Our second State of the Project (monthly podcast) episode is live! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey48KpsorjE

Those who listen will be able to learn more about the tech behind Ember, our recent work, our progress with exchanges, and info on upcoming test nets.

We've released Biweekly Update #10! Not only does it describe the work we've been doing, but it goes over our Testnet Schedule! https://medium.com/@EmberCrypto/ember-biweekly-update-10-a8052e8868

In preparation for our next monthly podcast, we're collecting questions from the community! If you have any questions you'd like answered in the next podcast, please, let us know!

We've published our 9th Biweekly Update and grown the team a bit! https://medium.com/@EmberCrypto/ember-biweekly-update-9-9def6d032b7e

Thank you for posting our new Monthly Podcast! As Crypto_si said, they'll be monthly and provide updates on Ember and it's future.

We have added it to the original post

We've just published our next Biweekly Update! This one is a bit short due to the holidays/hardware issues.

We made a quick reply earlier to the user who asked, but here is our blog post about the testnet's launch. https://medium.com/@EmberCrypto/ember-developer-testnet-c308b29f6781

The Developer Testnet is alive and running

We actively update our Twitter, Medium, and BTCTalk. Our Discord updates are mainly links to the Biweekly Updates (Medium Posts) or things we also cover in the Biweekly Updates. We make sure to post the Biweekly Updates on Twitter and here as well.

That's why I also post them here. That said, editing the OP is a good idea, and I will also do that.

We've just released our 7th Biweekly Update! https://medium.com/@EmberCrypto/ember-biweekly-update-7-b95bf758b65

As a summary:
We've been preparing for the Developer Testnet. It's currently planned to launch on Saturday.
We finished Verifications.
We added Minting.
We built a Miner.
We added Syncing.
We hired a new Community Manager.

We have launched our new website! It offers a description of Ember, our story, a roadmap, and answers some frequently asked questions.

Now, we can promote our project further. This will be useful as we prepare for our upcoming Developer Testnet! If you would like more info, or want to participate, please join our Discord.

There is currently not a Telegram community. We did create a group and tried to bridge it to our Discord, but Telegram's API is very finicky (in the name of 'privacy'), and wouldn't let us. Since we couldn't bridge it, we do not feel like pursuing it at this time.

Due to the recent influx of community members, we are currently working on building a stable (here meaning relevant for more than a few days) testnet. It will be aimed at developers, not the end user, but it should be a promising proof of all the work we've put in.

1) The other coin goes by Ember Coin, primarily.

2) When we picked the name, our GitHub repo was under my personal account, and its name was "Currency". I thought it was great, and continued development (what matters). Only weeks later when we did the 'rebrand' (repository name change) from "Currency" to "Ember" did I realize Ember Coin existed.

3) I thought they had already done their coin swap.

4) A few weeks ago I saw news about Ember Coin, and realized they were still in the swap process, and have been for months. They should abandon the name shortly, and if they don't, or this continues to be problematic, I'll change the name.

5) This coin isn't already existing. A coin with effectively the same name exists. Ember is written from scratch.

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Thanks geostation! Happy to have you!

It has not started and we do not have a plan for one yet. We aim to have one by the end of the year.

We plan for a Q1 or Q2 mainnet launch.

We're aiming to have a website in a few days! A talented community member has stepped forth to work on it.

The Block Explorer will not be in development until we at least have a public testnet planned. At this time, we do not have a public testnet planned.

Our dependencies, besides the common things like GCC/G++, are "Nim, Nimble, GMP, Chia's BLS library, and LibSodium". The only unusual ones there are Nim/Nimble and BLS.

We are the first to build a cryptocurrency with Nim. We aren't the first to build a cryptocurrency node in Nim. That credit goes to Status who built an Ethereum node with Nim. We picked it because it compiles to C/C++, has full interop, and is very elegant. If you want to know more, I talked about it on the previously linked podcast.

We are one of the first cryptocurrencies to use BLS. That said, ZCash, and I assume ZClassic, also uses it, and it is in the Eth 2.0 spec. I do not know what specific lib ZCash uses though. We use the one from Chia.

The Nimble packages are:

• A GMP wrapper.
• A BLS wrapper.
• A WebView wrapper (GUI).
• A Nim event-based programming module that we wrote ourselves.
• A Nim cryptography lib (SHA and so on).
• A RocksDB wrapper (currently unused).

Finally, we do ship Argon2 inside the Ember repository. A couple of other cryptocurrencies use that, and there's pretty much one lib for it.

P2P: PMed. You can also email us, PM us on Twitter, or join our Discord though!

DaMut: Fair enough! We should've used "PRE-ANN".

About x42:

• They are not instant. They have a 60 second block time (on their main chain).
• They offer side blockchains, which splits up the network, We use a DAG and a singular blockchain, which work together.
• They premined 25%. We have a premine, which after 3 years (the amount of time it's supposed to last for), will be 4.5% of the total supply.
• They offer smart contracts. We have a personal belief that smart contracts shouldn't be layer one objects.

I would not call them a competitor (of course, all cryptocurrencies are competitors).

We have an adjustable spam filter. It's the same process as mining, but much much less intensive. There are some other projects which do the same.