2019 BitShares Core Team Proposal

BitShares Core Development Team just released their 2019 Proposal with a total budget of up to $1,386,406 (¥9,358,220). In order to understand more about the next steps for BitShares in 2019, we interviewed Ryan R. Fox, BitShares Core Team Development Coordinator.

Interviewer: U.S. Blockchain, a blockchain marketing & public relations agency based at Boston, MA

Question: What are the strategic adjustments in the 2019 BitShares Core Development Team Proposal compare to 2018? 

Fox: Largely, the 2019 proposal is similar to 2018, increasing the budget in order to accommodate team growth. The Core Team remains focused on protocol development, and thus feature enhancements. The BitShares Improvement Proposal repository is a primary resource for advancing and defining protocol specification discussions. Our team will grow by 3 team members in February. Two team members will split the role of Coordinator Assistant, and will focus on the Chinese Community so they may gather and disseminate development information. We enjoy good traction in China, and therefore intend to build upon it with improved communications through dedicated team member contributions. We are adding a cryptographer to the team, with a focus on privacy and security. The Core Team participated in two developer conferences in 2018 and now expect further attendance at more conferences in 2019. Our attendance also helps spread our message out to a broader technical audience.

Ryan R. Fox
Development Coordinator at BitShares

Question: What are the major challenges at present that BitShares Community is faced with, as far as you can see?

Fox: BitShares is a mature platform, having also celebrated its fifth birthday in late 2018. Throughout its history, BitShares has maintained a “build it and they will come” development-focused mentality. BitShares used to not focus on fancy marketing, which consequently hampered our user adoption and retention. Therefore, I expect the Community will place more funding toward research and execution towards marketing efforts in 2019. We operate as a decentralized autonomous community (DAC), hence presenting challenges to crafting and disseminating a consistent marketing message. Therefore my desire is for the Community to fund an effort to maintain an open-source repository of marketing resources, campaigns, and execution strategies; furthermore, I understand this is ambitious.

Question: What do you think of the development of the blockchain industry in 2019? Any thoughts on the challenges, opportunities, or new trends?

Fox: BitShares is already ahead of the curve, having implemented a decentralized asset exchange and stablecoins from its inception in 2014. We recently added Hashed Time-Lock Contracts (HTLC) functionality to our protocol. This allows users to move their token value to other blockchains using atomic swaps. Combining these three protocol features will thus open many opportunities for businesses to build on top of the BitShares platform and connect beyond our siloed ledger. Interoperability between ledgers will also be a major focus in 2019 for development effort in the blockchain space. Based on the open standards and free-to-use streaming payments solution, I think the Interledger Protocol (ILP) also holds great promise.

Click here to read the full 2019 proposal by the BitShares Core development team.