Today, exactly 1 year ago, Electroneum’s ICO opened to investors around the world.
I think congratulations are in order… 
Electroneum has evolved a great deal since then. So to commemorate this birthday, join me on a visual walk down memory lane!
2017 Quarter - Development and Pre-ICO
Although Electroneum Ltd. was incorporated and development started in July 2017 already, the website and whitepaper only saw the light of day on 3 August. The Android app launched on 13 August.
The ICO opened to investors on 14 September and was advertised far and wide, including on billboards in London. Demand surged, and investors flooded in to purchase ETN before the price discount periods expired. The rush was big enough that it caused Electroneum’s servers to crash briefly on 28 September when it got 100,000 hits in 2 hours!
Richard represented Electroneum at RocketSpace in London on 27 September as well as at the NEX Exchange conference on 2 October.
2017 Quarter 4 - ICO Close, HackerOne Audit, Launch of Online Wallets
The ICO continued in full force and the support team had their hands full on email and Telegram. On 20 October, the ICO closed 10 days early when it reached the $40 million hard cap.
The Electroneum blockchain launched successfully on 1 November with Electroneum supporting 3 mining pools - in the US, Europe, and Asia.
Although the blockchain launched successfully on 1 November, the team started to notice signs of malicious action by hackers who wanted to take advantage of users and steal their coins. Emails were sent out to all users to reset their passwords. The developer team promptly decided to recode the 2FA system before distributing the ICO coins and launching the mobile miner. They worked through the night and on weekends to get everything coded! Organo sent a bunch of tea to keep the programmers awake.
On 9 November, Richard Ells announced that he has bought on board HackerOne to help bring the system’s security to enterprise level, which would take another couple of weeks of coding and testing.
Electroneum listed on its first exchange, Cryptopia, on 2 November, trading as high as 23 times its ICO price before stabilizing to about $0.05 on 4 November. It’s also got listed on CoinMarketCap, a site tracking cryptocurrency prices.
On 16 November, Richard made a wonderful video showing how the Electroneum app functions, and how it interfaces with the blockchain and paper wallets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24iBZilPsT4
After being thoroughly checked by HackerOne, Electroneum’s online wallet system launched on 13 December - and demand crashed the servers again! There were more than 40,000 transactions from the online wallet to the blockchain in the first day alone, compared to Monero’s busiest day with 11,000 transactions.
Limited-edition real Electroneum coins were made available by a third party, as seen in the following image.
On 21 December, John McAfee tweeted a quick summary of Electroneum and temporarily spiked a lot of interest in ETN all around.
After a busy 3 months, Electroneum celebrates Christmas and the beginning of 2018 with a jam-packed hear ahead! Who would have thought it would grow to the size it is today?
2018 Quarter 1 - Partnerships, Launch of Mobile Miner, and More Exchanges
This was the quarter of partnerships, with Electroneum striking deals with Telecom Co Limited, Xius, Effortel, BMedia, Redone, FanFare, and Unified. These partnerships would help Electroneum reach massive amounts of users by advertising the mobile miner to their user bases. On 17 January, Electroneum also became a member of GSMA - a first ever for a cryptocurrency.
On 3 January, Electroneum opened registration to be a beta tester of the mobile miner. It launched in beta mode for 20,000 beta testers on 31 January, and it launced officially to all users on 5 March! What a day that was!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ7lWR0NfII
Electroneum closed their official mining pools on 11 January to concentrate on developing the mobile miner and other technology.
Electroneum reached 100,000 Facebook page fans on 11 January and 80,000 Twitter followers on 16 January.
Electroneum was also the subject of a lot of price manipulation during the end of January.
In February, Electroneum released two magnificent videos of Richard explaining what Electroneum is, how it will work, and how they plan to reach the unbanked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AhvkF4cbtg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo3r2OHzm8g
The first recorded purchase of a product using Electroneum was published on 13 February, by Tom who purchased a bicycle from a friend for 1760 ETN (about $125 at the time).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1u-aItH9sM
Electroneum launched on Qryptos exchange (now called Liduid) on 12 February, Vebitcoin on 6 March, KuCoin on 13 March, and both on BitBns and Coinspot on 16 March. During the month of March, the number of transactions on Cryptopia’s wallet came to a point where the wallet would not open due to the sheer size of it. It took Cryptopia a good few weeks to code a workaround for this problem!
Richard Ells and his team represented Electroneum at the Mobile Word Congress in Barcelona from 26 February to 1 March.
During a fork update to avoid the Monero block 202612 bug, the Electroneum blockchain came to a halt on 3 March due to another bug in the code. Developers jumped on this immedately and released new node software within hours!
Richard hosted a wonderful Q&A on 15 March to answer all users’ pressing questions.
On 17 March, Electroneum reached 1,000,000 registered users!
2018 Quarter 2 - Patent Pending!
Electroneum was granted patent pending status (patent number 1805708.3) for their instant payments system on 6 April, after working with Dentons to secure the paperwork. This would enable them to be the leader in cryptocurrency payments around the world. The technology would give vendors instant confirmation that funds existed in the buyer’s wallet so that they can conclude the transaction without waiting for blockchain confirmations. Electroneum would act as an intermediary to make sure the funds reach the vendor’s wallet in due time. The following video demo was released on 12 June:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOtJVfZ29Es
On 29 April, KuCoin began experiencing the same wallet problems as Cryptopia had earlier. This would take them a few weeks to sort out as well.
Electroneum was listed on 3 new exchanges during this time - Altex, Cryptonit, and LetsDoCoinz.
On 3 May, the Electroneum mobile miner reached 100,000 active users! Although there were a couple of bugs experienced which made the miner slow or delayed payout, these were addressed fairly quickly by the team and miner performance had soon stabilized.
On 4 May it was announced that MegaXStore accepted ETN for payments (way before the launch of instant payments)!
Electroneum was featured on the BBC on 10 May.
On 30 May, Electroneum forked to prevent ASICs from mining the coin, and keep GPU miners in place. Although the fork was well tested before hand, and all the blockchain changes were implemented successfully, the developers did not anticipate the sharp drop in hashing power that would ensue.
With difficulty sky high and hashing power too low, it took a very long time to mine the blocks after block 307,500 before the difficulty would begin to drop - about a week to be exact! During this week, very little transactions were passed through the blockchain.
Electroneum even offered rewards for GPU miners and pool owners to come on board and help break the difficult blocks.
Once the difficulty actually started dropping, another problem arose. NiceHash renters started targeting the coin and would manipulate the difficulty in a way that would produce very fast block times at some stages and very slow ones at other stages, creating a wavelike pattern that was not good for transaction performance.
Finally, the team decided to fork back to the previous version on 5 July to allow ASICs back in. This would stabilize the blockchain and curb block time manipulation. It would also prepare the blockchain for massive scale that would come. All in all, this was a very good decision as the blockchain is now very stable and also very fast.
Richard appeared at the BCI Summit in New York on 11 June and gave this compelling talk about banking the unbanked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RIYYWUGeo0
Electroneum announced a new partnership with Mobile Streams on 15 June.
On 21 June, MSystems released a compelling article that shows that we as Electroneum supporters are stronger if we stand together - the three arrows mentality!
2017 Quarter 3 - Reaching the Unbanked, Community, Instant Payments
On 10 July, Richard released a very compelling playlist of videos on how Electroneum would reach the unbanked, and how the system would benefit the lives of these people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA6_nXIKSIY&list=PLpy-lPqkYzXW5BmagIuNS-mVmPiCxcSAy
On 1 July, Electroneum opened applications for vendors to be beta testers of the instant payments system when it launched.
Electroneum announced on 6 July that the iOS app has been approved for beta testing and that they would soon begin testing the app via Testflight with a few thousand users.
Electroneum reached 2 million registered users on 19 July, and to commemorate the event they launched an exciting contest for Electroneum artwork, ETN242. Thousands of contestants joined along and created magnificent artwork of Electroneum, its ideals, and its plans ahead.
On 3 August, Richard Ells was featued on the cover of Boss Magazine!
Electroneum’s ever-popular community forum (the one you’re reading on right now) launced on 30 August. The forum is a great place for people to share their thoughts, ideas, and suggestions, and to get help on ETN-related problems.
On 7 September, Electroneum’s Android app crossed the 1 million downloads mark! This is a feat achieved by very few apps.
And now.
The launch of instant payments…
On 10 September, updates were performed to the app and all users were migrated to the instant payments system. And finally, on 12 September, the instant payment API was opened to a select group of vendors to start performing tests and integrate the system into their sales points.
Within days, vendors have integrated the system into various platforms, including Android apps and Woocommerce. Other users programmed demonstration code to help even more developers go live.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xztj4b0aBXI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEV7DEhbUlk
And while more and more vendors are figuring out how to program the system, Electroneum is having its first ICO birthday!
The Future
In the past year, Electroneum has laid the foundations for an amazing system. Good things take time to develop, and Electroneum is no different.
The future roadmap of ETN is filled with great plans and lots of new exciting features. Technology is in place and is getting better by the day. Deals have been established to reach millions of new users. And to top it all, Electroneum has reached 2 million users without spending even a dime on marketing! Just imagine what the future could look like!
What do you think the future holds for Electroneum? Reply below and let me know…
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