Decred Unveils 2018 Roadmap: Decentralized Exchanges, Privacy Features, & More

Earlier this week, Decred released a blog post that outlined their formal roadmap for 2018.

In this roadmap, the team specified their commitment to generating and releasing deliverables prior to building marketing hype for them, while focusing their marketing efforts on the core components of the project. This is a breath of fresh air in a cryptocurrency world where the standard seems to have become announce -> build -> maybe deliver on time.

The Decred team is working on some pretty cool projects, many of which center around a theme of exchange decentralization via atomic swaps, an element of privacy, and the release of features and updates in line with Decred’s core mission of decentralized blockchain governance.

A high-level summary of the 2018 roadmap includes:

• “Decentralized Exchange – We will draft a proposal for a cryptocurrency-only decentralized exchange and share it publicly.
• Politeia Voting – Our proposal system is nearing completion and will allow users and stakeholders to make proposals, dictate what does and does not get funded, and participate in project-level decision-making.
• Lightning Network – The bulk of the work to port Lightning Labs’ lnd to Decred has been completed and it will be released soon.
• Initial Privacy Release – Privacy work has begun in earnest and we will make an incremental privacy release where we release working code and give further information about our plans and approach.
• Decentralized Control of Funds – While Politeia voting will be used to control the flow of dev org funds, in the meantime, we will be creating a smart contract that will fully decentralize control of the dev org funds.
• Decentralized Autonomous Entities – Using a similar method as that used to decentralize control of the dev org funds, we will allow for the creation of DAEs on the Decred chain.
• Scalability Optimizations – A variety of changes, some of which are consensus changes, are required to improve the scaling properties of Decred, e.g. a new signature algorithm, multi-peer sync support, and header commitments.
• SPV Wallet Support – Instead of taking the typical wallet service approach where wallets connect to a centralized server, we have added support for a proper SPV mechanism that uses compact filters and works over the P2P network.
• Decrediton Integrations – We will be adding new integrations to support SPV, mobile, Politeia voting and Lightning Network.
• Marketing Growth – Decred has lined up a presence at many of the premier cryptocurrency trade shows for the rest of 2018 and will continue dialing up its marketing efforts.”