NEM Foundation: Update on Catapult
First appeared in the NEM Forums
Dear community,
Thank you for your vote of approval for the NEM Foundation Funding Proposal 2019.
As a follow-up, we would like to provide a special update on Catapult.
We would like to highlight a response by Jeff McDonald, (@jabo38), our interim CTO for NEM Foundation. He answered the question on telegram in NEM::RED (t.me/nemred) on 21 February 2019 (based on an often asked question) from a community member:
“Where is the roadmap? When will “CATAPULT” be ready?”
When will Catapult be ready? There is no “clear” answer to that question right now because work is ongoing, but let me try to make things a little clearer than what they are now.
I am just guessing the question you are specifically asking is not exactly when Catapult is “ready”, but more so “when will there be a public mainnet launch”. I’ll explain. The current release of Cow is already a powerful release with more features than most other blockchains and is more scalable, so if you want to know if it is ready,
“all of those features already released are “ready”.”
This includes making namespaces, making mosaics, multisignature, multilevel multisignatures (Multisig 2.0 and way more powerful), aggregate transactions (grouping transactions. This is so powerful), send by an alias, account properties (filters on what accounts can and can’t do), cross-chain swaps, and much much more. Find out more about these features at the:
NEM Developer Center – https://nemtech.github.io/concepts/account.html
In addition, it has NEM’s revolutionary new architecture of the P2P server and the API server which fixes problems like Ethereum’s Infura problem which has led to their centralization of dapps reliance on ConsenSys. As far as I know, even if Ethereum gets POS (which NEM has a version – called Proof of Importance [POI]) and gets sharding (we already have private chains to offload transaction volumes), it will still have the Infura centralization problem.
The closest thing to a publicly posted list of things that need to be done before a public chain can be launched has been posted here: https://github.com/nemtech/catapult-server/issues**
This adds support for even more features above and beyond those mentioned above. Most of these changes are “adding” onto the work already done and not rewriting. The core of Catapult is getting quite stable.
What is labelled as “Dragon” are tasks the devs are currently working on. What is labelled as “Elephant” are things that will be worked on.
There was also a follow-up message from a community member on:
’It doesn’t touch on when we can expect to see public catapult mainnet or have the code become open source. Is this a 2019 thing? Q2? Q3? 2020?’
The reply from one of the Core Devs (@BloodyRookie) was simple but straight to the point:
’2019’
Note: the code is already open source on https://github.com/nemtech
Summary
NEM Foundation is absolutely committed to working with all contributors to the NEM ecosystem and the Project Management Committee (PMC) to ensure that we are ready. On top of that, we are also developing structures in business development and revenue growth to ensure that there is a pipeline of projects working towards the adoption of Catapult.
