Introduction
We are excited to share our upcoming products and give an early look at what we plan to deliver to the community as a whole in 2022.
The 2022 roadmap consists of three main development priorities:
1. V8 Menger
2. Web Wallet & Payment Gateway
3. BSC/ETH Gateway
We believe that Scala is already in a very good position in the privacy ecosystem and that the project and community will keep growing a lot in the future.
We also want to continue to engage more with our community and get more people involved in our vision!
V8 Menger
V8 is a major upgrade to our network. It brings a host of new additions — mainly our much-anticipated security solution Diardi.
You can find all the details about this new version in our previous article, but here is a short overview of the main features it will introduce.
Addition of delegated proof-of-work
Diardi leverages elected node operators that can mine blocks on the mainnet to secure the network from malicious influences. The regular node operators can now run a parallel Diardi client that will fetch checkpoints from IPFS and continuously add it to the Scala network daemon.
This will provide added security for no extra cost, and could help to fight against big centralized mining farms. Every 4th block is a Diardi block, so if the critical stakeholders (like pools and exchanges) use a confirmation period that is above this 4 block limit, they can be assured that malicious miners cannot do a private block mining 51% attack.
We made a conscious decision not to use IPFS directly within the daemon because we had some crashes in the past, and we think it is not wise to add such a dependency to our core daemon at the moment. However, we are confident that this will change in the future and will be ready to update the core IPFS library when it is more stable.
New Reward Curve
V8 will also include some much-needed changes to the reward curve. The reward curve is set to be deflationary but according to an emission curve (so it wouldn’t drop at certain intervals exactly). Instead, it will follow a smooth curve until the tail emission value is hit (which is 999 coins).
The rewards a Diardi operator gets will be 1/4th of the blocks per day, this is due to the fact that the electrical effort that goes into producing a Diardi block is much lesser than that of a regular block.
Updated wallets
This new version of the network will require an update of our wallets, so we will take this opportunity to improve and stabilize them — GUI, CLI, and Mobile (Android & iOS).
Testing & Airdrop
Neofelis V1 was the platform used to test our V7 network last year. It had so many participants that it was almost hard to keep our servers stable! For this reason, we feel that it is imperative to bring it back for V8 and let our community take the whole network for a spin.
The funding for Neofelis V2 comes from the swap tool which has been decommissioned on November 30, 2021 — a total of 50,000,000 coins will be airdropped as a reward to our testers. This number represents about 25% of the remaining coins of the swap tool. We are reserving the rest for other iterations of Neofelis in the future.
Stay tuned on Discord and Twitter for more information about when and how you can participate in this initiative and earn coins.
Web Wallet & Payment Gateway
Some of you know that we had a pretty cool web wallet back in the Stellite/Torque days — Scala Pay. This application allowed our community members to send and receive Scala coins easily and quickly, without the need to install a wallet and synchronize the network, with all that entails.
We have been working on a complete redesign of this application to bring it back to life with V8. We cannot reuse the name ScalaPay as it is currently being used by another project for a similar business case. We haven’t found a name for it yet, but we can already tell you that it will bring a lot of useful additions to our applications ecosystem and offer new integration possibilities with other projects.
BSC/ETH Gateway
One of our goal for 2022 is to expand our exposure beyond the privacy-centric ecosystem.
We have already been working on Solidity contracts that will allow us to build a swap between any ETH-compatible chain. This will allow us to build a gateway for Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and Ethereum (ETH) that will allow our users to swap wXLA (wrapped XLA) for ETH and BNB.
The only thing holding us back was the fact that Ethereum 2.0 might make BSC obsolete with its incredibly lenient fees and supreme security. We believe ETH2 will bring a lot of interest back to the Ethereum network.
Once the dust on V8 settles we will continue working on the cross-chain integration and will be sure to keep you informed about the progress of this project.
Community Update
We also want to provide an update on our current marketing and communications strategy.
Discord & Telegram Bots
We have already released a Telegram bot that you can use to send XLA tips to community members or just to use the rain feature to reward active members. If you haven’t joined our Telegram server, it’s right there: https://t.me/scalaofficial
We are exploring our options to implement a tipping bot on our Discord server as well. We invite you to join us there as this is where the core team is most active: https://discordapp.com/invite/djAFVvy
Communication & Marketing
As usual, we believe that developing our applications ecosystem is the best marketing strategy. We are still planning to conduct some marketing initiatives to promote our products, for example, Scala Share: https://share.scalaproject.io/
We have also added a long-time supporter to our Communication team, Ediz, who will help us to engage and share information with the community.
Revisit Website
We want to give our website a little touch of freshness. We have started to work on an update of the design and the information on our website.
Exchanges
As most of you know, we are now under the legal umbrella of Haku Labs, a legal entity created to oversee the operations of the project. This legal status creates new possibilities regarding exchange listing. We will continue to look for exchanges that respect privacy, are consistent with our vision, and can provide a good return on investment for the community.
Conclusion
When we look back, we see how far we have come in the last few years. Our community is now engaged, strong and our team is as passionate and committed as ever.
We can’t thank you enough for your consistent support. The entire team is excited about these upcoming challenges and is looking forward to it!
Don’t forget we are a decentralized and community-based project. If you would like to contribute to our growth, head over to our Community Contribution System (CCS) to submit ideas or to apply for an approved task: https://trello.com/b/rsAwcpJN/scala-ccs
