Status update and short term plans

Obviously we have the hard fork coming up in about one week with the mainstream CPU and mobile-friendly PoW.

There have been discussions with exchanges, so I do expect the coin to be listed for trading soon (either before or after the hard fork, I'm not sure).

Here is the short term roadmap for the next two versions (there may be incremental bug fix releases in between, along with additional minor features included with each release or as intermediate feature releases):

Version 0.10.0.0

Local blockchain pruning (light full nodes). On systems with limited resources (RAM and/or HD) you will be able to run a full node without storing an archive of the entire chain. This comes with no reduction in security -- you will still be validating the entire chain, but not storing it. Your node will be able to forward blocks and transactions, support wallets with full node security, and even mine. The only thing it won't be able to do is serve old blocks over the p2p to brand new users (it will still serve recent blocks to other users who are syncing after a limited amount of time offline). Brand new users or those offline for an extended period can use a bootstrap, or they can still sync over the p2p by connecting to archive nodes (full nodes that are not running in light mode).

Version 1.0.0.0

Cryptonote GUI integration (some preliminary work on this is already done).

Following version 1.0.0.0, we will move to the more on to the longer-term roadmap items, including the SPV client model, and finally the multisig, simple contract scripts, payment channels, and global blockchain pruning.

Although not presently on the roadmap, I would like to at some point see actual mobile wallets, which could work either as SPV clients or as light full nodes. For that to realistically happen, we'll have to see how things go with funding for the project and/or expansion of the core team.