that can connect to any blockchain.

We conducted and completed an internal audit of Portal, and continued work on Portal v3. Major updates to the bridges include enabling the use of ETH/ERC20 for custodian collateral, updating the smart contract shielding flow, and continuing to abstract Portalsa for seamless connections with currently unsupported blockchains. Integration tests are in progress.

Read more about Portal v3 >

Consensus

Dynamic sharding and committee size are two long-awaited, intensive features of the network. September’s contribution to their development lies in the slashing mechanism, currently being implemented, which will slash nodes that continuously miss votes for blocks in a single epoch.

Additionally, we have finished reviewing BFT v2 and are ready to implement, and highway now has a request monitoring system to protect against suspicious activity. Each of these updates gets us closer to safely releasing the Incognito network, so it can be the free spirit it was always meant to be.

Read more about dynamic committee size and sharding >

Layer 2

This month, we’ve been overhauling the ways you can experience the Incognito Network. For starters, we revamped the Node UI, complete with a clearer navigation flow, the ability to change wifi, a fix for that pesky “Fix It” message, a firmware update, and more. With regard to the Node Tree, we moved into the final stages of prototype production, finalizing the mould production process and the product packaging. And Node isn’t the only part of the app to get a makeover! We merged send and unshield for ease of use, enabled you to withdraw to Ethereum smart contract addresses, sped up the app, and more.

Read more about app v.3 >

Community development

Incognito has an active community of builders committed to protecting privacy. It’s been awesome to see growth in users, shield volume, etc, but even more amazing is the creativity of our builders as they apply privacy to all kinds of products. Here are some of the latest developments for community-led privacy projects with active user bases:

@josh_hamon’s telegram bot Nito is a validator’s best friend. It watches nearly 15% of the nodes on the network and sends push notifications about their status in the validation cycle.

@inccry just made the Network Explorer compatible with cross-pair trading, and continues to add to its immense list of useful features.

@raz’s Node Watcher got a bug-solving update, and is as helpful as ever as it monitors network activity.

@isyyyy’s WIC desktop wallet now has a clean GUI! Features like Node status and trade history were also added to the CLI.

@bruno’s Incognito calculator has kept pace with staking rewards updates, and offers a way to project your potential earnings from any of Incognito’s investment options.

@incsmile’s pApp platform is going strong, and has integrated with metamask. It’s already home to a privacy application called pMultisig, a multisig wallet for desktop.

@Thriftinkid is helping you manage your earnings with his Incognito Earnings Tracker, which includes a PRV price history and forecast, and can track up to 20 of your nodes at once.

@taind’s web wallet saw over 140 users in September alone! New features are in the works, such as trading, a browser extension, and candlestick charts.

October development

October is the last month before our 1st birthday. As such, we think it important to focus on the fundamentals - We’ll be working on making Incognito faster and more secure than ever before, and setting the stage for a smooth transition to a fully autonomous network.

Generate strong utility

Grow the user base by finding product-market fit

Grow the builder community with new builder proposals

Build a strong layer-2 core

Release HD wallets app feature

Enable full histories for assets (send, receive, shield, and unshield)

Improve bug resolution and cx response time

Fix bugs in the app and update SDK documentation

Build a strong layer-1 core

QC for bugs on mainnet and testnet

Deploy beacon fullnode on mainnet (currently testnet)

R&D

Finish confidential asset view key and deploy on devnet

Finalize new staking flow and slashing feature

Review BFT2 for implementation

Deploy Portal v3 on Testnet

PRV Holders Monthly Call

In this month’s call, as always, we’ll go over key events of the past month, as well as our plans for the future. Join us and share your thoughts and questions live!

When: Friday, 2 October, 2020

Time: 3pm UTC | 10pm VN | 11am NYC | 8am LA

Where: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86851282659

Livestream: The Incognito YouTube channel

We love to hear from you. What is an ideal market to reach for the Incognito Network or its related products? What products or features wouldn’t exist without privacy? What real-world problems should we tackle? Join the discussion, and post your questions in advance here.

Speak then, and see you around at we.incognito.org.

The Incognito Core Team

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