Since you asked:

Yes - we have always planned to come back to Aricoin - sadly a series of bad events hit the development team - there is no excuse for such silence but we were waiting for a time in our lives were we could devote more time to the project - that's why there has been no update in so long as it would be wrong to promise something when we don't have the time to commit to the project.

To give you some context if you were not around in 2013/2014. Aricoin was originally launched as OlympicCoin at the start of 2014 - see this launch thread. The team created the coin for fun originally but because we were one of the first altcoins to gain a lot of traction and community support (with the addition of some team members specialising in marketing) we decided to take the project more seriously. We saw huge potential in cryptocurrency but at that time there were no coins making cryptocurrency accessible to everyone - a 'mass market' coin as it were. So we took this idea and developed AricoinPay around our coin to differentiate ourselves but at the same time do something that was sorely needed, bridge the gap between the cryptocurrency community and the public. Making cryptocurrency accessible. We have some marketing guys on the team and they created a waiting list feature for the launch of Aricoin pay that had over 100,000 people signup - we verified around 10,000 as real people. You can see the history of that on twitter.

So now you have a bit of context, what were these bad events? AricoinPay functions exactly like PayPal. It uses real world transaction price data from exchanges, for it to work consistently without easy market manipulation we have to select one exchange for everyone to trade with so it can get an accurate live price from there - we were on a few exchanges, but the trade volume on MintPal was well into the 1000s of BTCs in 2014 so we selected this exchange as our primary exchange and included it in all our marketing material.

Then this happened to MintPal in 2014, shortly after our rebranding. Our community and developers made huge losses.

We quickly redirected everyone and relaunched on Cryptsy. Exchange volumes started slow but then got even higher here because the exchange was so large. It had a very public image and we foolishly didn't learn from our previous mistake. This happened to Crypsty shortly after.

The AricoinPay system relies on exchange data to bridge that gap and displays prices to people in their local currency.  After the downfall of Mintpal & Cryptsy in such a short time frame - given their huge respect in the community at the time - we were lost for words - that was then followed by a countrywide ban on cryptocurrency which has since been relaxed. We moved to a series of other exchanges that were much less known than Mintpal & Cryptsy and our thoughts were to wait until a time when the cryptocurrency environment was more transparent - so when we could find a more reliable exchange for the long run - with everything being so heavily regulated now it leaves less room for people to do things like our previous two selected exchanges and we are seeing a future again. We will be taking the next few months to plan our next steps.

We would love to have as many people on board as possible to help with coding / community support / outreach. You can see a list of jobs we require below the first post on this thread, so message this account if interested.


Extra note for community members who have been with us from the start:
We had 6 encrypted backup disks within our team, 3 of these have failed - causing more problems over the last couple of years. If you have historic versions/code for Aricoin or OlympicCoin please send it to this account for our records. In addition to this - we still have all the code for AricoinPay and database records if you had small amounts there you would like to recover - don't worry we haven't forgotten about you!