Gridcoin Roadmap Overview - Short, Mid, and Long Term Development and Outreach Goals
There has been a surge of developments to the Gridcoin protocol over the past year and my oh my does it show. Superblock creation has been stabilized, and several improvements and fixes to the beacon mechanism, RPC system, and codebase in general have mitigated forking and reorganization issues.
The front end of Gridcoin has also seen significant advancements over the past 12 months. Contributions to the gridcoin.us website have increased, a greylist process has been developed and implemented, a new white paper has been written and published, and the community and ecosystem has continued to organize and grow.
As we work to build on these improvements to the Gridcoin network it is going to become increasingly important to have a written path to guide our focus and inform the community.
Below is an overview of planned, in progress, and intended short, mid, and long term developments and outreach endeavors. As we continue to organize, we can hopefully build this overview into a more detailed roadmap that helps inform the community and any potential developers and participants who wish to contribute. The roadmap will be updated as more developments emerge.
This document was a combined effort between several core developers, contributors, and participants.
Development
https://github.com/gridcoin/Gridcoin-Research
Short Term
- Stabilize Protocol - Completed
- Steady superblock creation
- Improved beacon mechanism
- Mitigate forking and reorganization issues
- Polling Definitions and Parameters - Under Development
- Develop clearly defined types of polls
- Develop clearly defined proposal requirements for each poll to be valid
- Develop clearly define validation parameters that make the results of a poll binding
- Constant Block Reward (CBR) - Completed, Ready for Testing, Poll Underway
- Develop an economic system that
- Incentivizes block creation
- Increases network security and stability
- Creates an intentional economic model to expand on in the future
- Develop an economic system that
- Manual Reward Claims (MRC) - Pre-development, Help Wanted
- Develop a way for crunchers to receive their earned research rewards without being required to stake
- Develop an earned research reward distribution mechanism that scales to tens of thousands of beacons
Mid Term
- Code Rebase - Under Development
- Upgrade the codebase with the most recent Bitcoin/Peercoin/Blackcoin/etc. developments and reintegrate GRC specific mechanisms
- NN Renamed and Ported to C++ - Under Development
- Develop a neural net that can operate on both Linux and Windows clients
- Rename the neural net to something more appropriate, at least outside of the codebase
- A New Superblock Creation Mechanism - Pre-development, Help Wanted
- Develop an efficient superblock creation mechanism that ensures we do not DoS BOINC project servers
- Develop a superblock creation mechanism that creates superblocks for individual BOINC projects
- UX/UI Improvements - Ongoing Development, Help Wanted
- Voting/polling visualization improvements
- Image updates - new images, logo, colors, etc.
- Notification improvements
- Mobile Development - Help Wanted
- Develop a simple, stable, mobile wallet for Android and iOS
- Simplify Multi-Sig - Help Wanted
- Develop a simplified UX for multi-sig wallet creation and use
Long Term
- Smart Contracts
- Additional Superblocks/Abstraction Layer for Additional Computations
- (potentially) Treasury System
- Automated Greylist
Outreach
Short Term
- White Paper - Completed
- Produce an up to date white paper that details the general operation and intent of the Gridcoin network
https://github.com/gridcoin-community/Whitepaper
- Developer Documents - Help Wanted
- Produce documents that help introduce potential developers to the Gridcoin protocol and development process
https://github.com/gridcoin-community/Documentation
- Introduction Documents - Help Wanted
- Produce documents that help introduce potential participants to the Gridcoin protocol and contribution process
https://github.com/gridcoin-community/Documentation
- Tutorials and Other Visual Resources - Help Wanted
- Produce documents that guide new participants through the process of getting started with Gridcoin
- Produce video and visual tutorials that detail the process of getting started with Gridcoin
https://github.com/gridcoin-community/Documentation
- Marketing Documents and Resources - Semi-completed, Help Wanted
- Produce branding documents and resources
- Produce documents on how to use Gridcoin resources for marketing initiatives
https://github.com/gridcoin-community/Gridcoin-Marketing
Mid Term
- Directed Marketing Initiatives - Ongoing Development, Help Wanted
- Develop and fund marketing initiatives directed at hyper-specific demographics, institutions, and industries
- Blue Paper - Under Development, Help Wanted
- Produce a blue paper that details the technical specifications of the Gridcoin protocol
- Gridcoin.us v2.0 - Help Wanted
- Design and produce an updated Gridcoin website
Long Term
- Major marketing initiatives
- Institutional outreach
- Partnership outreach
Let us know what you think!
If you would like to help with any of the tasks marked with "Help Wanted", either make an issue on the linked repo or reach out on Discord, Slack, or Rocketchat.
Discord: https://discord.me/gridcoin
Rocket Chat: https://chat.gridcoin.io
Ask for a Slack invite.
Interesting. I hadn't thought of using superblocks this way.
So instead of 1 superblock a day we could get a superblock a day for each whitelisted project. This way if a project server is down during superblock creation it wouldn't need to wait a whole day to get included in the next superblock.
This is also arguably a simplification in the protocol (at least from the users point of view).
Superblock-per-project was mainly proposed to prevent one project failure from taking down the entire superblock consensus. Also it will add a nontrivial (not big, but some) processing and storage overhead to the protocol. However we have to make compromises between pros and cons. Note that it is not black-or-white, projects could be split to multiple super-blocks, each containing some projects.
Well, it’s great to see such enthusiastic projects around Gridcoin!
I will be really happy to see Gridcoin going stronger and better in the near future. It’s a pity, that I barely have enough time to cope with the project I’m currently working now on, so I doubt that I will be able to deliver and devote part of my time. Anyway I will continue to create some posts aimed towards not so technological society, which will contribute a lot.
I am going to consider again these points from the post and if there is any chance to help.
Best wishes!
Regardless of the time you have to devote to the project, the contributions you make are much appreciated!
Thanks to everyone involved in putting this together and doing the work.
Great to see that there are still many people working on big things in gridcoin!
Great stuff, keep up the great work and the updates. I wish I had more time these days to help with testing or proofing the English on marketing documents, but it's genuinely not in the cards at the current moment. But, I'll still be here cheering the development team and volunteers on!
Does the Manual Reward Claims (MRC) allow for simpler crunching and more GRC transactions without adding additional staking nodes to the network?
One of Gridcoin's strengths is that it is more energy-efficient than Proof-of-Work-based coins (e.g. Bitcoin & Ethereum today), but a distributed Proof-of-Stake coin (like Steem, or soon, EOS) might leapfrog Gridcoin to be a more environmentally sustainable option. Can MRC help Gridcoin minimize its environmental impact?