One consistent question over the past few months as Decred’s Lightning Network has entered testnet, is on how it relates to the staking system and if they will be somehow integrated.

Now that dcrlnd, our port of the most prominent LN implementation available, is synced to the upstream work and nearing mainnet release, I feel it’s time to show one of the things that we’ve been leading up to: a plan for implementing multi-owner tickets over the Lightning Network.

The greatest benefit of this work is that once deployed, the staking system will be truly approachable by all interested parties, even those without sufficient funds to purchase a full ticket and in the future where lower stake rewards make large on-chain splits …

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It is finally time for the 2018 Decred roadmap to be released. 2017 has been quite an eventful year for both Decred and the entire cryptocurrency domain, with exchange rates surging and a substantial increase in interest from the conventional finance sector. Decred has continued with its approach of generating deliverables before hyping them, despite many other projects in the space continuing to relentlessly hype their work far in advance of generating deliverables or focusing on exchange listings in lieu of doing any substantive work. We have substantially improved our marketing in the past several months and expect a strong uptrend to continue on this front throughout 2018. Here is a summary of what we have planned for the rest of …

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Lightning Network (“LN” for short) is a recently-proposed, and even more recently implemented, low-latency off-chain micropayment system that can work with Bitcoin or other similar cryptocurrencies, such as Decred. Since LN makes liberal use of smart contracts, the details of how it works are, unsurprisingly, complex. To make LN more tangible from a non-technical perspective, we will view it through the lens of practical engineering considerations and the concepts that drive those considerations.

The utility of LN is driven by several major considerations in the context of cryptocurrencies:

• low-latency payments - Many potential use cases for a modern system of transmitting value require a low latency, e.g. point-of-sale purchases. …

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The time for a new Decred roadmap has finally arrived. While many users have been keen to know where the project is headed in detail, we have intentionally avoided laying out our longer term plans in order to prevent other projects from implementing these ideas before they make it into Decred. I recognize that our approach with Decred runs counter to most other cryptocurrency projects, which often focus much more on hype and marketing than on development and sound engineering. Instead of hyping future work in advance of its completion, we have quietly completed our work and will hype it as it goes into production. Now that we are close to our first major post-launch milestone, hard fork voting, it is a good time to share where Decred …

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