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RTA Testnet Launch

We’re extremely proud and thrilled to unveil Real-time Authorizations (RTA) and RTA testnet!

It has taken us a while to get here, but for a good reason! See, RTA doesn’t stand on its own – in order to get here, we had to do a lot of heavy lifting, creating and optimizing communication protocol, implementing staking, supernode quorum selection and many other things that provide a solid foundation for RTA and other network features. It has been quite a journey and an effort to get here, but that foundational work is mostly done and should serve us well as we roll out various network features and have a solid foundation and infrastructure to build on top of.

For those of you who are fairly new to the project, RTA is a foundational feature of GRAFT Network, which allows real-time payments to be done at the point of sale, something that traditional blockchains aren’t capable of themselves. Being able to have predictable transaction time is fundamental to having digital currency work at the point of sale. The other fundamental feature that RTA brings to the world of r/etail payments is predictable fees for the merchant and minimized fees to the buyer. Predictability (both in time and fees) and the overall smooth, point-of-sale friendly experience are key to having a functional payment network that can compete with traditional credit/debit payment networks like VISA, MC, Amex.

Testing RTA

We are rolling out RTA testing gradually, focusing first on basic functionality and ramping up the testing scope from there to focus more on vulnerability and performance (there will be bounty programs), followed by beta testnet, security audit, and finally mainnet.

You can follow the RTA install and configuration instructions if you’d like to participate in testing or just get some hands on with RTA

There’s also a QuickStart guide that the community has put together (thanks Tiago)

Next Steps

Launch of the RTA Testnet signifies a huge milestone for the project. There are still a few loose ends to tie up and few corners to polish, which will be doing in the upcoming weeks (including turning on improved communication protocol and blockchain based lists for quorum selection), as well as a sufficient period of testing followed by beta testnet, and mainnet.

While that goes on, we will be focusing our energies on ramping up the remaining critical element of the final network – an exchange broker ecosystem. We are looking at a pretty cool way of doing it, that has a great potential not only to create a robust interchange layer for the network, but also provide an additional strong use case for the network itself (yes, we’re talking about a cross-chain, collateralized atomic swap DEX. Details to follow..)




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GRAFT Quarterly Update – Q1 2019

Dear GRAFT supporters,

Q1 2019 was a very busy quarter for the GRAFT team, with the highlight being the launch of the Supernodes on the mainnet in stimulus mode to establish a production-ready network and an upgrade of the mining algorithm. Both went down smoothly. The great news is we have got over 1,000 Supernodes launched and staked in under 2 weeks – it is a fantastic accomplishment and we would like to take a moment to congratulate the team and the community!

Let’s go over other progress and plans that will hopefully help bring things into perspective.

First, there’s the technology track – we are working hard on finishing up and releasing the real-time authorization (RTA) to the mainnet, tentatively end of May. Elements of the RTA (eg. staking transactions and sample selection) are already part of the supernode, pending further optimizations, as well as finishing up the point-of-sale ready RTA flow. We are doing some major internal rework on the clients as well to make them more robust and scalable – we should be able to complete that around the same time or shortly after. We have put out the reference versions of the exchange broker, payment gateway, WooCommerce integration, and are finishing up the payout gateway. We’re finishing a Monero13 merge, which is proving to be very involved this time around. Then there’s the early R&D work on delegated proof of stake (DDPoS) consensus algorithm to make sure that GRAFT stays the most advanced point-of-sale ready crypto payment network on the market, ready to face real-world scaling challenges and additional features like merchant tokens and loyalty programs. Needless to say – we have our hands full.

When it comes to market adoption – we’re not leaving it up the chance either. With 300+ merchants, 100+ merchant service providers, and 50+ exchange and payout brokers waiting in the wings to get started and with efficient channels to get to more, we want to make sure that GRAFT hits the quickest path to adoption possible. While GRAFT’s primary use case relies on facilitating payments with virtual currency using existing payment infrastructure, there are other use cases that could make the merchants act and deploy even faster. Among those are loyalty programs, store refunds, cash backs and cryptocurrency sales, end-to-end vertical solutions, etc. With your help and by conducting merchant outreach early, we can position GRAFT to be in the most advantageous position for market adoption.

We have started the rebranding effort in last quarter and are currently in the process of doing due diligence on availability etc of the names before we put it up for the final vote.

Getting Involved

There are three primary ways to get involved with GRAFT at this point:
  1. Become part of the infrastructure. You can run a supernode, become a merchant service provider, exchange broker, mine, or consolidate multiple of these options under one roof.
  2. Evangelize. Social media, local meetups, talking to and tweeting at the merchants – anything is fair game – we just ask you to keep the tone professional and thoughtful to convey the quality of the project.
  3. Put your creative hat on and roll up your sleeves. Help GRAFT network achieve market traction quickly by identifying (and if possible building) the functionality representing the additional use cases you can think of, no matter how small. We’re opening a section on the forum dedicated to the quick traction ideas – please participate.

Funding

You have been asking us about the financial status, and we would like to provide you with a bit of an update.

The most important thing is at this time we have the funding and budget secured for the core development efforts to deliver on the short and mid-term roadmap.

Investment / donation opportunities:

Opportunities remain to invest in GRAFT project with additional funds going towards marketing, liquidity (exchanges), additional dev resources, and new initiatives. If you are a qualified (accredited) investor who’s interested, please contact us at [email protected] and we will work to match you up with an appropriate investment option.

And of course we will never say no to project donations, providing you with lots of karma points (and an honorable mention on GRAFT site). To donate please send an email to [email protected] and we will generate a unique donation address for you.

In closing

We have very ambitious goals for Q2 and beyond. Q2 should allow us to see complete end-to-end network in production. Beyond Q2, we will be focusing on filling out the network with service providers, adding user and merchant features and workflows, expanding support for various use cases, improving scalability. From the specific goals for this year, we strive to achieve 100k real RTA transactions this year and 1M next year, subsequently pushing GRAFT to the scale of traditional payment networks.

A lot of GRAFT’s success depends on the community – we rely on the community to stay engaged and active, providing meaningful contributions towards success of the project. The timing is right with the merchants and users around the world looking to add alternatives to traditional payments. The faster we’re able to execute, the more likely the project will achieve success.

And please remember – YOU ARE THE NETWORK!