Quote from: jayycox on October 23, 2017, 08:04:06 PM

RaiBlocks Newsletter 23rd October 2017 (Issue: 5)

Welcome to the fifth issue of the RaiBlocks newsletter, apologies for the delay in releasing this newsletter, Ive been caught up in a lot of RaiBlock related projects!

News
Closure of the Faucet
After lots of debate both internally and externally it was finally decided that the faucet would be closed. The cryptocurrency RaiBlocks has been swamped by the faucet distracting everyone from its main strength and selling point - the awesome tech behind the currency. The distribution has now officially has been completed with 7 Million XRB being kept for future development. The focus now developing the technology behind RaiBlocks and creating everyday uses.

Burning of Remaining Supply
As only 39% of the total planned supply is now circulating the remaining 60.8% is in the process of being burned, the Genesis account transferred 205,676,485XRB to xrb_1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111hifc8npp, both Landing and Faucet will also be transferred there to be burnt.
To see a video of the transfer checkout our youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwR-CXNafLs
We have been running a competition for the best mashup, (best 5 mashup videos chosen by the Dev team will receive 500XRB) - for more info check out the twitter thread: https://twitter.com/raiblocks/status/921519522183462913

Community (XCM) - clone of RaiBlocks
With the closure of the RaiBlocks Faucet the 2 developers who had been running the faucet have left the dev team to clone RaiBlocks and continue a faucet based distribution. They have started their own social media channels and will announce soon their plans in full. This new cryptocurrency will be different to RaiBlocks though is likely to use its technology and we wish them the best in their plans and endeavours.

Switching from Slack to Discord
The team have had to switch from Slack to Discord for community chat, for the last few weeks it has been a challenge to manage users on Slack as its not designed for large communities, also there were the constant spam attacks which couldnt be stopped and then finally Slack closed down our invite system.
Discord is much better suited to a community like ours and we invite people to join us - https://discordapp.com/invite/73Qmn4m

RaiBlocks Road Map
With all these changes a new road map is being worked on and will be released in then next 48hrs, this will provide some guidance about where RaiBlocks is aiming to go over the next few months. For more information head over to #roadmap on the discord channel

Behind the Scenes
While it might appear that there is a very small team behind RaiBlocks actually there are a number of teams working on different aspects of the cryptocurrency including the community team which contains the Community Managers and also key players on social media. There is also an exchange team put together of developers and users who are in the process of approaching an negotiating with exchanges for listings.

Third Party Services

YapRai Wallet
YapRai Wallet was developed to provide users with an xrb address instead of waiting for their desktop wallet to sync (pre version 8.0), it was only meant to be a side project and grew to have over 10000 accounts. Due to increasing commitment in the RaiBlocks Dev team I cant guarantee its security and so have decided to close it down. All accounts with balances have been emailed with details on how to withdraw your XRB to a new address. Options include the desktop wallet (Recommended), RaiWalletBot on Telegram and RaiWallet.com

Twitter
@xrb_giveaway and @tip_xrb are both back online after a period of downtime. @xrb_giveaway allows you to reward retweeters with XRB while @tip_xrb allows you to tip other users with XRB. Unlike other cryptocurrencies who arent quick enough to make real time transactions both bots actually make transactions taking advantage of the speed of XRB.

New Services
If you have an idea for a web service using XRB or a pre-existing service youd like help adding XRB to then get in touch either on here or via social media (e.g. on the RaiBlocs Discord).

Next Newsletter
Still keen for submissions, reviews and news, happy to donate xrb for your time. I hope to publish the newsletter more often, stick to the every 2 weeks for now.

Thank you for this, I've been gone for almost a month and I couldn't catch up back reading so it's great that this newsletter is keeping me up with what's been happening while I was gone. I'm glad that the faucet is gone, now the devs can focus more on expanding and on the development of the coin. I've been following the twitter updates and all I see are good news, so kudos to the devs for the job well done so far. I really hope to see more updates on here. I'm glad to see more people talk about the coin and not the faucet.