It is no secret that the altcoin projects are going through hard times. Even the top altcoins are currently struggling to find funding for development. Even Crown is starting to struggle, and future network updates will be delayed due to the low budget.
Crown’s Struggles
Up until recently, while even the top market cap altcoins were struggling, Crown always managed to have enough funds to develop updates. Their superblock creates up to 54,000 CRW coins each month that are distributed according to the wishes of the community and decentralized governance system. Last year, the portion of the superblock that was dedicated for development was 30,000 CRW and managed to provide for 5 developers. For the month of August, the block portion for development was 40,000 CRW but barely enough for two devs.
The two most dedicated people are Artem and Ashot, as they continue to accept lower and lower pay for their services and continuing to work full time for the Crown network. They are currently working below the market standard pay for professionals with their experience in software development for several months. Due to this, the percentage of the superblock dedicated to development has been rising and some community members have sharing their concerns about that. Infrastructure, marketing and design are suffering as a result.
As a response to the concerns of the community, both Artem and Ashot have agreed to request only 50% of the next superblock for development purposes. This leaves them with 13,500 CRW per person. At the current fiat market price, this means that each developer will get only $675. In other words, less than 10% of what they can currently earn elsewhere. Although they are quite dedicated, after they finish their projects, they will be looking for work elsewhere to make ends meet. This will delay future releases for Crown.
Expected Future Updates
We mentioned that Artem and Ashot will still finish up their current projects before they move on to other jobs. In this section we will quickly go over them.
NFT Framework
The NFT Framework is currently only available in the testnet as it is not completely finished. The API and registration aspects of this project are proving more demanding when it comes to workload. It is more than what Artem anticipated and now that he is unable to fully commit to the Crown network, the release date has slipped and unknown. The update was expected to be ready by 10th October 2019, which is the 5th anniversary of Crown, but the best that Artem can currently do is early November 2019 and even that can be subject to change.
Codebase Update
The codebase update is being developed by Ashtot. He has made great progress on it and estimates that there is about 1 month left of full-time work in order to complete and start testing. Of course, due to the budget issues, the beforementioned one month estimate will have to be revised again. This update will bring changes to all unique features that make Crown one of a kind. These functionalities will be remapped onto the Bitcoin v0.17 codebase, bringing more security, speed and stability. In the future, critical Butcoin changes and maintenance will be easier to follow up.
Trezor Support
The new Trezor update has not yet released their updated firmware with support for Crown. When it drops, you will be able to store your CRWs on the hardware wallet. The community is hoping that soon after that to fork the Dash masternode tool to support CRW as well, so users can manage their masternodes and systemnodes with their Trezor. Although a beta has been released, there was no official information regarding Crown support. In that case a few contributors will be testing that.