– @deadalnix
The goal for eCash is to become money for the world, but the fact is it will take many steps in order to get there. This past week eCash took one of those steps by finally launching Avalanche post-consensus. What this achieved was to provide additional security against potential 51% attacks, enabled exchanges to securely accept transactions after 1 confirmation, while also giving us more evidence of Bitcoin ABC’s engineering aptitude.
Since the launch, there have been 79B XEC (~$3.1M) staked on the eCash Avalanche network. To me this represents a strong commitment by enthusiastic eCash supporters around the world who are willing to put up their capital in order to help the project succeed. If you’re interested in seeing more details regarding Avalanche on eCash, you can find them on ecash.coin.dance/avalanche and avalanche.cash.
Now that Avalanche post-consensus is live, you might be asking yourself what’s next? Well, the next big item on the roadmap is implementing Avalanche pre-consensus. Once completed, this will give eCash transactions instant finality, making 0-confirmation transactions secure once and for all. You will no longer need to wait for block confirmations to know that a transaction can’t be reversed. And while there’s been no official word on how long pre-consensus will take, my understanding is that much of the engineering work done for post-consensus can be leveraged for pre-consensus, implying it shouldn’t take as long as post-consensus did.
Once pre-consensus is live, this will pave the way for potential staking rewards. It has yet to be announced how staking rewards will work, or exactly what they will amount to, but I believe this will have the potential to greatly improve redundancy and security of the network as holders will have a direct incentive to run their own staking nodes. Keep in mind there are still many factors that need to be considered before staking rewards can go live, but I’m confident the community will reach consensus on the right path forward.
In the meantime, the integration of the Chronik indexer is well underway. This will bring about infrastructure improvements that can help application developers who are looking to build on top of the eCash network. Because in addition to scaling the protocol, in order to become money for the world, we’re going to need useful applications that leverage the capabilities of XEC.
This is also why improvements are constantly being made to the Cashtab.com and Electrum ABC wallets, so that when more users show up, the necessary tools will be in place so people using the eCash network have a great overall experience.
Last but not least, perhaps the project I’m looking forward to most is Paybutton, a tool that will make accepting eCash on any website as frictionless as possible. I plan on using it right here on ProofofWriting.com so I can publish personal essays and works of fiction that can only be accessed by making a small payment in XEC (because believe it or not, I would love to write about more than just eCash). My hope is that Paybutton will give people a chance to discover how fast and easy it is to use XEC and allow them to experience first hand what magic internet money is all about.
I haven’t even mentioned the eToken decentralized exchange, or the community fund program, but the point is there’s still plenty to look forward to. While some people are only interested in cashing out on a single giant green candle, I’m here because I want to actually help build something that will add value to the world.
This is why as we wait for the developers to do their job, I urge everyone to learn how to use eCash. Become experts on how to keep your coins safe, or how to run your own node, or accept eCash for your business so you can teach others who might be interested in learning themselves.
Adoption isn’t going to happen overnight, but I believe that if we continue iterating and making progress one step at a time, this project has the opportunity of achieving the goal that was first set by Satoshi himself.