Papyrus 2020

What we accomplished in 2019 and what’s coming in 2020!

Dear friends, as another big year is past, we are glad to enter the new year together with great confidence. For us, moving into 2020 is a festive, satisfying but also an adventurous feeling: 2019 brought a lot of challenges, which we acknowledged and which eventually led us on the right path and helped us to shape into what we are now. We worked hard and passionately throughout the year, and, combined with your feedback and support, we achieved all our high-set goals, including launching Papyrus Network

Now, it is 2020 and we have big plans and ambitions for this year. To celebrate the first week of the new year as well as to mark the end of the last year, here let’s take a look back at the amazing 2019 and unveil what’s coming in 2020!

2019 Recap

Last year turned out to be full of exciting challenges and hard work for us. We managed to launch a whole set of products, such as:

Papyrus Network Go client https://github.com/papyrusglobal/papyrus

Papyrus Network documentation portal http://docs.papyrus.network/

Papyrus Explorer https://explorer.papyrus.network/

Papyrus Wallet https://wallet.papyrus.network/

Papyrus Bridge https://bridge.papyrus.network

Last but not least we released Papyrus demo dApp “Roulette” within Papyrus TestNet to demonstrate key network features — https://roulette-testnet.papyrus.network/

Another milestone was to get truly worthwhile partners onboard to operate Papyrus Network nodes — we managed to reach and to come to an agreement with Atomars, Memorandum Capital and TrezorMini to fill that role!

A significant contribution to the success of the network development was made by our very dedicated and supportive community. We successfully run testing of all our products above, a number of defects were fixed and overall usability was improved thanks to the help of network users.

We can proudly say that as a result of 2019 our vision of creating really fast, scalable, cost-efficient and reliable public blockchain network for decentralized applications has been achieved. Papyrus Network surpasses Ethereum throughput and cost-efficiency by several orders of magnitude.

The Dynamics

While we believe we are performing great on the technology side, dynamics of 2018–2019 crypto markets has introduced non-technical challenges for our team:

• Slow adoption of dApps and DeFi. As other blockchain initiatives such as Ethereum, EOS, TRON demonstrated, adoption of dApps and growth of dApps is difficult and expensive. Top dApps on Ethereum and EOS still have no more than a few thousands of daily users. Additionally, less than 3% of ETH is locked for decentralized finance (DeFi). While dApps and decentralized finance represent promising cases of what could be achieved with public blockchains to improve our daily life, there are some major blockers for their wider adoption. From our point of view, it is the lack of clear regulatory frameworks across the globe and poor user experience. It is really difficult to buy tokens, get familiar with wallets and start using them in applications and our daily life.
• Funding. Crypto winter started in 2018 and is still there, especially for alts. The price of Ethereum is 90% down from the top. This dynamic is affecting our funding reserves and the ability to raise additional funding. In fact, this point is dependent on the previous one. Public blockchains have to demonstrate major adoption growth to ignite new crypto demand and mark the end of crypto winter.

These are the primary challenges for Papyrus Network growth, which we want to address to the possible extent with our existing resources. Here are our thoughts:

• Adoption. We believe that the major case for public blockchains adoption would be DeFi, which promises non-custodial stablecoins as basic primitive for the self-sovereign global economy. It enables things like global savings accounts with sustainable 2–3% interest rates on top of stablecoins, accessible from anywhere in the world. That is something that can help fighting hyperinflation of local economies in developing countries and enable services that never existed before. Add here global permissionless borrowing and lending platforms. To enable DeFi, two main requirements need to be satisfied: (1) uncensorable economic security, (2) programmable money. Both are achievable within Papyrus Network and Ethereum. We believe that Ethereum already got significant traction with DeFi applications (Maker, DAI, etc) and further DeFi growth is just a matter of time. This growth will inevitably result in a growing demand for reliable platforms, which can underpin DeFi applications around the world. That will likely be a trigger for a new bull cycle for altcoins and will create a great demand for Papyrus Network technology. Maintaining compatibility with Ethereum protocol and smart contracts, while ensuring the higher grade of usability, reliability, speed, and scalability, should allow Papyrus Network to be in a good position in this upcoming trend to attract 3rd party developers and partners to build new applications on top of Papyrus Network. We will keep monitoring market dynamics and will continue business development to attract new partners during the whole of 2020. Every quarter we will be making a blog post with a summary of our observations and perspective developments.
• Funding. In 2019 we made runway optimizations and reduced our burn rate to the bare minimum, ensuring (a) technology delivery and Papyrus Network launch in 2019 (b) longer runway as there is no way to predict when exactly crypto winter will be over, so we need to maintain operations as long as possible, waiting for market momentum to start working in our favor (see above). Based on these optimizations we will continue operations with a small team focused on the most important areas for 2020.

Going 2020

Thus, the key areas of focus for the Papyrus team in 2020 are:

• Technology — our team keeps developing open-source Papyrus Network software as independent open source contributors, ensuring MainNet reliability, maintenance, bug fixes, and will proceed with perspective R&D work (see the list http://docs.papyrus.network/en/latest/doc/work_in_progress.html, which is periodically updated);
• MainNet autonomy and censorship resistance — Papyrus Network is decentralized and maintained by third parties — Authority Nodes, the goal of our team is to increase the amount of Authority Node operators involved in network operations and maintenance;
• dApps and DeFi partners onboarding — our team will be attracting new partners into Papyrus Network ecosystem, which will improve Papyrus position in upcoming crypto market trends;
• Launch referral/airdrop program to increase the Papyrus Network audience.

Our plan for 2020 Q1:

Technology: finish autonomous self-governance implementation and tests, including the limit on Authority Nodes count and dynamic changes of Authority Nodes set.

In 2020 as our communication strategy we will be publishing one blog post every quarter with disclosure of our achievements and progress!

Happy New Year and best wishes to everyone!

Join us at the Telegram channel to chat with the team and get all the news first!