We had 8 meaningful sessions with beta testers who provided in-depth feedback to us.
You can read about it in details in the new article:
bit.ly/2Wggrhx

Giant Community experienced the first webinar, dedicated to GEX Beta Trading Interface:
bit.ly/2W40OVy

Finally, we make a public release of GEX Beta!
bit.ly/GEX-beta

The primary goal of the beta is to share the current status and vision of the platform, and to collect as much feedback as we can to improve it before the final release of the product.

Please, share your thoughts in the social media and submit the bugs using the form:
forms.gle/hAkxhdsnxSofEY1S6

Now it’s time to process the feedback and take advantage of that Beta for our marketing purposes!

GiantCore has a mandatory update! Please, update your wallet and nodes using the guide till 04/30/2019 @ 12:00am (UTC):

https://giantpay.network/pages/giantcore-13-update

Major updates, insight and changes haven't stopped us from day-to-day work.
Besides quarterly updates that addressed hot topics, we want to share with you the detailed picture.
You can  now acknowledge what's going on in different parts of the project.
We switched to the new format of progress reports. Please, share how do you like it and leave comments!

Original:  https://giantpay.network/pages/march-results
Medium: https://medium.com/giantcrypto/march-results-ad2e3bae5d6d

A quick heads-up for everyone interested in the most recent Giant news.

Giant CEO Dmitry Filinberg is currently attending TeamLead Conf 2019 in Moscow, Russia. This event is made exclusively for Team Leads to exchange experience and find together what it means to be a good administrator.

For instance, one lecture will be dedicated to the topic of responsibilities delegation by Skyeng.
Another one is directly connected with the way how we work — Team Lead Soft Skills Scrum Style by Orange Training Group.
And while Dmitry is gaining valuable insights, we continue our job to bring you a secure cutting-edge smart contracts system.

You can always suggest.

Another recent event: Giant Coin (GIC) is now accepted as a payment method by HumanAction.io — a libertarian online apparel shop.
After visiting it, you may soon find yourself drinking coffee from a cup with Ludwig von Mizes while wearing a T-shirt with Rothbard or Hayek.
Giant founders fully support the concept of a free digital market without any state borders.

https://twitter.com/Human_actionLLC/status/1099360250757410816

Hello. PoS calc is available on https://giantpay.network/proof-of-stake
From August there is only PoS mining

Once again, the Giant team tells everyone a lot of information regarding the Giant Project management,
community activities and even the internal development of Giant Contracts.
See the latest sprint report and learn what we’ve all been doing last two weeks:

Original: https://giantpay.network/pages/latest-sprint-news-coding-is-power
Medium: https://medium.com/giantcrypto/latest-sprint-news-coding-is-power-e1b09f238669

Retweet and spread the word about Giant way of doing things!

How can innovative projects reach success?

What’s the key advantage of Giant?

Giant Coin founders share their insight!

See how the Giant team is going to address business development tasks and why the community-driven Governance matters:


https://giantpay.network/pages/giant-insight-9

Good news for everyone who's interested in Giant Contracts progress!

GiantJS developer Alexei Bokarev has made it possible to calculate the exact sum needed for the Giant contract deployment and WP methods execution fees. This also means that the system is already able to show the budget you need to work with smart contracts (for now, only with dummy ones).

However, we're yet to finish this work with fees for all possible methods execution. The so-called WP methods are only a limited range of commands one can use with Giant Contracts. The fees calculation for other methods will be finished faster because now our devs have a working basic structure.

The main advantage of our fees calculation mechanism is the ability of the system to determine the real contribution a chosen smart contract is doing to the blockchain and dApps. This is different to some popular projects where the fees' value is calculated by looking at the amount of symbols in a contract. This is a primitive approach, as theoretically there can be smart contracts which have less symbols than usual ones but play a more important role in the system.

Other notable recent breakthroughs include smart contracts payments to multiple wallets at the same time. The wallet info display is now complete as well. You can see all the progress for yourself here, in our corresponding GitHub repo:

https://github.com/GiantPay/giantjs/commits/dev/deploy/%23412

Don't forget to follow our news on Twitter @giant_coin

We would like to tell about a good strategic advantage of Giant Contracts that will seriously contribute to all future dApps security.

It's no secret that smart contracts made on new programming languages have mistakes often missed by their original creators. One of the most illustrative examples is Solidity - this was recently pointed out by Duncan Coutts (Computer Science PhD) from Input Output Hong Kong, an independent team of experienced blockchain engineers.

As he says, the problem is that some programming languages have well-established practices of software creation, while others are still too young. Because of that, smart contract creators leave unfixed errors which can lead to DAO hacks.
JavaScript developer Alexei Bokarev who’s responsible for delivering of Giant Contracts joins this discussion and tells that the programming language itself is very rarely to blame for security vulnerabilities - ultimately, it's still about the people responsible for code writing and about their skills.

The future smart contracts system on the Giant blockchain will have less chances to become compromised because of a human error by the decentralized apps creators: all of such contracts will be written on a language that is widely-known and researched by the large coding community - JavaScript. This is how we seek to make Giant Contracts available for the widespread use. This will also ensure that every Giant smart contract is a job well done.


Original: https://giantpay.network/pages/smart-contracts-security-discussion
Medium: https://medium.com/@GiantProject/smart-contracts-security-discussion-deff52ed6164

Let’s get everyone familiar with our plans for the next sprint! Learn what can speed up our smart contracts development soon.
Giant.Contracts are a foundation for every future dApp on the Giant blockchain.
Our long-term public relations and community management strategy is improving with every new sprint.
Find out what plans we have in order to make Giant.Exchange (GEX) popular among binary option traders - even those who are not familiar with the world of cryptocurrency!
 
https://giantpay.network/pages/sprint-17-backlog

You can check several GitHub commits collectively made by Ablai and Denis. It has been added to the Giant.Exchange votes archive.

https://github.com/GiantPay/GiantExchange/pull/20

Ablai is currently making the platform back-end side (Graphql and Node.js) while also reviewing the updates made by Denis.
The Giant.Exchange (GEX) community voting is one of the most underestimated features of the binary options platform: every new underlying asset or data source can be put on vote. This will result in GEX having only what the end user needs! Another important aspect of GEX changeable by the vote is the distribution of dividends.

This is how the archive currently looks:

https://beta.giant.exchange/governance

Read this article to find out more about the governance mechanism of Giant.Exchange:

https://giantpay.network/pages/giantexchange-decentralized-management

Another sprint report is ready for everyone to see! Learn about our efforts in the area of Giant Contracts.
See the current version of the Giant.Exchange (GEX) interface.
Our business contacts are expanding, and there will be even more as the time goes by.
The Giant team determination is strong!

Original: https://giantpay.network/pages/latest-sprint-news-giantdetermination
Medium: https://medium.com/@GiantProject/latest-sprint-news-giant-determination-918981a139ff

Retweet and let the world know what Giant is up to!

Quite possibly, everyone knows about the so-called Fake Stake attacks.
Our developers took some time to research the problem independently and without resorting to quick copy-pasting of GitHub commits made by other projects.
The Giant user funds are secure for the following reasons:
- The authors have studied PoS 3.0 while Giant operates under PoS 2.0
- This attack cannot perform double spending as a result

Now you can track the development process in #github channel on Discord.
This is especially important considering how we don’t want to distract the devs with a parade of inquiries on their hard work.
Commits are broadcasted from three main product repositories:
 - GiantCore
 - Giantjs
 - Giant.Exchange

My plans for tomorrow include a joint call with Blockfolio CEO Edward Moncada on the addition of Giant to their platform.
It is the world's most popular Bitcoin and cryptocurrency portfolio management app. If you are using this app, please tell about your experience.

Don't forget that quite soon users that have not updated their MN role will lose the access to the private Discord channel.
Please follow these steps. It won't take more than 5 minutes.
https://giantpay.network/pages/masternode-owner-verification-process

Considering the importance of the upcoming vote the first phase of which will be held on Discord, we are raising the reliability of masternode owner status verification. This solves several problems at once. You can read more about this in a detailed verification guide. We would like to remind that the submission of proposals for voting will end January 14 and the first phase (Discord voting) will last for 10 days. Only masternode owners who verified their role as told in this guide will be able to participate. This is why we are introducing a temporary Discord role that will allow to vote while all of the owners of the obsolete MN-owner role will keep access to the masternode owners chat until January 31.

Luckily, all the procedure takes no less than 5 minutes, you can leave the rest to our automated blockchain-based digital signature solutions! We hope that by reading this guide, you will also learn more about the unique opportunities provided by cryptography.

Please carefully read this guide for more information:

https://giantpay.network/pages/masternode-owner-verification-process

It’s no secret that some other cryptocurrency projects have started to borrow our best practices such as a private chat for MN owners – this was our innovation introduced to the masternode market back in August 2018. Now we are once again introducing a new standard based on advanced technologies. Let’s raise the Giant Community quality to the next level together!

Our work is a constant learning process – adding smart contracts into the existing blockchain cannot be called a mundane process each cryptocurrency project undergoes. This is a non-trivial task requiring to solve many optimization issues and have a practical vision. That’s where Alexei Bokarev comes in: his attentive work on the edge of blockchain technologies will bring Giant smart contracts closer to each Giant investor.

The smart contracts metadata with the description of their methods (functions) allows to track a smart contract of choice and call it with the help of special commands. One of them is network – as of today, it shows accounts, the number of blocks and hashes. The last block of the blockchain always shows its version, the Merkle root, while the hash of the previous block serves as a basis for the smart contract call. When deploying the smart contract, 33 declarations are calculated which fully covers the MetaCoin contract syntax.

A week ago, Alexei has changed the display of the last block and now the system also shows its height, nonce and timestamp. Overall, the CONTRACT_CALL task has been one of the non-trivial ones we mentioned before: not even the Ethereum network has a full integrity when it comes to smart contract parameters. Still, it’s extremely important to divide different types of transactions and make the Giant contracts network secure.

References

You can read more on the Merkle root parameter here:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/merkle-root-cryptocurrency.asp

The MetaCoin contract resembles the one described here:
https://dappsforbeginners.wordpress.com/tutorials/interactions-between-contracts/

Dear Giant enthusiasts!
As some of you may remember, we told you about Masternodes Awards 2019 held by BetweenBlocks together with Masternode Buzz and several other projects. We've hinted that Giant Coin (GIC) can become a winner in The Best Masternode Support category but there are several other nominations where Giant has good chances to become first - especially with your help!

1. The Most Innovative Use Case - Giant founders will use the blockchain-based Giant.Exchange to solve the problems of toxic binary options industry, and potentially expand the bets topic beyond crypto prices

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1J3bcPoMhCEYQtH5hrpJbgNrqiMzN6NwAk3rnAgj_kD8/viewform?edit_requested=true

2. Best Masternode Community - Giant is already a unique project with the active participation of masternode owners in strategic issues, namely the change of the Giant logo (remember the old one?) and bug fixes. The enthusiasm of our supporters should also not be underestimated

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1BHdpIkH0njJOuPAtSjZoWu8G5oCb1fVmNYoT7jgQpds/edit

Other options are The Best Wallet or App and The Best Marketing Strategy in 2018. The latter is, again, quite relevant for Giant, as there are not so much crypto projects with such a swift reporting on the recent activities of the team.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/15EnI0ax_KT88VpTOJkXdCDkLdZOj-lm3hpBOKDKJcc8/edit

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1NB79Vp0CiC52zNqcs0t692Pz8xAyUn2AnnNFJW0mw_c/edit

Of course, the choice is always yours and you can even vote for a different project, but we are still counting on your support. Thanks!

We haven’t been making new announcements related to our Giant.Exchange development progress but the most inquisitive of you might have seen the recent changes on GitHub.

During this sprint, Ablai and Denis have almost finished the primary work on the Dashboard and the Trading section. On Dashboard, the Activity tab is 100% ready. This tab shows the user actions. This is going to be extremely useful for all roles – for Traders who will have an opportunity to have a useful log of the deals, for Brokers whose binary options need classification and for Oracles to see when they added a new eponymous smart contract. This tab will become even more useful for everyone as the time goes by. All history records will have active links to follow.

Denis has also started to work on the voting page – we believe you are able to realize how important this component for Giant.Exchange is. The MVP (minimum viable project) will soon be updated with tools to create a new asset registration vote. The list of info parameters is individual for every binary option present in the vote. The table formatting is, however, universal: every new parameter begins from a new row. Denis has already deleted old unnecessary templates – this will help to operate with the dev tools much more efficiently.

https://beta.giant.exchange/

And, lastly, pull requests that were recently merged are available via the following link:

https://github.com/GiantPay/GiantExchange/pulls

We strongly recommend to track the changes on our GitHub to always have a full picture of what we are doing.

Hope you had a great Christmas, here's a quick heads-up on our short-term progress. A more extensive review of our work will be in the usual Sprint News at the end of this week.

- We've published a new article regarding the block reward vote and the main reason of its structure. It will serve as an answer for most frequently-asked questions about this major event in history of Giant:

Original: https://giantpay.network/pages/giant-block-rewards-vote
Medium: https://medium.com/@GiantProject/giant-block-rewards-vote-8de778f4b7e9


- Giant is in Top 5 Masternodes for Q1 2019! The list has been made by Melchionda Network. Check out this vid to see more:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQQSDYFJTM
 
- Giant Coin (GIC) has been added to TrttNodes - a platform affiliated with Trittium (TRTT). Before the end of this year, no fees are imposed! This has become possible due to the prolonged and fruitful communications of Pavel with Trittium CEO Evgeny Kagan. We hope for a meaningful future cooperation. The team is proud of TrttNodes features they described:

*  The fee is in TRTT coins and so the Trittium service will not have your coins sold on the market.
*  The hosting price is 5 euro flat per full node and 4% of profits for the shares.
*  Almost instant withdrawals. So far no one has waited more then 4 hours and 95% withdrawals were immediate.

- More info:
https://node.trittium.cc/
https://medium.com/@Trittium_cc/how-to-invest-in-trttnodes-59ffcb66d85c

Dear Giant community! We wish you a Merry Christmas and want to shed light upon the current state of Giant.
If you don’t get what’s been going on in our chat last week – this message is for you.

To be ranked among the leaders of the MN space, we need a self-governance mechanism. This will give us:

1. Decentralized decision-making by the active majority.
2. An instrument for potential partners who want to promote the project in exchange for financing.
3. The decrease of workloads for the marketing department which could focus on strategic goals.

The required mechanism is already present in the code. We only have to activate it and set the Superblock budget. See more on this mechanism in this article:
https://giantpay.network/pages/governance-mechanism-of-giant

We’ve got a funny situation here: to choose the Superblock budget, we need a voting mechanism we cannot activate without choosing the Superblock budget. But we’ve found a solution!

As an alternative, we hold this vote in 2 stage. The 1st stage will be held on Discord. Four options will be picked as a result. The 2nd vote stage will be held with the use of Giant wallet clients and masternode signatures – and we will soon instruct you on how to participate.

What we need from you at this moment is to:

1. Get familiar with the posted variants for the vote available on #block-reward-vote
2. DM me the reward structure you consider fair in case you don’t agree with anything else
3. Express your own opinion in the chat

We are going to set a deadline not earlier than a week before the application receival ends. After this, the masternode owners vote will be held on Discord. We know that it’s a long and convoluted scheme but, in the future, after the Giant proposals’ mechanism is established, similar votes will be held automatically in accordance with the pre-set open rules. Follow our updates!

We’re glad that the vote has set a new precedent in history of Giant. This precedent has made many community members to express their own opinion and demonstrate a bit of misunderstanding towards certain issues. I’m going to answer to the most of the controversial themes raised.

Why distract ourselves to voting when we can develop Giant.Exchange?
Different project departments work in different spheres. For example, Ablai and Denis are building Giant.Exchange with the support coming from Maria and Dmitry Filinberg. The activation of self-governance mechanism will happen thanks to the efforts of Dmitry Myachin with the help of Dmitry Filinberg. It’s much more rational to change the code only once, and this is why we are holding a reward structure vote right now. You should also remember that the change and the following mandatory wallet update will not happen in the near future.

Why do we need this ‘self-governance mechanism’ at all?
It’s a necessary step in the project development, as it will allow to optimize the outsourcing of various market promotion initiatives which currently fully depends on the Giant Team. Self-governance is the way chosen by all truly decentralized projects.

What are we voting for?
The vote has not started yet. The previously-made announcement was only to voice our position and start the public discussion after which the balanced and most popular results will emerge. Among the members of our community there are people with different vision of the Giant future. Quite soon, we are going to start posting options which will be present in the vote. Of all these variants, 4 will be put on the masternode owners’ vote.

How does the vote option look?
It must represent a viable structure for block rewards we will be able implement in 2019. Note that in May, there is a planned block reward decrease and the options should be formed with this change in mind.