Word on the BLOCK: 30th April

Hello everybody and welcome to the latest Blocknet newsletter update of 2018! This newsletter is released twice per month to keep the community up to date on what is happening with Blocknet. You can view the previous newsletters here.

• The Blocknet and NIX teams are excited to announce our new partnership! NIX is creating a first of its kind, chain to chain privacy centric communication protocol, establishing itself as a DEX Manager. We are happy to announce that the very first DEX to be incorporated into NIX will be the Block DX. The integration of the Blocknet protocol into NIX will enable privacy based DEX trading. You can read more about the NIX and Blocknet partnership here. Read more below…
• A Blockchain Interoperability Reddit AMA with Core team member Jeff Madgett (@86b) will begin shortly. Please check the Blocknet social media for details shortly for the link. Questions will be received April 30th - May 3rd. Answers will be posted on Friday, May 4th. Please submit your questions to the Blocknet Discord, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Telegram and BitcoinTalk groups this week. If you are posting questions on Twitter, please use the hastags #InteroperabilityAMA or #BlocknetAMA.
• The Blocknet website has undergone a redesign and has moved from a static site to a Wordpress site. Check it out and read more below……

• Core team members have began scheduling follow up meetings with connections made at the London Global Blockchain Expo that they recently attended.
• Five new channels in the Blocknet discord have been created:

1. Ambassadors - A place to discuss and formulate a framework for Blocknet ambassadors.
2. Bounties - A place to discuss and formulate a framework for Blocknet bounties.
3. Trinity - Community liaison Baron and member BoosterDooks have created Project Trinity. An educational project aimed at realising the Blocknet as a functional decentralised organisation beyond a purely code based approach to decision making and governance.
4. DX Coins - A channel to discuss coins on the DX
5. Memes - Get creative and fire up the memes!

• Please make sure you are on wallet version 3.9.16. Please check to see if you are on a fork by following this guide It is still possible to be on a fork even though you are still receiving stake rewards, so make sure to follow the guide to know definitively whether you're on the main chain or not.
• The development teams continue to work on a number of improvements such as listunspent fine-tuning and fixes,lockunspent being fine-tuned and refactored, mass order acceptance/placement testing, ongoing xrouter development and features and the Superblock user-friendly voting UI is now in Q.A. phase.
• Various API documentation is now nearing completion and tutorial work is ongoing.
• SPV development is 25% complete.
• Work on automatic xbridge configurations continues. This will make the Block DX much easier to set up.

• A Blockchain Interoperability Reddit AMA with Core team member Jeff Madgett (@86b) will begin shortly. Please check the Blocknet social media for details shortly for the link. Questions will be received April 30th - May 3rd. Answers will be posted on Friday, May 4th. Please submit your questions to the Blocknet Discord, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Telegram and BitcoinTalk groups this week. If you are posting questions on Twitter, please use the hastags #InteroperabilityAMA or #BlocknetAMA.
• The Core team recently attended the Global Blockchain Expo in London The Expo was a very productive event allowing us to develop numerous relationships, discuss use-cases with a multitude of projects and get the word out about the Blocknet at the event. Many projects spoke highly of us, including kind words from our friends at the Decred project in the first part of their live stream (at around the 1:17 mark.)
• Blocknet Co-founder Arlyn Culwick, was a sponsored speaker at the Expo, giving a 30 minute lecture entitled, "What should inter-blockchain infrastructure look like?"
• The team will also be atteneding:

1. New York Consensus Blockchain Summit on 14th - 16th May.
2. Global Blockchain Expo in London (the largest in the world) on 18th - 19th April.
3. Amsterdam Blockchain Expo on 27th - 28th June.
4. San Jose, California Blockchain Expo on 28th - 29th November.

• Two DX video tutorials have been released with more to come:

1. Xbridge Configuration video here
2. Coin Configuration video here

• On May 2nd, Blocknet co-founder Arlyn Culwick will be doing an interview with Future Tech Podcast.
• VSA recently delivered the marketing materials and paid advertising campaigns will now move forward beginning in May.
• A Blocknet "all-in-one" thread has been created by community member @lifeistooshor and will be updated on a regular basis.

• The Blocknet website has undergone a redesign and has moved from a static site to a Wordpress site this week. This enables a whole host of capabilities including easily implementing pages for coin announcements, coin hubs (to give each new coin's community a portal in Blocknet), project hubs (projects building on the Blocknet protocol), and much more to come.
• A Blockchain Interoperability Reddit AMA with Core team member Jeff Madgett (@86b) will begin shortly. Please check the Blocknet social media for details in the next few hours for the link. Questions will be received April 30th - May 3rd. Answers will be posted on Friday, May 4th. Please submit your questions to the Blocknet Discord, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Telegram and BitcoinTalk groups this week. If you are posting questions on Twitter, please use the hastags #InteroperabilityAMA or #BlocknetAMA.
• Chinese (Mandarin) and Korean translations of the Blocknet whitepaperare now underway.
• 3 articles are currently being worked on with many others scheduled for the future.
• A Korean Blocknet Twitter has been created by community members lifeistooshort and cricket.
• Social media and websites: Website / Protocol Website / Discord / Twitter / Medium / Telegram / Reddit / Steemit / Newsletter / Facebook / YouTube / DTube / Minds / BitcoinTalk / Proposal Forum

• Trinity — Community liaison Baron(@theredbaron) and member @boosterdooks have created Project Trinity. An educational project aimed at realising the Blocknet as a functional decentralised organisation beyond a purely code based approach to decision making and governance.

• There are 2 proposals submitted for Superblock 388800. Voting will close May 8th at around 2am UTC+0.
• In order for a proposal to pass, it must have a majority in favor and at least 10% of Service Nodes must have voted for that proposal in either direction or abstained.
• There is a great responsibility for Service Node owners to vote either “yes” or “no” on the proposals. It cannot be emphasised enough how much the community, as well as the Blocknet team, relies on Service Nodes to vote on project proposals to ensure continued funding for development of the Blocknet. Not voting could greatly threaten the project.
• We have created a new emailing list for Superblock notifications. This emailing list is separate to the Word on the BLOCK newsletter email and is directed toward Service Node operators to provide reminders leading up to the voting deadline. To subscribe to these notifications, you can sign up for here.
• Voting will become a great deal easier and much more user-friendly in the new wallet, taking just a few clicks. You can view the designs for the voting functionality here
• An introduction to Superblocks and a guide to voting guide can be found here.

• The Blocknet and NIX teams are excited to announce our new partnership! NIX is creating a first of its kind, chain to chain privacy centric communication protocol, establishing itself as a DEX Manager. We are happy to announce that the very first DEX to be incorporated into NIX will be the Block DX. The integration of the Blocknet protocol into NIX will enable privacy based DEX trading. There will be a 0.25% transaction fee for Blocknet nodes that control the atomic swaps, and 0.25% transaction fee for NIX Service Nodes that control the private Zerocoin transaction in between swaps. In total, a 0.5% transaction fee is made via each atomic swap through NIX, a small fee to pay for private swaps. Apart from earning transaction fee's through swaps, NIX Service Nodes will also earn partial block rewards. You can read more about the NIX and Blocknet partnership here.

• So far 262 coins have been addressed. (19 additions since last newsletter.) 73 are currently finalized of which are 55 unannounced, (6 additions since last newsletter). The 18 announced are:
  Bitcoin (BTC) | Blocknet (BLOCK) | Dash (DASH) | DigiByte (DGB) | Dogecoin (DOGE) | Dynamic (DYN) | Faircoin (FAIR) | LBRY Credits (LBC) | Litecoin (LTC) | Monacoin (MONA) | MonetaryUnit (MUE) | Namecoin (NMC) | PIVX (PIVX) | Qtum (QTUM) | SysCoin (SYS) | Vertcoin (VTC) | Viacoin (VIA) | XCurrency (XC)
• 129 coins are in progress for error resolution + finalization. (4 additions since last newsletter.)
• 194 different coins have had orders placed on the DEX. (11 additions since last newsletter.)
• A constantly updated list of compatible coins can be found here.
• New coin announcements will begin soon.

• The price of BLOCK is currently at $19.97 (0.00212495 BTC) at time of writing.
• Circulation: 5,118,550
• Market Cap + Ranking: $102.1M USD | 10,877 BTC | Rank 156
• Exchanges - BLOCK is listed on the following exchanges:
• The price of BLOCK is currently at $18.44 (0.00227980 BTC) at time of writing.
• Circulation: 5,097,817
• Market Cap + Ranking: $94.005M USD | 11,622 BTC | Rank 124
• Exchanges - BLOCK can be traded on the following exchanges:

1. The Block DX (obviously!)
2. Bittrex
3. CryptoBridge
4. UPbit
5. CoinSwitch
6. Cryptopia where you can now trade BLOCK/BTC, BLOCK/LTC & BLOCK/DOGE
7. Abu Coins

• Current wallet: v3.9.16
• Block height: 375507
• 418 Service Nodes are currently active.
• 1,324,800 staked coins are currently active.
• The APR 7-day average for Service Nodes is currently at 18.25% and for staking it is currently 12.61%.
• Lockup percentage from Service Nodes: 45.65%
• Blocknet stats can be viewed on Master Nodes Pro here and on Masternodes Directory here.

Many thanks for reading. We hope that you are excited as us with what the future holds for Blocknet. A decentralization project fundamentally requires an engaged community, and so if you would like to help with anything, having something to add, use your professional skills or have a problem, we want to know about it.
Please also be aware that a community project is run by a diverse group of people with varying time-constraints (in a number of time-zones) and personal lives, so remember to be kind and patient!
If you want to be the first see these updates, you can receive the newsletters directly to your email by subscribing here. Our next update is due on May15th. Until then we look forward to hearing from you!
Sincerely,
The Blocknet Team.