Spring Plan (2018)

When I was at middle of this writing, the crypto world appeared falling to some bottom. Some coins like BTC or ETH could lose some value, but some others would be hit much harder probably because, despite of big market cap, they provide much less than what had been promised.

Back to over 6 months ago, a tiny coin with strange name, Sumokoin, was launched. It boasted very little, promised very little (if any), staying humble among hundreds of hyped cryptocurrencies/tokens. It seemed there were no hopes for such small coin with zero marketing budget while under constant attacks about its legitimacy to exist. Well, it did survive and paid the community off, those who have never failed to believe in the uncompromised privacy it provides for a better, non-censorship world. Thank you all, especially core members like @sumogr, Patrik, @Syncmaster913n, Paul, Odd Teng etc. who have spent countless hours on social media to support the coin and build a great community.

In this post, we’ll try to address some most frequent questions about the coin creation, the premined coins and the development road in 2018. Let’s start with the most important question: Why was Sumokoin created?

Why SUMOKOIN anyway?

Two most FAQs about Sumokoin I often encountered were:

- Why should the world need another privacy cryptocurrency while there are plenty of them already like Monero, ZCash, Dash etc?

- What make Sumokoin different from its brother, Monero?

We believe that most of good coins were created with great missions. Sumokoin has a simple mission, to provide uncompromised privacy on a solid cryptographic basis. With unbreakable ringsize of 12+1, Sumokoin can claim itself truly fungible that no other of the above mentioned coins have yet such characteristics without some flaws one way or another. It means, in plain English, using SUMO for a transaction, you can always be sure that no one can find any detail about it, no one can blacklist it based on coin transaction history: you are in a TRUE secured channel.

Monero is a respectable cryptocurrency, packed with a lot of cool ideas and you can see it as a testing field for cryptographers to achieve better privacy from time to time. The project follows periodical hardforks to implement new features (that often resulted in many troubles for exchanges, related services and users to cope up with changes). Sumokoin devs always keep away from direct comparison to any coin (all comparison charts/sheets around were created by community instead) but here are some advantages you may find only in Sumokoin now:

+ Unique, miner-friendly emission scheme aiming for long-term existence (20 years)

+ Robust difficulty adjustment algorithm against opportunistic mining practice

+ (Very) high privacy from day one. No optional or lower privacy settings allowed

+ Stable blockchain, no historical “weak” transactions, not clustered by endless hardforks

+ Competent devs, helpful community

Sumokoin, as a fork of Monero, fortunately could fix many possible flaws from its creation, thanks to the inheritance of great cryptographic foundation from its predecessor and wise decisions to choose the way it should be by the team. However, I believe that gradually users will find out there are huge differences among the rest of privacy coins from their experiences, not because of our boasts for our own coin.

How about the premined coins?

Premined coins are even more questioned than anything else and that is understandable. Right after the launch, dev team felt uneasy with the premine because that is a large portion of coins in comparison to total circulating supply in the first few years. After many discussions, team decided to lock most of the coins until around July 2020 when we thought we would have better decision on how to use them properly.

On the other hand, we planned to release small parts of premined coins to market in 2018 and 2019, the total released coins would be about 15% of total circulating supply at the time, to fuel coin development, PR and to list SUMO on bigger exchanges (that could require a lot of money for some of them) while not to saturate the market. So, on July 2018 at blockchain height# 153600, 600K SUMO will be unlocked from the escrowed wallets and, after throughout discussion, we wanted to distribute most of them to investors to avoid any potential price manipulation or security concerns. There are some options to do that:

1. Selling them gradually to market

2. Selling them to some big investors (if we can find them)

3. Selling them via token sales (a kind of mini-ICO)

While first option is the easiest one and may profit us most, it lacks transparency and may cause negative market reaction. Second option depends on the interest of investors and still yields concern if one holds too many coins. The last option appears to be the best one to distribute coins to community but it (token selling) is really a strange land to us. However, if it happens, we want it to be done for the best sake of Sumokoin supporters:

1. There should be no single paid ads for the tokens, so only those who are really interested in the coin would know about it.

2. The coins should be distributed at reasonable price, i.e. only a limited number of tokens would be released.

We will need more discussion and value any constructive idea from community on how we should conduct the token sales. Thank you.

Development Roadmap for 2018

After a very productive dev conference last week, devs agreed to keep planned schedule but set some specific jobs and deadlines for upcoming months.

- Lite GUI wallet: the GUI wallet will be able to connect to remote trust nodes instead downloading full blockchain like full GUI wallet (that will be optional), more security levels should be added to send coins along with wallet password — Target release date: End of March, 2018.

- Web wallet: the best wallet for a starter, security is the primary concern however creative, mobile-friendly UI should also be essential — Target release date: End of May, 2018.

Devs are planning to implement a new feature to Sumokoin core called “Bulletproofs” (paper here) which will potentially reduce blockchain size down to 70% — 80% in comparison to current implementation. The new feature won’t be implemented without throughout testing so we set the deadline for it to June, 2018.

We also discussed about expanding dev team to meet some tough jobs like integration to micro payment channels (Lightening Network or similar ones), full-feature mobile wallets, hardware wallet integration etc. but it will largely depend on the talents (that are very rare in crypto) we can acquire in future. We will keep you updated on our plans for those jobs in the next upcoming months to avoid any over-promising.

Finally, we would like to send best wishes to community and we hope 2018 will be a great year for cryptocurrency and Sumokoin in particular.

Spring Plan (2018) was originally published in The Sumokoin Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.