https://www.graft.network/2018/08/31/graft-emission-correction/

When you take a look at whattomine, mining GRAFT is as profitable as mining Monero. At first glance, this seems like a good situation for everyone who cares about GRAFT, especially for the miners. But let’s compare Monero and GRAFT market capitalization (the dollar price of one GRFT multiplied by the number of tokens in current circulation): $1.68 billion (Monero) vs. $3.76 million (GRAFT). There is a huge difference between these two market caps, but they have the same mining profitability (actually GRAFT is even better).
The current GRAFT block reward (the proof-of-work fee that the miners receive when they “solve” the block and successfully add it to the blockchain) today is approximately 1,420 GRFT, so every day the GRAFT circulation grows by more than 1 million (!) GRFT. Unfortunately, many miners abuse the high profitability of GRAFT and immediately dump their mining rewards on exchanges, which keeps the price down as the demand cannot cope with such a rapidly growing supply. Even growing demand cannot catch up to the emission rate because the project is too young. In order to stabilize the price of GRAFT (not to mention any growth), we need emissions to match demand, i.e. more people have to join the community and buy at least 1 million GRAFT every day. This is not a simple task for a blockchain that is 7 months old.

Although the block reward is designed to decrease with every block, the current rate by which emissions are decreasing is not significant enough to counteract the overall supply increase rate from miners dumping. It will be significantly lower in, let’s say, one or two years, but the GRAFT team and supporters—including miners—cannot wait that long. We all need the price to stabilize and even increase in order to make GRAFT successful right now.

Note that ERC20 token-based projects do not have the problem described above because they don’t have a real blockchain. Their token supply remains the same (actually, it is even reduced with every exchange transaction), so they just need to make sure their demand at least remains the same in order to constantly pump the price and the market cap.

With that said, in order to increase the value of existing GRAFT tokens, we decided to correct the emission by reducing the block reward by 50%, so the new block reward formula will be as following:

reward = (M – A) * 2^-19 * 10^-10 / 2

Where M is max total supply and A is current supply.

As you can see, the correction will not change the total maximum amount of GRAFT that will be ever created, it will just stretch the emission curve such that it will take longer to mine the total supply (see the existing and the new emission curves on the diagrams below).

All GRAFT supporters should benefit from the corrected emission formula because it is supposed to limit the daily increase in circulating supply, which will reduce the overall supply growth rate and stabilize the price. Long-term miners will benefit from the reduced emission for two reasons: 1) the price will go up so they will receive the same, or even better, revenue, and 2) the emission curve will be stretch, so they will get a more steady income over the extra years without the need to rely on transaction fees.


The emission reduction change requires a major network update (aka “hard fork”), which will be scheduled for block 176,000 (September 17, 2018). The major network update means that each GRAFT network node must be updated to the new software version before that block/date. Otherwise, the node that wasn’t updated is going to be on the wrong version of the blockchain. The new release will be available for download on September 10, 2018.

As another reminder, a major network update means that if you are running the GRAFT network node (graftnoded daemon), you must upgrade it to the current software release as soon as possible. If you do not install the updated node before the block 176,000, it will be disconnected from the mainnet after block 176,000.

Note that the users of mobile and desktop wallets will not be affected by the upcoming major network update and don’t need to do anything—as long as they are still connected to the default proxy supernodes (if you are connected to your own supernode, however, do not forget to upgrade the underlying network node to stay on the right network).

The info you seek in in the about page on the website (About half way through , look for coin distribution )
https://www.graft.network/about/

The tokens for the airdrop was intended to be funded from the DEV`s reserve token pool.
As these tokens will not be used for airdrop they will remain in the reserve pool.

Thanks

Confirmed.

https://www.graft.network/2018/08/14/whats-real-and-whats-not-in-the-blockchain-payment-space/





The Blockchain Payment solutions space has recently become a very hot topic, with both legitimate developments and a multitude of questionable claims. This article attempts to separate facts from fiction by outlining the lay of the land and Graft’s competitive positioning based on our view of the space.

With that in mind, let’s start with some definitions of key components of the electronic payment chain:

Payment processor — a service provider that processes a payment authorization, settles the transaction, and deposits a merchant payout.

Payment network — a network (or protocol) that provides an infrastructure for processing payments by coordinating the activity among multiple participating parties.

Payment gateway — a service that provides access to a payment network. These categories are important when deciphering what various providers are trying to do.

Centralized Payment Processors
The first class of payment solutions that are operating today are the centralized payment processors such as Coinbase and Bitpay. To enable crypto payments, these players simultaneously act as a payment gateway, a payment processor, and a clearing house. There’s nothing significantly wrong with this approach other than the fact that 1) it goes against the principles of decentralization; 2) it’s not a network, but rather a single entity; 3) it doesn’t scale very well because a payment processor needs to be able to handle an unlimited volume of the transactions and provide cross-border support; and 4) they represent a single point of failure and, more importantly, a single point of attack making themselves extremely attractive to hackers.
Solution Integrators
Integrators usually take existing blockchains and make them work for a specific use case. In the case of payments, they would be the “last mile” solution for making Dash, for example, work at the point of sale. Integrated solutions usually work okay but they only support specific point-of-sale systems, specific merchants, and have limited flexibility. They also decide who gets to participate in the ecosystem and they essentially act as a bank by fulfilling a lot of the clearinghouse functions themselves.
Payment Blockchains
This category includes legitimate blockchain projects that attempt to facilitate cryptocurrency payments. Dash and Ripple are good examples of payment blockchains, as they have made significant advances in facilitating the use of blockchains for payments. Dash implemented on-demand privacy and on-demand speed, whereas Ripple implemented inter-blockchain swaps.
Payment Networks
Payment network implies that there are multiple participants that are being connected together to form a network. In the case of traditional credit/debit card processing networks, they are bridging the issuing banks, acquiring banks, and payment processors into something that works in the context of a single transaction.

Source: PYMNTS.com

Processing a payment at the point of sale is a complex chain of events that includes obtaining pre-authorization or authorization from the issuing bank through the acquiring bank, putting funds on hold, releasing the payment for settlement, and, finally, clearing the payment by transferring the funds from the user’s issuing bank to the merchant’s bank account.

In the case of cryptocurrencies, use of such a network implies pre-authorization by verifying and placing funds on hold in real-time, transferring the payment from the payer’s wallet in the currency of their choice, converting that currency into the currency of choice for the merchant, and distributing the fees — all this is accomplished by accepting and coordinating services from service providers. This is exactly what a network like GRAFT is doing (while providing integration points for the point-of-sale applications, and in a decentralized manner to boot!).

There’s only one other network-like solution (other than GRAFT) that’s looking to resemble some fragment of a payment network: the Lightning Network. However, the Lightning Network concerns itself with instant currency swaps, without much regard for fees or compatibility with the merchant point-of-sale systems and processes. It also relies on pre-existing payment channels, making it suitable for repeat transactions as opposed to what you would see in the point-of-sale environment.

Suspects
Unfortunately, the blockchain space is rife with projects looking to capitalize on general lack of knowledge to pass themselves off as a legitimate payment solution in order to raise funds. They call themselves payment networks without building anything resembling a network, or a blockchain payment solution without having anything close to a viable solution. Their white papers are usually vague and full of buzzwords with little substance of the specifics of implementation. It’s often painful to watch millions, if not billions, of dollars being flushed into projects that show no signs of real technology or other innovation.
Here are some “giveaways” that can help identify suspicious projects:

They are based on ERC20, EOS, or other smart contract tokens rather than dedicated blockchains.
It’s very easy to create these tokens, but unless the project will act as a bank and take on the brunt of arbitrage in releasing the funds before they themselves collect those funds, there’s no way for them to overcome the speed issue. They are also subject to the underlying network fees that the token is built on.
They advertise a “crypto credit card” that can be processed by a traditional credit card network.
The impossibility here is that none of the traditional payment networks will license anyone but an issuing bank to accept network-backed payments. Unless the crypto credit card is backed by their own issuing bank which gets licensed by a traditional payment network (an unlikely scenario), this claim is quite dubious. Those that manage to pull off this feat will become a single-bank-backed, centralized solution, at the complete mercy of the local regulatory environment and traditional network continuous licensing.
They are creating their own point-of-sale devices.
It’s easy to private label a payment terminal found on Alibaba or similar manufacturer marketplaces. The problem with this is a merchant will not place a new terminal into the store without PCI and other rigorous certifications, not to mention that it would have to integrate with their point-of-sale software. Adding new terminal to a store, or especially a chain of stores, is an extremely difficult and expensive process which implies significant integration, certification, testing, and employee training costs that must be thoroughly justified.
Summary
There are distinct and important differences in payment solutions, with true payment networks providing the most open and flexible option for payment processing, while centralized and integrated processors can provide “point” solutions.
There is quite a bit of disinformation in the cryptocurrency payment processing space, so it’s important to understand how payment ecosystems work in order to tell fact from fiction as you proceed to navigate this treacherous market space.

Slava Gomzin, GRAFT Co-Founder

Although we have created a lot of materials explaining GRAFT (both existing features and future developments), including countless technical or semi-technical pages, marketing brochures, blog posts, and educational videos, it’s often difficult to see the whole picture while going through all of the specifics. A focus on the multiple features and their design details can obscure the view of the entire system, creating a so-called “you can’t see the forest through the trees” effect. We are getting many questions from supporting community members as well as potential customers and partners about “the big plan”: what is the ultimate goal, and how exactly are we going to achieve it? Whereas the answer to the first part of this question is quite simple and short, the answer to the second part requires some time and efforts. In this series of blog posts we will iterate through the various GRAFT features and try to explain why they are there, and how they help achieve our ultimate goal: Conquest of the crypto payments world.


Part 1: Blockchain and CryptoNote

Let’s start from the very beginning with the blockchain, or layer one of GRAFT. The blockchain is maintained by a peer-to-peer network of computers, or network nodes. We refer to these network nodes as “cryptonodes” to distinguish them from our “supernodes” (a.k.a. “masternodes” in other networks), which constitute the second layer of the GRAFT network (to be explained in a future blog post). The GRAFT blockchain is based on the CryptoNote protocol, which is the most private blockchain protocol in use as of today. In order to save time and resources, we used the luxury of the open source principle and forked the initial code of the GRAFT cryptonode from Monero — the best implementation of the CryptoNote protocol. In addition to acquiring fundamental privacy features “out of the box”, forking Monero provided a high degree of confidence in our blockchain from day one of the mainnet existence. It’s important to note that the code of GRAFT supernodes, which we create from scratch, is also open source, so essentially everything that we add on top of the previously existing features is also available for others to reuse.

Now let’s go back to the initial question and apply it to the blockchain layer: Why a brand new blockchain and why CryptoNote?

We’ll start with the new, dedicated blockchain: Yes, it would have been easy-peasy to run the GRAFT ICO on ERC20 or a similar token, as most people do these days to avoid blockchain maintenance, mainnet, mining, emission, seed nodes, etc. However, creation of the GRAFT payment network requires our own blockchain because we have to modify the cryptonodes as we develop the supernodes so they will support each other and work together. Without the ability to modify the code, we wouldn’t be able to create the network of supernodes and implement features like real time authorization or exchange brokers on top of any existing blockchain or token platform. In addition, there are features such as payout tokens, loyalty points, store credits, gift certificates, and discount coupons that are required for merchants — all of these are based on the merchant tokens platform, which cannot be built without a dedicated blockchain.

Now for CryptoNote: it’s not just “nice to have”, it is absolutely required in order to be competitive with traditional payment systems such as Visa network or PayPal. Ironically, Visa and PayPal provide much better privacy to their customers than most existing cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Let me explain. When you swipe/insert your payment card at the point of sale terminal, or click the PayPal’s pay button online, there are two entities in the world that are aware of your transaction: the payment network (Visa or PayPal in our case) and the merchant. In reality, of course, there are more organisations that “know” about your transaction because the payment network is more complex. This network includes, at the very least, the issuing bank (the one that gave you the payment card), the acquiring bank (the one that approves the payment), the payment gateway (the one that routes your transaction to the right payment processor/acquiring bank) and the payment processor (which processes the payment and merchant’s payout). However, in any case, this list of organizations is limited because they are under security and privacy regulations, and they have typically implemented some decent security controls that protect your transaction records from prying eyes. Of course, everyone in this list can be hacked or give away your info to a law enforcement agency, but this is a different story (which is, by the way, another good reason to switch to cryptocurrency payments and throw away your plastic cards!). For the sake of simplicity though, let’s assume that random people cannot gain access to your data in most situations.

Finally, let’s see what happens with blockchains. The key innovation of Bitcoin (the first blockchain and cryptocurrency) was the open ledger that is accessible to every node participating in the network because your transaction must be verified to make sure you are not trying to spend your money twice. But this also means that anyone in the world can see your transactions and how much money you have in your wallet! Now, unlike plastic cards, Bitcoin wallets are, in principle, anonymous because transaction records are not directly linked to your identity. At first glance, this feature appears to compensate for the fact that your transaction records are laying there in plain sight on the blockchain for anyone to see. Well, the problem is that there are ways to link addresses to identities. Once this happens, all of your transactions magically become visible forever because the blockchain is always there and it cannot be erased!

Fortunately, there is a solution: the CryptoNote protocol, which hides the sender’s address, the recipient’s address, and the transaction amount , while still preserving the ability to validate each transaction and prevent double spending — and it’s all thanks to advanced cryptography! One day I am going to explain how it works in layman’s terms to unveil the beauty of CryptoNote and its cryptography (the same as I have done to explain RSA and Elliptic Curves cryptography in my book about Bitcoin payments). But for now, let’s just take it on faith that CryptoNote ensures a high degree of privacy for all participants. Moreover, on top of existing CryptoNote features, GRAFT adds even more privacy and hides transaction fees!

Summary of Part 1:

Why a brand new blockchain and why CryptoNote?

The dedicated blockchain allows GRAFT to create a merchant token platform. This is required for features like payout tokens and loyalty programs, and the second layer supernode network, which enables special retail features such as real time authorizations and exchange brokers.

The Cryptonote blockchain protocol provides an absolute privacy to all participants of the transaction, which is required in order to compete with existing payment platforms such as Visa or PayPal that are more private than most exciting (non-Cryptonote) cryptocurrencies.

To Be Continued — Part 2: Supernodes and RTA

Pay-in, pay-out and interchange brokers (aka exchange brokers) are a critical part of the system, and will likely be quite lucrative.



True to decentralization principles we’re also working on making it super-easy to launch an exchange broker – straight from the wallet!



** Exchange brokers are subject to laws and regulations of their jurisdictions

New Video from All Things Graft explaining GRAFT Super-node and Real-Time Authorizations (RTA) protocol! Thanks Jose! Follow the link to watch it: https://youtu.be/7mNovjovS2I

The non-provisional patent application covers various facets of the network, but perhaps most importantly the multi-purpose Supernode layer which acts as the “pre-frontal cortex” of the network, handling super-fast sale and interchange transactions. Read more at https://www.graft.network/2018/07/30/graft-files-a-patent-on-a-decentralized-payment-network/

As mentioned in the original white paper, the network relies on pay-in and payout brokers to facilitate near instant payments with any fiat or cryptocurrency, and near-instant merchant payouts into any fiat or cryptocurrency. What follows is a more detailed description of how the system operates along with the fees that are present. Read full blogpost at https://www.graft.network/2018/07/27/pay-in-payout-exchange-brokers-design-and-economics/

Thank you , please remember to check back on s after Aug 1st

This function should be available in the next release.
However i do not have an ETA at the moment.

Graft is not affected by cryptoNote double counting bug

https://twitter.com/slavagomzin/status/1014945365509005314

https://www.graft.network/2018/06/28/graft-development-status-update-june-2018/


GRAFT DEVELOPMENT STATUS UPDATE JUNE 2018

Supernodes and Real Time Authorizations

Let’s start from implementation of full supernode, which is essentially an implementation of real-time authorizations (RTA). Although we are close to the finish line, we do not release it yet to public alpha. We need more time for optimization, fine-tuning, and QA testing. One of the main reasons for the delay is an issue with communication. Unlike other two-layer cryptocurrency networks which use a separate mechanism for communication between their second-layer nodes, we reuse the existing peer-to-peer network as a basic transport. Our original algorithm finds the shortest and fastest routes between the supernonodes by maintaining a set of P2P tunnels through the network of cryptonodes. The main difference and greatest benefit of using the same communication base for two layers (both cryptonode and supernode networks) is not exposing the authorization sample’s supernodes – because in our design they are not required to have a public IP. Such design is the major difference and significant improvement comparing to other layer two implementations such as Dash masternodes.

Remember that one of GRAFT’s key differentiators and goals is absolute privacy initially provided by underlying CryptoNote blockchain protocol, which is the first layer of GRAFT platform. The fact that the auth sample supernode does not require a public IP attached to it makes GRAFT even more private and decentralized, because the supernodes are less dependant on regulated hosting providers. Without public IP the supernodes are “hidden” behind the large, distributed, and complex P2P network, which makes them less vulnerable to DDOS attacks. At the same time, the hosting and maintenance are less complicated and less expensive for supernode owners. (Note that wallet/POS proxy supernodes, which typically belong to service providers and large merchants, still require public IP address in order to be able to serve wallets and POS/payment apps).

However, such great benefits do not come for free. Along the way we found several issues in existing CryptoNote/Monero P2P communication implementation, which we are fixing in order to make it more efficient, stable, and suitable transport for our purposes. With that said, we anticipate the public alpha of supernode with RTA to be released by the end of July. Meanwhile, we will start a private alpha release for testing in a coupe of weeks, so if you are interested in helping us with preliminary testing please contact us at dev@graft.network.

While working hard on RTA implementation and getting ready to its production launch, we realized that hosting a supernode, either full (authorization) or proxy/gateway, requires a special DevOps skill set, so we are working through making arrangements and building relationships to provide turnkey solutions to supernode owners and merchant service providers.

Payment Apps

We are continuously working on improving the Verifone terminal app so it will be fully polished for production by the time RTA is released. As Verifone have written on their merchant marketplace website, where GRAFT app is listed as the Featured Apps Partner, “Our app partners are working around the clock to help empower our merchants with applications that enrich the customer experience and provide business productivity.” This is absolutely true statement, there is not much to add. Since the Verifone certification was achieved last month, we have done several improvements such as UI redesign (in both terminal app and our wallet), enhanced configuration utility for merchants, integration with CoinMarketCap for real-time exchange rates, and some bug fixes. Also, we are working on Ingenico terminal app integration into their marketplace.

One of important and promising features we are planning to develop is using NFC (Near Field Communication) for initial engagement between the mobile wallet and terminal app, so instead of scanning QR code displayed on payment terminal the buyer will just wave the phone (the same technology is used by contactless payment cards and Apple Pay). Implementation of such a feature will help improve both buyer and merchant user experiences and reduce the overall transaction time. We will keep you posted about our progress in this area.

We just finished design and now are ready to start implementation of the payment gateway which will facilitate GRAFT payments on online shopping platforms. Once implemented, integration with GRAFT payment gateway, among other features, will bring to online merchants and buyers a unique combination of absolute privacy and instant transaction confirmations (using RTA) – something they have never seen before. Plus, after we finish RTA and move to accept broker implementation, they will be able to accept various cryptocurrencies, while keeping the same benefits of privacy and transaction speed.

Wallet Apps

We finally redesigned the app downloads page on our website, so now it’s easier to find all our apps, including wallets, and their releases for various mobile and desktop operating systems: iOS, Android, Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. In recent wallet releases, we fixed some bugs and added new configuration options. The upcoming wallet release will support purchases with real time authorizations using full supernodes (currently it supports a limited version of RTA on testnet only).

CryptoFind App

As our app for discovering and listing crypto-friendly merchants is gaining more popularity among crypto enthusiasts, we periodically release new features and bug fixes. In recent CryptoFind version, in addition to bug fixes, we added a possibility to take a picture of the GRAFT sticker on the merchant’s window so the users can earn better bonuses.

Happy Grafting!

Miner.

We appreciate your support and we had not intent to make you or anyone else feeling betrayed.
The team have committed to the airdrop  ( a few weeks from he end of ICO) .
Although the current airdrop terms might not in your personal favor we will follow through with our commitments to the community.

We will follow through with our commitment to ICO investors.