General News
StakeCube in Numbers
While development continues and progress is being made, numbers have experienced some contraction this week. With Bitcoin continuing the sideways trend, mining profitability remains at low levels. Difficulty reductions are helping in this front, but this is not enough to offset the loss of value caused by a reduction of more than 40% in Bitcoin price. Since users receive the mined Bitcoin with electricity costs discounted, and as electricity costs are denominated in fiat currency; mining revenue falls faster than Bitcoin price. This implies that until Bitcoin price shows some signs of recovery, mining revenue will remain far from the levels we saw two months ago. Depressed mining revenue reduces demand for SCC, as MineCube workers become a less attractive investment.
There is, however, a good side to all of this. What we are observing is that SCC price is correlated with demand for Bitcoin mining. Since the miner exodus from China is expected to continue, there will be a further difficulty reduction this weekend. This means that as soon as Bitcoin price returns to higher levels, it will do so with much lower mining difficulty. Mining revenue should then increase significantly, making workers a very attractive investment again. As soon as that happens, demand for SCC will increase and the price will respond.
- User Count: 95,312 +1.17%
- Pool Value: 589.43 BTC -6.14%
- Daily BTC Mined: 0.096 BTC +0.74%
- SCC Price: $1.03 -8.85%
- SCC Market Cap: $9,408,000 -6.37%
- Alexa Rank 12555 -319
If you want to monitor changes in mining difficulty, you can use the following website:
GBX Listing
As we announced last week, May’s community coin vote winner was GoByte (GBX). Listing is now complete, and GBX is available for withdrawal and deposit. A trading pair against BTC has been added to the exchange:
https://stakecube.net/app/exchange/gbx_btc
We have also added a GBX faucet, at the request of their team.
May Trivia Winners
The May trivia competition ended with the three following winners:
- Jonnidewoolf with 29 correct answers
- Kafarabo with 19 correct answers
- Zaiden, Manuel1894 and Btran with 8 correct answers.
The prizes were of 15 SCC for the first place, 9 SCC for the second and 3 SCC for each of the three participants that finished third. This month we had 25 users answering at least once correctly among all participants. To all of you that participated we hope you enjoyed the competition and best luck for next month!
UX Guidelines
As part of our rebranding efforts, we have released a set of guidelines on UX design. You can check them out here:
https://github.com/stakecube/UX/blob/main/UX-Guidelines.md
As the guide is open-source, everyone is welcome to suggest improvements that we could add if they meet the standards set by the custodians. It is intended for general, public use and licensed under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Feel free to fork this repository to make any changes you deem necessary and refine it to better suit your needs.
New Support Agents and Developments
Our support team has grown with the addition of two new members: Chetz and JohnLuke. They are in training right now and will begin their duties on the 15th of June. With this, there has also been a re-modelling of schedules to ensure 24h availability.
On top of this there is in development a new support system to complement the existing one. We will release further details when we make further progress.
TRBO Swap Delayed
As we announced a couple of weeks ago, the TRBO team has decided to perform a swap to a SCP-based token. They will also rebrand the coin from TurboStake (TURBO) to Moments (MMT) to better serve the use-case as native coin of the Moments market.
A slight delay on the API front has forced to postpone integration of SCP into platforms like the Moments Market or StakeCube. This does not affect the performance of SCP in any way, as it is working as intended in all respects. It only makes it so that integration into platforms has to wait a few more days than anticipated. We remain committed to our partners and as soon as there is a new date for the swap we will communicate it. Pay attention to the official TRBO media channels as well, as their team will also keep the community updated.
StakeCube E-Sports
As we told you last week, a friendly Rocket League match was held between the StakeCube and the Rapids teams. The result was 3-0 in favor of the Cube Squad with a very convincing victory. This has encouraged us to organize new e-sports events involving the StakeCube community.
On July 10th we will organize an e-sports Rocket League tournament. For the moment all we can say is that we want to onboard 8 to 16 teams of 3 players each. All other details will be released in the near future. If you’re interested in participating, feel free to join our StakeCube e-sports community on their discord:
Or check out the other StakeCube social media accounts:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/stakecube/?ref=share
https://www.reddit.com/r/StakeCubeEcosystem?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
Development News
StakeCube Protocol News
The SCP wallet has been improved with a highly customizable settings screen. We are now in the process of adding options and settings suggested by the SCP testing community. With the new options, users are able to customize the wallet appearance and functions, as well as having available essential features like wallet exports and backups.
The database has seen a big improvement, with a redesign from scratch to pave the way for the multi-wallet system. This has also improved cross-platform deployments (Win, MacOS, Linux), making it so that the team can release binaries for any OS without having to adjust the codebase.
The MacOS release (darwin-x64) is now available for download on our official Github page:
Over the past week we have also performed a lot of optimization work and codebase cleanup. Thanks to it, loading times are much faster, and binaries considerably lighter. This also makes codebase maintenance and expansion easier for new developers joining the team.
We also redesigned the wallet backend from scratch using our own SCC-JS open-source cryptographic modules. Not only did this greatly reduce the needed dependencies for the wallet, but also improved performance and opened the door to the upcoming headless API wallets.
Exchange Buttons Disabled on Load
Some users were reporting that upon sending limit orders to the exchange, the price was changing and executing an order at a different price than they set. We think we might have identified the origin of this issue. These users might have been editing the price field while the page had not finished loading yet. When this happens, the values that the user typed in may be overwritten later by the default ones when the page finishes loading.
To help prevent this issue we have disabled the buy and sell buttons until the page has loaded completely. With this solution, users will have to wait for the page to finish loading before sending the order, which gives them time to check the values. Although the problem could only have affected users with very slow internet connections, this should prevent it from happening in the future.
SCC Webminer
In an attempt to fix the difficulty issues were facing, we lost API records when the proxy was restarted. Thankfully we were keeping a record of these lost shares and managed to recover these data to be able to credit contributors. Payouts will be credited as usual, once the pool reaches the payout threshold. We also fixed the share counter and estimated rewards on the webminer webpage, and deployed a solution to prevent this problem in the future.
2FA on API Key Creation
To further improve security, we have added the need for 2FA code upon creation of a new API key.
Alias Staking
We have now activated pooled staking for Alias. Users with Alias in their StakeCube wallet have already started receiving rewards. We wish all of our Alias holders happy staking.
Wallet Maintenance News
DAPS Wallet
The DAPS wallet is back online after a period of a few weeks in maintenance caused by technical issues. Transactions and staking are possible again, but might be delayed. We keep monitoring to see if the issues reoccur. If you notice a “no connection” warning for DAPS, this means the wallet is unresponsive and the system doesn’t get the signal that it is running in time. The DAPS team will release an update in the near future but we didn’t want to keep deposits and withdrawals disabled any longer, as this is inconvenient to our users.
Ghost Staking
Work is ongoing regarding the implementation of pooled staking for Ghost. The Ghost team is helping us with the technical aspects, and we will inform you as soon as it is ready.
Coin Wallet Updates
The server infrastructure has seen some improvements implemented. Additionally, the following wallets were updated:
DASH
Previous version: 0.17.0.2
New version: 0.17.0.3
Masternodes did not need a restart.