The advent of Satoshi Nakamoto's blockchain-based Bitcoin was truly an evolution of how human kind thinks digital currencies work. The concept of a decentralized digital currency, used to create smart contracts, have since then managed to muster enough eye balls of highly influential coders all around the planet.
Once such set of talented software developers fabricated a revolutionized autonomous digital currency- Decred.
Decred- The Family Background
Unlike other cryptocurrencies, Decred doesn't know who its biological father is. It seems, though, Decred was the dream project of a bunch of crusaders, who were self-motivated to build an open-source technology which shall foster futuristic technological ideas (aka smart contracts), which aim to benefit the community. Withal, if you wish to hunt for all its roots, please refer here.
It all began in 2013, with a thread of discussions over Bitcoin Forum, amid which these mysterious geeks received the whitepapers of Memcoin2- which detailed the possible downfalls of Bitcoin's principle model- Proof of Work (PoW) as well as that of Ethereum's- Proof of Stake (PoS).
The papers proposed a substantive evidence of how the two models, though solving centuries-old problem of corrupt centralized algorithms, can manifest almost an entirely same set of issues even without the acknowledgment of its community members.
Implicating that the actual governance, in both these models, was still clutched in the hands of a few superpowers.
So what did they do with it?
Soon after this episode (and of course after lots of diligence), on 8th Feb 2016, Decred was launched as an open, progressive, and self-funding cryptocurrency with a system of community-based governance integrated into its blockchain.
Quoting Decred's Project Lead, Yocom Piatt, "Decred is more of an app coin because it is specifically designed to address particular set of problems with particular use cases." He also noted that Decred nearly solves the governance problems by ironing out the consensus rules and determining which set of consensus rules are accurate on an ongoing basis.
The USP being- it is a hybrid of PoW and PoS mechanism.
But how does it actually work?
Roadmap for 2018
The next in the pipeline for Decred is the “Project Politeia”- which aims to cryptographically connect time stamping to identity repository (digital signature) on an off-chain platform- such that it records all the prospective discussions between anyone over the chain and maybe refered to at the time of preparing future smart contracts. “Just like a service lane running parallel to the main highway”, as quoted by Yocom Piatt.
Decred- “The best of both worlds”
The blueprint provided here is in correspondence to Decred’s aim of “cooking everything to its minimum in order to build a hassel-free DAO.” Indeed Decred is heralding a constructive future where anyone could either build or assist to build an automated, decentralized world.