The other day, after almost four years of being live, we had our first live contributor conference!
We all put our heads together to help solve some of the issues that we, as a community, as a project, face during these times. The outcome? Let’s jump into that!
During our two hour call, we discussed everything that has been done up until now. We’ll quickly go over that here:
Sometime in February of 2018, the idea of uPlexa was conceptualized with the need for more privacy and a decentralized mining algorithm in which supports power-efficient devices
October 23rd, 2018: uPlexa Launches on Mainnet with the first IoT-friendly mining algorithm supporting low-powered architecture. This includes our core blockchain, original GUI wallets, cli wallets, block explorer, miners, airdrop system, website, whitepaper, and web wallet.
November 28th, 2018: uPlexa integrates a Linear weighted moving average difficulty algorithm to prevent flash hashing attacks
December 31st, 2018: Listed on Graviex exchange
January 28th, 2019: Listed on STEX Exchange
January 5th, 2019: uPlexa launches the Android miner & IoTProxy
January 19th, 2019: uPlexa launches the Android Wallet
March 5th, 2019: uPlexa launches:
- uPlexa Node-JS library
- uPlexa PHP Library
- uPlexa Python Library
March 6th, 2019: uPlexa WooCommerce Gateway
March 8th, 2019: uPlexa Magento Gateway
March 11th, 2019: uPlexa WHMCS Gateway
March 13th, 2019: uPlexa Prestashop Gateway
March 14th, 2019: uPlexa OpenCart Gateway
April 23rd, 2019: UPX-TWO mining algorithm releases, increasing the profitability and efficiency of IoT mining
July 3rd, 2019: The concept of Steadfast Storm/Plexanet is released and work begins on design and implementation
July 22nd, 2019: uPlexa Electralight GUI Wallet
October 8th, 2019: uPlexa rewards are halved and TX fee’s are minimized.
October 30th, 2019: uPlexa launches on BISQ Decentralized Exchange
February 4th, 2020: uPlexa partners with CryptoCurrencyCheckout for additional payment & donation support on Shopify, Bigcommerce, Woocommerce, Wordpress, Crypto Invoice, Twitch, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Streamlabs
February 10th, 2020: uPlexa Merch launches
July 20th, 2020: uPlexa offline wallet generator is created
July 27th, 2020: uPlexa Discord Tipbot
August 25th, 2020: uPlexa Presentation: Mixnet on Blockchain hosted at Chiang Mai Web3 conference by Yellow.com
September 4th, 2020: uPlexa Live Presentation pertaining to dVPN/Plexanet
December 30th, 2020: v1.0 of Steadfast Storm (staking via Utility Nodes) is released on Testnet
April 14th, 2021: wUPX/UPX Swaps via the uPlexa Bridge is launched
April 21st, 2021: wUPX Rewards via liquidity mining ETH/wUPX starts
May 5th, 2021: uPlexa is listed on TradeOgre Exchange
July 5th, 2021: uPlexa Foundation is formed
July 21st, 2021: bUPX/UPX Swaps via uPlexa bridge is launched
July 28th, 2021: bUPX Rewards via liquidity mining BNB/bUPX starts
August 12th, 2021: New limited edition merch added to uPlexa Merch
Within this timeline, there are particular things we did not mention such as our various public bounties and challenges, partnership and exchange coordination, community engagement & moderation, continued work on the Shopya commerce platform, continued work on Steadfast Storm and Plexanet, marketing, three revisions of the main website, team growth, wallet and core repository maintenance, coordination with lawyers, etc. We are proud with what we have been able to accomplish over the years given how small our group of contributors for this project is!
Now, enough reminiscing over all of the past releases. Back to the topic at hand. During our call, there were three major conclusions drawn by those whom participated.
#1) Lack of community updates
#2) The inability to release our most highly anticipated upgrade within a timely manner
#3) No proposed timeline for the current progress of our work
1) Lack of updates — a serious issue
This is not anything new by any means, but as you may realize from our history above, we have not released much since Q2/Q3 of 2021. There are various reasons on why this is, mainly due to the shift in priority on Steadfast Storm and Plexanet. However, our lack of community communication is no excuse.
The Solution — Public Conference Calls
We decided to create a public conference call on the first Friday of every month. This call would explain what has been done, what is currently being worked on, as well as topics such as work the community may pickup on and help contribute to. We feel like a public call will help clarify what it’s like on the backend of this project, whilst also providing the insight to the community so they may better understand and help provide value to the project to get us where we need to be.
2) Releasing in a timely manner
We have had to push back the release dates for Steadfast Storm & Plexanet multiple times. What people may not realize, is that even some of the largest centralized projects take a lot of thought and man hours to produce a functioning piece of software. However, it becomes incredibly more complex within the realm of peer-2-peer and blockchain technology. The main culprit has really been the lack of core developers to be able to contribute to this project. Although we’re near a final testnet stage prior to a mainnet fork announcement, we have a solution for increasing the capacity of our efforts:
The Solution — Community Crowdfunding System
A community crowdfunding system, may, perhaps be the ultimate form of a decentralized delegation system for the work on uPlexa. Users will be able to propose ideas in which they have the skills to complete. An example of this would be, an iOS wallet. The user then provides information on their expertise, as well as a timeline with milestone achievements in order to get the work done. The community then, has the option to contribute (via donation) to this specific proposal if they believe this is a vital component to the uPlexa ecosphere. Providing an incentivized way to on-board further developers, whilst giving the community the ability to prioritize the work in which needs to be done.
#3) No timelines
Timelines are always difficult to stick to, especially to that of a project with absolutely no funding and somewhat of a skeleton-crew. However, timelines are estimated frames of time in which a project expects to deliver on. Without it, our community is unclear on exactly what to expect from the project.
The Solution — A timeline, really.
We have created a timeline for 2022, all credit to Jose for the artwork, and to those whom participated within the call to highlight the need for a timeline.
Furthermore, we will also be releasing some more updates over the next few weeks regarding to how much we would need for more developers, how the community crowdfunding system will work, and official dates of the official uPlexa monthly conference call.
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