Q1 2020 Update: Papyrus Network During COVID-19 Outbreak

Today’s situation with the global virus outbreak is indeed immensely disturbing and distressing. We as the Papyrus team express our deepest concerns at the prevention of virus spread as well as the healthiness of the team and everyone around. Since the beginning of the outbreak, the whole team is set on a fully remote working plan until it will be completely safe to switch back. To whoever reads this update, we strongly advise you to stay home and follow accurate public health advice from WHO and your local health authority.

However, despite the changes in the working schedule, right now we are still 100% on track without any freezes or breaks coming up and ready to bring you some positive development updates as well as industry insights.

Industry update

• dApps and DeFi. We continue keeping an eye on what’s going on in the crypto ecosystem and DeFi got an unfortunate hit in March due to the spread of coronavirus and crisis of liquidity on the markets. The total value locked in DeFi is down by 50% from a peak of $1.2B in mid-Feb. Top dApps still can’t demonstrate DAUs above a few thousands of users. Overall, slow adoption is still in effect and in our view Coronavirus resulted in a negative impact, which will delay the adoption/growth of DeFi and dApps ecosystems to new milestones for a minimum of 3–6 months. The poor user experience of interaction with crypto wallets and software is still the biggest obstacle, which we hope will be overthrown by a new generation of user-friendly projects such as Papyrus Network itself.
• Funding. Unfortunately, the Coronavirus crisis significantly reduced investors’ risk appetite, and we expect that markets will remain in a “risk off” mode for at least 3–6 months.

According to these observations, the Papyrus team is taking the following approach:

• Adoption. We will continue building technology with the focus on: (a) APIs for user-friendly interfaces and overall simplicity of interactions with the network, (b) censorship resistance capabilities to ensure Papyrus Network suitability for DeFi applications. We will also maintain business development and partner relations, but without ramping up until the market enters a new buillish cycle.
• Funding. Reduce the burn rate to the bare minimum.

Development update

Despite scary shockwaves, our small distributed team easily adapted to the realities of pervasive quarantine and in the first quarter we made significant technology progress:

• For us, it is extremely important to prove that Papyrus Network has a stable infrastructure for enterprise applications. To achieve that we implemented a new system of monitoring for every aspect of Papyrus Network operations and functionality based on Grafana. Now we are assured that the team can detect and react to infrastructure problems instantly, ensuring business continuity for network applications.
• As planned, we finished preparations for autonomous self-governance, introducing a dynamic limit on Authority Nodes number and dynamic Authority Nodes set, managed in BIOS contract based on election and blacklist procedures. BIOS contract now supports both the main blacklist and community blacklist voting. This extremely important innovation will allow us to grow faster and ensure better censorship resistance in the network for DeFi applications, providing better tools for ecosystem self-regulation and eliminating the network’s dependence on the Papyrus team.
• Finally, we started architecture and design works for secure native entropy beacon, which will unlock truly secure randomization in gaming dApps, allowing application builders to build amazing games. The network will protect app developers and their customers from any kind of security failures or hacks, which sometimes happen in public blockchain networks, such as Ethereum 1.0, where entropy beacon is absent and dApps use less secure methods for randomization.

Our support for all third party developers in the Papyrus ecosystem continues — do not hesitate to contact us for any questions:

https://papyrus.network/about.html

We wish everyone to be in good health in these times, stay strong 💪 !