tl;dr
A recap of the Fedora project revival of the Tips altcoin.
The Story of Fedora Tips
The history of Fedora Tips goes back at least four years, when it was forked from Bitcoin via Doge and then Feather. The original creator - Invisibel - disappeared shortly after making Fedora but s/he clearly had a fondness for memes. Fedora developed quite a following before suffering a decline.
In mid-2017, a group of us happened by chance to come together around Tips, and finding no others interested, decided to revive Fedora. It was tricky - there seemed to be no active social channels, no website, no tech guides. The wallet code had hardly been touched in years. I think it was challenge that interested us, and the fact that there were some original community members who remained passionate, if you went and looked for them. We messaged old github profiles, mods, admins and community members. Most never replied but some did and we are grateful.
We started rebuilding the wallets, and discovered that a wallet several years out of date requires a huge amount of redevelopment. Patching several years of security upgrades and addressing incremental changes that creep in over repeated forks is a massive undertaking, and required months of work by our tech lead and QA gurus.
In parallel we developed a roadmap. The initial plan was good: updated wallets, more exchanges, mobile wallets, bigger community, faucets, tip bots and the like. We released the roadmap and the new Windows wallet simultaneously in early March, along with a new website, social channels and forums. This received a great response and the Tips community started to grow again, slowly but steadily.
We are all reasonably experienced, but our tech lead Jojapoppa also happens to be a bit of a visionary. We all wanted Tips to be used in the real world, Jojapoppa knew that if we integrated some of the interesting new platforms out there this could happen sooner than we thought.
A Solution Vision was developed based around preserving the original Tips POW wallets and blockchain, but simultaneously integrating with Bitshares. Our new plan is to build a bi-directional bridge between our traditional POW infrastructure and a new affiliate DPOS network that is integrated with Bitshares.
With the completion of the bridge, Fedora Tips will be able to utilise the 3 second latency of the underlying graphene network to make real time tipping possible! Our web wallets will be usable in markets, cafes, bars - anywhere you currently transact with fiat currency. The initial, Foundation stage of our roadmap is nearly complete as per schedule. The end state development bringing face to face, real world tipping & trading will be live by the end of 2018!
To learn more about our plans, please check out the Trello roadmap. We'd love to chat to you on Discord and Telegram too!