UPDATESHello Rapture community!
It's been just under a week since we officially announced and launched and we've covered a lot of ground, so we wanted to provide a snapshot of the launch, what we've accomplished as a community, and what to expect in the coming weeks!
LAUNCHWe officially launched on Jan 20th. The wallets and the git repository were made available to the community, miners, pools, and exchanges simultaneously. Over the course of a few minutes, the network hashrate went from 0.001 GH/s to over 30 GH/s, which is a massive 30,000x increase. Thousands of new wallets came online and synced with the network over this time as well. The network stayed healthy and stable, no forking, and no sync issues, which is exactly what we had aimed for during our development and testing. Very happy about that!
EARLY COMMUNITY
We've been dedicated to being very active and responsive to the community. We have great respect and appreciation for all of your involvement, and hope you can feel that! Discord has become the main hub of activity and we're constantly found there providing updates, catching up with community members, providing support and answering questions, and keeping everyone up to date. If you haven't joined the Discord server, please drop in!
https://discord.gg/NMgQEn8
AIRDROPS
Our first “Early Community Airdrop” is winding down, but if you're on either of these lists (see below) and haven't already sent us your Rapture address, please do!
http://our-rapture.com/images/early-community-DISCORD.jpg
http://our-rapture.com/images/early-community-BITCOINTALK.jpg
(Note: please be sure to send your wallet address via the same username and platform reflected on each list) With this Airdrop, we specifically wanted to show gratitude to the early community that came out and engaged/messaged with other users. Thanks again!
We have some good ideas for upcoming Airdrops, and we feel like the community probably has some GREAT ideas. We've setup a channel on the Discord server called #community-ideas. If you have a great idea for Airdrops, Bounties, and other ways to effectively support the community and also reach a wider audience, feel free to submit them in that channel.
TRANSLATIONS
Since launch, we've had a ton of requests for translations. We have a list of who requested, when they requested, and the language they requested and we'll have it up shortly on our Discord #translation channel for all to see. Some users have pro-actively done translations, which we greatly appreciate! But please check in with us before doing so, as we'd like to keep it fair and give priority to those who requested first. We've settled on a bounty and that will be announced with the list. We'll reach out to all of the users that messaged us for each language, and if we don't hear back within 2 days then we'll move down the list.
EXCHANGES and LISTINGS
We're excited to announce that we're officially listed on southXchange and stocks.exchange. Both have been great early platforms!
https://www.southxchange.com/Market/Book/RAP/BTC
https://stocks.exchange/trade/RAP/BTC
For listing sites, crypto-coinz.net has just added us to their mining and masternode calculators.
https://www.crypto-coinz.net/coin-info/?55-Rapture-RAP-NeoScrypt-calculator/
https://www.crypto-coinz.net/master-node-calculator/
We love their site and their admin has been great, so we’re very excited about being listed there! MNRank should have us listed shortly as well.
We're pursuing the other main listings sites that the community has requested and we'll post updates as things progress.
DEVELOPMENT and ROADMAP
With the launch week almost through, we're turning our attention towards development and the all-important roadmap. The strong launch has allowed us to expedite the roadmap and we're excitedly laying the groundwork to make significant steps earlier than initially planned. Our lead designer is actively iterating on prototypes of the gift/tract card system, and we'll have visuals to share there very soon! We also have some feature requests that we've started on with the QT wallet and we'll be looking to push out a small update soon. It won't be a mandatory update, it will just have some niceties that have been asked for.
MINING, POOLS and MASTERNODES
As mentioned in the launch section, we've seen a very high amount of mining activity. We greatly appreciate the support of the mining community and are here to support you as well! There was definitely early pool-to-pool drama as there seems to be some history there, but we took neutral ground and tried to shepherd the pools towards focusing on providing a stable and positive experience for miners. They received the wallets at the same time as everyone else, so they had to implement and respond very quickly.
As a general note, we don't have any direct control or affiliation with the pools. But our top priority is the community and we'll do everything we can to make sure that mining is running as smooth as possible. The pools worked with us to get masternode payments enabled early on, Lucky PoW blocks distributed accordingly, and maintenance schedules properly broadcast. It's our general impression that they understand that keeping miners happy is in their best interest, but of course, please bring any issues to our attention and we'll do what we can to help resolve things.
Lucky PoW blocks have been popular times for mining activity to ramp up, as we'd expect. A reminder to all miners, ramping up massive amounts of hashing power just to target a specific block is a risky strategy. If you're trying to specifically mine a Lucky block, be sure to ramp your hasing power up and down gradually, and continue mining at least until you see those Lucky blocks mature.
Regarding Masternodes, we're happy to report a total count of 36 nodes as of this posting. Masternodes have been providing services and stability to the network and we appreciate those who have set them up! We're happy to report that the 50% Masternode reward for Lucky PoW blocks has gone to a few lucky node operators, that's 500 Rapture in one block. Congratulations!
One of our Discord community members, @birty, has started putting together a Masternode setup guide that can be found here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CWUjlrmvpbceB7_Mu-mEhqg67nKYT7hvvF9gNTu4qMA/edit
We've also updated our README notes regarding Masternodes in our git repos:
https://github.com/RaptureCore/sentinel/blob/master/README.md
https://github.com/RaptureCore/Rapture/blob/master/README.md
Please consult all three of those documents when setting up a Masternode, and don't hesitate to reach out for support on Discord if necessary.
That's our quick snapshot of a very active launch week, where we're currently at, and the exciting things to look forward to. Thanks again for being such a great and supportive community and please join us on Discord and spread the word!
