November was an enormous month for Skycoin development and community growth. It started with a bang, as project figurehead Synth and crypto legend John McAfee chatted live on stage at the Malta Blockchain Summit, in what was the beginning of a close friendship. Sit down and get comfortable for our longest update yet!

Lead developer Synth with John McAfee. John identifies strongly with the Skycoin and Skywire aim to decentralize the internet and has begun spreading the word to his large online following.

Skywire

Work on Skywire mainnet continues, with all of development resources dedicated to finalizing software specifications and bug fixing. The Skywire mainnet is a massive software undertaking. It must have the ability to process hundreds of machine-to-machine bandwidth payments per second and be scalable to hundreds of millions of nodes located all around the globe. It will be worth the wait!

The Skywire testnet continues to operate smoothly, with more than 9000 nodes currently online. Skycoin paid out 24,000 Skycoin in testnet rewards for the previous month of October. Check out this excellent video depiction of the three phases of Skywire roll-out.

Skycoin Core

The core Skycoin repository (GitHub skycoin/skycoin) stands as the 11th of 378 cryptocurrency projects as of the past 3 months, as measured by CryptoMiso. This repo alone had more than 500 commits and 50 different contributors. Special mention to ikethedore, gz-c (lead developer Steve) and olemis for their outstanding recent work.

Skycoin/skycoin contains Skycoin core and the Skycoin wallet software. It is only one of more than thirty active GitHub repositories building different parts of the Skycoin ecosystem. Each plays an important role in bringing about our vision of global mass-adoption of Skycoin, forming the foundation of the ecosystem, increasing usability of the platform, and driving user adoption of Skycoin-based applications.

CX

Along with Ethereum (Solidity language), Skycoin is one of the few blockchain projects with its own programming language. CX is based on Golang and is currently in Alpha stage. We envision an ecosystem of games and blockchain applications written in CX, complete with its own store. We encourage all developers in the community to start coding in CX to help build out this key component of the Skycoin project. Check out our brand new CX homepage here.

The drive for Skycoin adoption requires the most advanced technical fundamentals, ease-of-use for users and developers and a suite of highly useful applications. Skywire is the flagship application of the Skycoin ecosystem.

Wallets

A functional and secure mobile wallet is essential in the democratization of any peer-to-peer monetary system. A Skycoin iOS mobile wallet app now joins Android versions to provide all the advantages of the Skycoin wallet for all mobile users. The mobile wallet has all of the important functions of the desktop wallet, including loading and generating new wallets as well as UTXO selection for Coin Hour management and privacy.

The Skycoin mobile wallet is now available on iOS, joining current Android versions. Download the app now from the Apple app store.

Hardware

Skycoin hardware forms a cornerstone of the decentralized internet and monetary future we are building. The hardware incubator is key to prototyping low-cost components for the Skywire mesh network and other crypto-hardware devices. In November we saw images of: