Decredulous Analysis of Decred 2018 Roadmap
Decred has recently released a roadmap for 2018, and while it is definitely worth reading the full post in depth, I’ve listed below my thoughts and a brief summary on what is included. It is interesting to note that this year, deadlines have been omitted. Considering the team has met almost everything outlined in the previous roadmap, I don’t believe this will be an issue! Continue reading for my brief analysis of the roadmap and liberal use of emojis!
What’s on the map? 🗺️
SPV - Simplified Payment Verification
SPV enables mobile wallets by vastly reducing the amount of storage necessary for transaction validation. Only 66 MB of data is needed to validate transactions as opposed to 2.1 GB for the entire Decred Blockchain on a full node. I believe this is a signal that Decrediton is coming to mobile platforms shortly!
Politeia 👩🏻⚖️👨⚖️👩🏼⚖️👨🏽⚖️👩🏾⚖️👨🏿⚖️👨🏻⚖️
This a huge one! The meat and potatoes of Decred. This is where a good deal of Decred’s future magic will happen as members of the Decred community submit, judge, and vote on proposals to extend and support Decred’s ecosystem in various ways. It’s nearing completion!
Lightning Support ⚡⚡⚡
The best time to be actively developing and incorporating a technology is when you aren’t in desperate need of it. This is definitely an exciting development for Decred. Second layer scaling, incredibly quick transactions and much more is enabled with Lightning Network support.
Privacy 🙌🏻🔍🚫
My business is my business and your business is YOUR business! Privacy is coming to Decred, and Decred has developers with privacy experience. I fully expect to see an implementation rivaling Monero in 2018. Plans have been kept under wraps due to the incredible amount of competition with privacy implementations and rampant code reuse without attribution. As a bonus for those of you actually reading this and paying attention: if you're interested in proof of how decentralized Decred is and would like to see for yourself before it might possibly no longer be possible, check out the project by 
Decentralization of Development Fund ❗❗❗
This cannot be understated. This is huge for Decred, and anyone who is involved with the project has been anxiously awaiting this since its inception. This is part and parcel of Politeia’s release as Decred’s contractors transition to a decentralized system where disbursement of Decred development funds happen autonomously based on the definition of smart contracts and realization of proposal milestones.
Decentralized Autonomous Entities 📜
DAE’s will be formed to receive funds for work related to Decred’s development. Basically, this is a smart contract that specifies who has control over funds for a project or specifical line of work within a group of individuals.
Scalability Optimizations 🎊
Optimizations to dcrd will be made throughout the year. Decred developers are relentlessly vigilant.
Decrediton Integrations
Politeia voting, lightning network, and SPV support. Coming to a Decrediton near you!
🎉🎉🎉Decentralized Exchange🎉🎉🎉
This one is HUGE, and personally the one I am most excited to see mentioned in this roadmap. The Decred team popularized atomic swap by building the command line tools to facilitate these groundbreaking cryptocurrency exchanges without any middleman or escrow. Decred intends to build a decentralized exchange based on atomic swap technology that will allow for further disintermediation of centralized exchanges. You can bet Decred will be at the forefront on this exchange as well. If you have been upset in the past about the small number of exchanges Decred has been listed on, you can look forward to Decred being bell of the ball on what I am betting will become the most successful decentralized exchange. More details will be announced in a later Decred blog post as well as on a proposal on Politeia!
Marketing Growth 📈
Marketing efforts have increased and will continue to increase throughout 2018. We’ll see more presence at events and in additional countries! I expect marketing efforts to explode in number with the release of Politeia as many come in with various ideas to reach more and more markets.
Concluding Thoughts
I am personally very excited with this roadmap. Unlike many projects we come across in this space, the Decred team delivers on promises and typically will not hype anything until the hype is real. Everything we see listed in this roadmap is of great importance to the future success of the project and will bring a ton of value to not only Decred, but the cryptocurrency space as a whole. At its core, Decred (https://decred.org) is an open source project and its community is one of cryptocurrency and blockchain enthusiasts.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, please support me by sharing and consider following! This is my first post on steemit, and I am happy to bring value to the platform any way I can! If you feel overwhelmed by this post, you can learn more about Decred with my beginners guide to cryptocurrencies and Decred over on https://decredulo.us
Follow me at https://twitter.com/decredulous, or reach out to me on the Decred community platforms under the username dezryth.
If you’d like to read the full roadmap yourself, you can do so here: https://blog.decred.org/2018/02/28/2018-Decred-Roadmap/