Progress Report April 2021

Since the start of 2021, the Electra Protocol team has spent countless hours diligently working to bring the project to where it stands today. In addition to the technical work that has occurred, there are many behind-the-scenes advancements that we would like to report. And while we cannot share everything, we feel that this progress report addresses many important topics.

Premine and Project Management Stage

First, we want to explain how we utilize our financial funds during the project management stage.

Premine Wallets

As we have previously shared, the premine of three billion XEP has been placed into four different addresses within the same wallet, with three of those addresses currently locked. The first wallet, containing 1.5 billion, is designated for the current year. We then set aside 500 million for the following three years. This 3 billion XEP is a “global maximum” amount; however, it does not mean that this reserve amount will be spent. More than likely, it will not be.

While it is still too early to make a definite statement, we recognize that there is a high likelihood that there could be a change to the project’s funding solution. This solution could arrive starting with the release of our validator nodes. This change would likely result in the burning of the remaining premine amount since our goal is not to hold a significant percentage of the total supply.

The premine wallets are currently accessible by two individuals, Master Den (Aykut) and Jenova. This accessibility to these wallets are temporary and mandatory by default situation. We will move the premine wallets to be under the control of the legal entity once it is active. This foundation will also be responsible for overseeing the blockchain project.

We do want to note that during a transaction for a 3rd party test, the premine wallet staked. The stake amount can be viewed here.

In the event we burn the airdrop wallet, the stake rewards will be burned as well.

Exchange payments

When negotiating with cryptocurrency exchanges, they ask for listing fees during integration. We are very careful when discussing this with exchanges and cautious regarding the cost of the listing. Due to the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) of some exchanges, we cannot share the listing cost; however, we can ensure our community that we pass a tough bargain period each time to utilize our funds efficiently. Sometimes, such bargain periods may delay our announcements.

Infrastructure costs

There are several ongoing expenses associated with maintaining our global network, which include the cost of running the servers that host our website, seed nodes, and the ElectraPay infrastructure, which is essential to the Electra Protocol project.

Development

While forecasting potential development costs, we understand that there may be times when we must choose to utilize third-party coding services for critical needs. Additionally, there are times that we must purchase such items as software licenses for the use of the software in the development of our code, as well as to build and maintain our website.

Temporary liquidity to exchanges:

On rare occasions, we face a scenario where XEP is listed on an exchange, yet the cross pair sell walls do not have enough XEP for potential buyers. Due to the low amount of available XEP or the high spread volume, potential buyers face a high cost. To correct this and protect the users, we will from time to time place small sell orders with tighter spreads. The need to do this should diminish as our order book increases and stabilizes. So far, we have placed around 10M XEP to cover the spread, mainly ETH and USDT pairs. Part of this amount has been filled, with the remaining still in place.

Business/Legal Entity

Regarding our goals for this project, the first step that we must complete centers around the finalization of the project structure.

We are currently evaluating the aspects of establishing a foundation that will oversee our open-source community project. In time, we would like to turn over the Electra Protocol blockchain management to the foundation.

As for ElectraPay and the goals we want to achieve, we feel that a business venture is more appropriate in overseeing the continued development and marketing of our merchant environment.

The ongoing discussions regarding the new foundation and business entity have been ongoing since January. Upon a conclusion, we will share the decision with our community.

Bounty distribution

Occasionally we plan to motivate our developers and community members who are showing a high level of engagement with small bounty gifts. Please keep in mind that the bounty amounts will not demonstrate the actual value of the efforts spent. This amount will equate to a small payment to encourage the team and several community members based on their activity and engagement.

Third-party services

While anticipating the project’s needs, we realize that there may be times when we must utilize third-party services for such things as writing articles or marketing services to increase awareness of the XEP ecosystem.

Tipping and Engagement Rewarding

Our team is working on an additional social media rewarding system, which we plan to utilize as a way to increase non-XEP community members’ engagement. We are doing this to reward community members who have completed tasks or assignments.

Presale

In January of this year, we successfully conducted a presale from our premine. This presale covered the initial cost of getting the Electra Protocol Project started. During the presale, we arranged scaled sell orders between the 5 and 8 sat level. We originally announced that there would be a 10% max bonus given to presale participants. We then announced that we were in discussions with a T1 exchange, and in order to expedite the opportunity to get listed, we increased the bonus to 100%:

Amount of XEP coins sold: 135M XEP

Bonus distribution period: July 2021

Airdrop

We successfully distributed a total of 15,183,754,127 XEP to 2400 wallets, desktop and mobile, during our airdrop period.

We want to note that the data collected for the airdrop process was only needed to complete the airdrop process. All names, wallet addresses, and holding amounts will soon be destroyed.

ElectraPay

Based on several meetings, contacts, and the demand coming from the crypto market, we have decided to make ElectraPay our top priority on our roadmap.

Our developers are currently focusing on many ongoing parallel tasks, which includes:

• integration of multi-currency system
• improvements to the merchant account page
• plugin developments and testing
• API connections and improvements
• POS application development

Mobile Wallet

The development of our mobile wallet is still in progress. This wallet will be a light wallet and will contain only the blocks from the transactions that occurred from that wallet.

The wallet will have a global sync process, which means that the wallet will first connect to seed nodes to discover the network peers and then connect to any node in the network. This process was a top priority and will operate exactly like our desktop wallet. And like the desktop wallet, you will be able to add a node manually within the wallet. This is beneficial to wallets that contain XEP and have been offline for an extended period of time. Once the user takes the wallet online and if they find no network connection, they will be able to check the explorer for other nodes, add these IPs manually, and connect to the network.

Desktop Wallet changelog since the release of the new chain:

* Important reminder *
The latest release of our desktop wallet is a mandatory update. This upgrade is set to occur at block 150,000; this allows enough time for everyone to update.

v1.0.2.0 (mandatory update)

Core – Block 150,000 has been set as a mandatory upgrade block where PoW will be disabled for good, so please upgrade your wallets before this point in time in order to stay on the main chain.

Staking – Staking on p2sh-segwit addresses will now be supported once the network has passed the mandatory upgrade block.

GUI – A new GUI option has been added to hide orphaned coin stakes from the transaction list.

Core – BIP37 bloom filter support has been enabled by default to support mobile wallets on the network.

Core – Miscellaneous optimizations and reduced log spamming

v1.0.1.1

GUI – The wallet software will now notify the user if there is a new version available and provide a prompt to update the wallet with download links.

Staking – Multi-wallet staking is now supported, so any wallets which were open when starting the wallet software and are currently unlocked will begin to stake.

GUI – The GUI option to enable blockchain pruning and discard blocks has been fixed and now works as intended.

Core – The initial blockchain sync will now proceed much faster due to various optimizations.

Staking – Orphaned coin stakes, which currently appear as unspendable, will now be automatically abandoned on wallet startup to allow spending and staking again.

Exchanges

With the start of an entirely new project, we had to find new platforms for buying, selling, and trading Electra Protocol. Our first contact was with Crex24, through which we got listed immediately just before the new year.

We also extended our listings with NEXT exchange and AltMarkets, Vindax, Finexbox and Graviex. However, we have always known that Electra Protocol deserves to be listed on top-tier exchanges.

In January, we applied to a top-tier exchange and soon afterward started our negotiations. After having some tough deals, we were able to get favorable conditions for our listing. Top-tier exchanges have strict rules and policies, and project teams have to sign NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) stating that they will not share information about the listing. All top-tier exchanges have strict listing procedures, where they analyze the project and team, complete security audits of the blockchain, etc. In the end, and if accepted, the project enters into a queue list to be integrated and listed.

We are proud to share that we have passed the security audit, and we are waiting for the final steps to be completed from our first top-tier exchange.

Our community can rest assured that this listing will not be enough to satisfy our desire to have XEP listed on as many top-tier exchanges as possible.

Each day we explore other top-tier exchanges. But please keep in mind that we can’t waste our money for just listing purposes. We must think about a balanced financial resource utilization which we try to do consistently.

We recently finalized a listing agreement with an additional T2-T3 classified exchange, which we anticipate occurring within the next two weeks. This exchange is popular with several traders in the crypto market, and we look forward to announcing this listing.

Awareness Facilities

To increase the awareness of Electra Protocol, we conducted a few marketing events. Due to these events’ success, a new Nigerian Telegram group was created, and now we have +400 members inside that group. We are also excited that our Turkish Electra Protocol group increased the number of members by 400.

Mass Adoption Facilities

Beach Volley Sponsorship

One of our community members is organizing a traditional beach volley tournament. He met with core members, proposed promoting XEP during this exciting event, and asked for some marketing support. As a team, we discussed and decided to cover some marketing and advertising costs. We are proud to have community members like this, as this support will definitely bring more exposure to Electra Project.

Electronic Transaction Association (ETA) webinars

As many of you are aware, our development coordinator Ruanne Lloyd serves on several ETA committees. In January, Robert Bakker was asked to join the ETA committees for business networking and exploration of possible co-operations. Robert is one of our valued business development team members, and we are confident that ETA members will well respect his level of blockchain and cryptocurrency knowledge.

Unique Block Explorer

Along with a unique codebase, our new block explorer was created from scratch by Quentin. This new block explorer is a real-time explorer, which means you will not have to refresh the page to get the latest blockchain activity. This new explorer is extremely fast compared to the current one due to the new microservices structure.

It was essential for us to get a new and efficient codebase. This explorer will not stay a simple explorer but is a concept for an extra feature of the ElectraPay environment. Once again, we can’t disclose all the details; however, we will keep everyone updated in due time.