GoodHabit
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March 17, 2021, 09:02:02 AM
Last edit: March 17, 2021, 11:22:23 AM by GoodHabit |
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Today actually marks the 4th anniversary of the Electra-Blockchain. I wrote a short (critical) review of it history, and hope it will not become an obituary.. enjoy..
A Brief History of Electra (Electracoin / ECA).
2017 - The beginning – till the End of the Bonanza
The first Block on the Electra-Blockchain was (according to the Explorer) generated 4 years ago, on March 17th, 2017, regular blocks followed from March 29th, and the launch was publicly announced on Bitcointalk on March 30th, 2017, by an anonymous founder going by the name of Electra01.
On Block 1, a pre-mine of 1'000'000'019 (one Billion and nineteen) Electra was mined, while all the following POW blocks till block 11522 only received a tiny reward of 0.00390625 Electra each, so that for the entire period, only 45 Electra (forty-five – not thousand or even million) would be mined. So, at the time of block 11522, circulating supply (total supply – minus unspent pre-mine – would be only 45, with the pre-mine amounting to 99.999995 % of total supply – or the circulating supply to only 0.0000049 % of total supply! Really extreme numbers.
During this period, Electra was listed on a first exchange (Nova-Exchange) and added to Coinmarketcap, with the extreme disparity between total supply and circulating supply. Initially, only small fractions of an Electra were traded, volume around $1, but as this was for a small fraction, prices fluctuated between $20 and $800 for an entire Electra, although there were no trades for that “large” amounts…
Then, with block 11523, on June 12th, 2017, the super Bonanza period started, with block-rewards suddenly rising to 65'972'222 per block, thus increasing the “circulating” supply extremely fast. Electra01 had stated that the aim of the super-rewards Bonanza was to “create a goldrush”. So, in the next 288 blocks, total supply increased to exactly 20'000'000'000 (20 Billion) Electra.
During those 288 blocks, none of this fast-rising supply could hit the market, as they needed 288 confirmations for transfers. So, the price on Nova-Exchange did not crash (yet). And then, at the end of that period, at block 11810, the POW stage ended, and the chain moved to POS only, and came to a halt early on June 14th, because E01 had not cared to create enough staking inputs (by – e.g. – splitting the pre-mine). The blockchain remained stuck, until on June 22nd, the start of wallet version 1.1 allowed for another 1000 POW blocks (with 1 ECA reward each).
During the time of the Bonanza and the time when the Blockchain remained stuck, Electra01 was publicly claiming that Electra was now worth more than BTC, because he demanded that the high price from the time when there were only 45 coins would now be multiplied with those 19 Billion coins that could not hit the market due to being unconfirmed and stuck on a not moving chain… He mostly complained about Coinmarketcap, that according to his claim, had unfairly failed to update the circulation supply. Thus, the hope to create huge attention, failed.
Was the Bonanza intended as just a ridiculous hoax or a huge scam attempt that fell horribly flat? At least it failed to attract a lot of publicity.
Once the chain had started moving again, the extra coins from the Bonanza started to hit the only Exchange, and price crashed extremely hard to 1 sat and below (Nova-Exchange only allowed 1 sat as minimum price, but the sell-wall soon amounted to 2 Billion ECA – and trade than moved to the LTC and particularly the DOGE market, where most trades now happened at far sub-sat levels…
2017 – post Bonanza – just one more minor coin
Another problem was soon noticed – while the chain was now moving again, and after 1000 blocks, switched to POS only, the calculation of the staking rewards was way off – instead of the promised 50% annually, rewards were often only fractions of an Electra… This problem was solved with a second Hard-Fork (Wallet-Version 1.2), that occurred at block 17102 on July 14th.
From then on, Electra was just an ordinary high-supply, high-staking rate coin with a price usually far sub-sat, quite an uneven distribution (very few very big whales) with a blockchain that was more or less working fine, although some flaws in the difficulty adjustment formula did lead to somewhat irregular block times – instead of the target of one block every 5 minutes, blocks came often way faster, but then sometimes took way more time (sometimes up to several hours), and so, on average, instead of the 288 blocks expected, the 1.2 Chain only had about 210 blocks a day…
During the rest of the summer of 2017, not much was happening – sometimes, price trackers showed wild fluctuations, but this was just because every time someone had bought a few ECA at the excessive price of 1 Sat from the huge sell wall, price seemed to jump up, but most of the trades were against DOGE. During that time, a second, widely unknown, exchange also opened a DOGE/ECA market and attempted to attract users with the promise that they would even stake your ECA for you. This Exchange went by the name of Coinsmarkets.com.
At the end of summer, with little debate on Bitcointalk, some people decided to try to promote Electra on newer social-media channels, and formed a group, first on Telegram, on how to build a supportive community.
Discussion centered around a potential use-case, about a new design, the start of a new website, and finding some more exchanges.
But in November, another setback happened, Nova-Exchange announced that it had changed hands, and would not allow any new user registration anymore. So, Electra seemed to be down to Coinsmarkets as only exchange.
The New (Community) Team was looking for new Exchanges, with «Next Exchange» being forever «Next» - as after large announcement, it never really got off the ground… Around the end of 2017, the new Website (Electraproject.org) was launched, and the new Logo promoted.
2017 / 2018 – Coinsmarkets pump, crash, and aftermath
Then, something unexpected happened – while there was a general bull-market, and many rather unknown Alt-Coins saw huge price hikes, Electra on Coinsmarkets put it to the extreme – early in December, price was still well below 0.1 sat, but then, and particularly between Christmas and January 3th, 2018, the price completely exploded, price reached around 60 sat on January 3, so it had pumped ca. 1000 fold (not 1000% - one thousand times) in just 3 weeks. So, around that time, Electra would have a market cap of >200 Million $ and be ranked around place 100 on Coinmarketcap. At the turn of the year to mid-January, some more – rather unknown – exchanges listed Electra, (Coinhouse.eu, Coinscontrol, Bitafex, and finally Crypto-Bridge). But on the 4th of January, Coinsmarkets went offline (they already had problems on the third), Electra had for some days no price on Coinmarketcap.com, as the exchange where most of the remaining volume was – at Coinhouse.eu – (were the price declined from 70 to 50 sat in a few days, but still…) was not accepted by them, - until Crypto-Bridge listed in mid-January.
During this huge spike, most of the large holders from the Bonanza period had cashed out (some had dumped earlier – some still stayed on – but still…), and when Coinsmarkets went offline, around 5 Billion Electra remained stuck there. This did create huge anxiety, as many new buyers had just got in at ATH, and there was no contact for Coinsmarkets available…OTOH, this had also the result that now many people had a stake with Electra, as they wanted to save their investment, so participation in all forums of the new Team was quite high. Until the end of February, the price of Electra had declined substantially, to less than 1/6 of the peak price.
End of February 2018, coinsmarkets opened a withdrawal window for very few coins, one of them was Electra, so, at least, many Electra holders got their coins out. And then, Coinsmarkets just vanished, never to be seen ever (no real-world address / person was ever identified and made accountable, AFAIK), and the remaining Electra were then dumped on Crypto-Bridge during late March and April.
2018 – some ups – and some delays and setbacks
While most of the early Exchanges had gone offline (not only Nova and Coinsmarkets, but in the meantime also Coinhouse, Coinscontrol and Bitafex), Electra was finally listed on Cryptopia and Coinfalcon, and from then – early May 2018, prices started to recover somewhat.
The “Team” had decided to promote Electra as a leading future payment provider. As a first step, they announced the launch of a new wallet, which they called the “Desktop wallet”. This product was much hyped, if offered restoration of your private keys via a Mnemonic code and a neat graphic design, but technically, was just a different GUI to the original 1.2 Qt wallet, with significantly less functionality for experienced users. This wallet was released with still several bugs and was a point of conflict between the Team and Electra01, who clearly stated that he did not support that release.
The “New” wallet, however, did not solve some more pressing issues – initially, it was stated that Electra should have a maximum supply of 30 Billion coins. With a staking rate of 50% annually (a bit more with compound interest), this number would be reached in the second half of 2018 – what then? Ignoring the cap (because it was nowhere in the code) OR just stop staking at all? … Development of a wallet / Blockchain update to address this issue (which would require a hardfork) took quite some time – as the limit of 30 Billion drew closer, uncertainty about future staking rates increased, and the price started to fall again…
When the update to Version 1.3 of the wallet finally took effect at block 112201 on October 4th, 2018, the staking rate was extremely cut, to just 2.5% annually, and announced to fall even further rather soon. So, the incentive to hold and stake Electra declined heavily, and the price continued its downward trajectory…
Around that time, the Team finally reached a deal with Electra01, in which he promised to hand over part of the premine to a foundation, created under Dutch law. The foundation would support the development and promotion of Electra.
From its blockchain at that time, Electra could not be called a technically leading project, and thus, the necessity for a further upgrade was clearly evident.
2019 – Blockchain-upgrade, and some more – but more troubles with exchanges
The Upgrade to the Electra-Core V2 Wallet was activated at block 182750, on February 22nd, 2019. The new wallet is technically a Fork of the PIVX wallet, a leading coin linking POS with Masternodes – there are many PIVX clones out there, most run MN, and it is technically also implemented in the Electra-Core wallets Masternodes were never activated with Electra, but combining MN with proportional stake rates would also be somewhat special.
(As a specialty, Electra was one of the very few coins that mastered such an upgrade without a swap, by importing the old blockchain in to the new one).
Other technical improvements that were much promoted was the implementation of AtomicSwaps (a technology that was much hyped but is de facto useless outside of Decentralized Exchanges (DEX) with sufficient liquidity) and the start of the own mobile Wallets for both Android and IOS devices.
Both were promoted as big steps forward on the road to make Electra-Pay ready to “ mass adoption” with merchants and customers.
But the year brough also setbacks: Cryptopia, the exchange with the largest volume of Electra-Trading, went offline early in the year (and up to today, at least 2 Billion Electra are still stuck there), and later, Crypto-Bridge and Coinexchange followed suit. There were some new – smaller – exchanges that newly listed Electra (e.g., Crex24 and STEX), but generally, the picture was not so bright, and some people felt that the Team was better in announcing future announcements than in presenting results…
So, it was not surprising that the price, after some recovery after the launch of the mobile wallets, returned to its long-term downward trajectory once again.
2020 – some more modest progress – but finally split and crash
Comes along 2020 – while the team insisted that Electra-Pay and mass-adaption are on track, not that much changed. When in the summer Electra got listed on HitBTC, a mid-sized exchange, some pump happened again, but this was soon followed by a dump. The Team accused Electra01 to dump the bulk of the remaining pre-mine (instead, as they claimed to have agreed before, hand it over to the foundation) (conflicts between the team and Electra01 had gone on for quite some time), and thus pulled the plug, by announcing on November 25th 2020, that they would move to a new project called Electra-Protocol with the ticker XEP, that people who held Electra on their wallets (but not on exchanges, staking pools etc.) at the time of a snapshot on November 22 and were neither named Electra01 nor had participated in the Bonanza mining could claim an Airdrop between January 1th and January 10th, 2021 – and just BTW, that support for the mobile wallets (including connectivity) would stop at the end of 2020, unless Electra01 would pay a relative large amount to maintain them.
After this announcement, price of Electra collapsed to – again – far sub-sat levels.
While Electra01 organized a modest new website and a new Explorer, nothing much happened. Many people got the XEP Airdrop, but many were left behind, particularly mobile wallet users.
2021 – a new start – or just an obituary?
Some people try to organize themselves into a remnant of a community – but if this brief history is more of an obituary, or marks a new turning point, must remain open for now.
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