Important Features of the 1.0.4 Update

6 min readMay 31, 2018

Potentially many people breezed over the details of the 1.0.4 code release, and simply just updated their wallets without putting too much thought into what the updates bring to the ColossusXT community project. We would like to take some time to cover some of the finer details.

ColossusXT Moves Towards a Decentralized Future

Atomic Swaps Capability

In light of these developments and growing vulnerabilities associated with the exchanges, the ColossusXT Development Team has decided to take a step towards greater decentralisation. To do this we have implemented BIP65 in the current v1.0.4 Core Release, which allows for Atomic Swaps.

What are Atomic Swaps and why is it important?
Atomic Swaps, or atomic cross-chain trading, is a technology that enables direct peer-to-peer trading across separate blockchains with BIP65 support, thereby eliminating a third trusted party. Traditional centralised exchanges in this case are replaced by decentralised exchanges, which means you always keep your funds in your wallet and do not rely on an intermediary that represents a single point of failure in the current world, filled with governments trying to shut down exchanges, frequent security breaches and diminishing privacy.

Here is how it works in plain English:
Alice has some traceable coins, e.g., Bitcoin or Litecoin. But she cares about her privacy and would like to exchange them for ColossusXT. Bob is less concerned about privacy, so he is willing to buy the coins from Alice. With Atomic Swaps they can trade directly with each other, bypassing the centralised exchange that is scheduled to shut down any minute now by some government hostile to crypto.

Final Note:
By enabling Atomic Swaps capability, ColosssuXT takes a proactive step towards a decentralised future. In that respect, we at ColossusXT believe that decentralised exchanges will be an important part of it. Therefore in the coming weeks we will continue to collaborate with pioneers in this field, such as Komodo’s BarterDex.

ColossusXT Increases Funding for the Project

Masternode Governance System & Block Rewards

To help fund the development of the ColossusXT project toward our roadmap goals, and to ensure the continued success of our community project, a lot of development time has been put into addressing our financial freedom. If you believe the ColossusXT team gets a lot of work done now, imagine what we can do with a healthy budget…

Governance and Budget System

One of the greatest challenges of building a crypto currency platform is ensuring you create a decentralized system of governance to manage, fund, maintain and expand the project. This key element has been absent in every currency to date, so the natural response is to create a not-for-profit foundation that is tasked with maintaining the core protocol and promoting the coin but is not really connected to the coin holders in any meaningful way. This approach has a few issues that have been made evident from the experience of older crypto currency platforms.

Current crypto foundations are not related to the currency itself by any mechanism that is included in the protocol and are not designed to outlive early adopters when they lose interest. The foundation then struggles to get funding until it implodes and core development of the protocol is left scrambling for funding or depending on charity that can’t be counted on and does not allow for proper budgeting and planning. Donations are also unfair to donors because there are always free riders that benefit from the effort done by others without contributing. Other projects have financed themselves by premining coins or running prelaunch sales, which is not a great solution either because control of the funds is centralized and at that stage it is impossible to quantify the future needs of the project.

Through the network of full nodes and the collateral requirement, ColossusXT already has a decentralized network of masternode operators that are invested in the future of the currency, and that as a group can act as stewards of the core protocol development and promotion. We propose a decentralized management system based on the masternode voting mechanism. Masternode operators are not the only ones interested in the success of ColossusXT, but they are the most stable ones because, unlike miners, they can’t reuse their asset for any other purpose or coin.

In the budget system, a portion of the block reward is held in escrow by the network itself, in the name of the operators, to be executed in the development and expansion of the ecosystem through the vote of the masternodes in different budget proposals. These funds are directed to supporting development and promotion of the coin. Masternode operators vote on specific budgets and projects to be funded, thus defining the direction the coin is taking. This is done in a completely transparent way through a public portal where new initiatives are proposed and masternodes can vote on them. Something like a decentralized Kickstarter or Lighthouse, the budget can be used for anything that creates value within the ecosystem.

This is a 100% decentralized system powered by the masternodes, where budgets are set and paid directly from the blockchain. The blockchain hires core developers in this way and introduces a new concept of paid blockchain contractors, where people work for and are directly compensated by the network, through the decentralized votes of all masternode operators. One advantage of this model is it can survive early adopters. If early masternode operators sell their coins, the new owner can set up a masternode and with it acquire the right to vote on the budgets and projects. This guarantees there is a working system of maintenance as people come and go, making the network capable of sustaining itself on its own without depending on specific actors.

How is funding being addressed?

Starting June 30th of 2018 the block reward will be adjusted from 1000 COLX per block to 1500 COLX per block. Total inflation will rise by just 1% after 10 years as compared to the current rate still making ColossusXT have one of the best inflation rates in the privacy sector ( 4.11%). The new block reward distribution will be as follows:

80% (1200 COLX per block) will go to users for Staking and Masternode rewards. (This equates to roughly 20% more COLX awarded to Masternodes and Stakers)
10% (150 COLX per Block) will go directly to the official Developer Fund Address: DBKqofwU8QUFYFwNYZetyBbj2Y7oAcWLbX
10% (150 COLX per Block) will be used for governance/budget system.
Transaction Fees will now go directly to the official Developer Fund Address rather than being burned: DEKP7sVxwwuN1mtCpTXtjua77XqFBBRaKG
If there are no proposals approved in the budget payment cycle, these funds will be routed to the official Developer Fund Address: DE2nWCnyYyWxoUNRg5gEeA7Kx1kpBs2spB

Final Note:
More information about he governance and budget system will be rolled out as we approach June 30th.