Roadmap

Ergo Platform

24 November, 2021

See full sized image. References are available below.

Please keep in mind that most applications built on top of Ergo are community-run and have no formal connection to the Ergo Foundation.

Ergo Foundation Updates

Successful Ergo Foundation votes in the past month

EF Treasurer Proposal
US Based Legal Opinion
Marketing/CM Assistant
Strategic Marketing Planning Budget
Youtube/Video Manager
AMM Kairon Labs
Bounty Budget for Core Repositories
Dan Friedman EF Advisor Role
Hire Android developer as a Full-time engineer
Proposal to hire part-time Yoroi developer

We also have 2 scala engineers starting a training period.

Development Update

Ergo always was intended to be Proof-of-Work cryptocurrency resembling Bitcoin, with simple and conservative design choices whenever possible, but also incorporating years of research to have significant improvements in regards with scalability, light clients, support for financial and crypto-financial applications.

Ergo already has proven that it provides rich possibilities for building applications:

More than 12,000 tokens have already been issued (mostly NFTs though), while colored coins projects failed
ErgoMixer was the first non-custodial mixer and is still the only token mixer on the market!
Ergonauts are supporting charities with ErgoRaffle
Completely decentralized auctions (with a UI anyone can deploy) are quite unique for the whole space
Algorithmic stablecoins with SigmaUSD and DexyUSD on the way.
ErgoDEX already can be used with Yoroi Nightly
Zero-Knowledge treasury can back multisig-based DAOs with unique zero-knowledge property for multi sigs
more applications are coming, such as ErgoLend, ErgoTeam etc.

Note that Ergo outperforms Bitcoin forks with extended features (Bitcoin Cash, Ravencoin etc). The protocol client is becoming more stable and feature-rich with each release, basic infrastructure is improving. Now time to go forward!

Research on different scalability proposals for Bitcoin, Cardano, Ethereum, such as sidechains (which are also nice for testing new features), commit-chains, rollups, isomorphic state channels, FairSwap etc. For some solutions for Bitcoin new opcodes are needed (so a little chance to see things in the real-world), while Ergo allows for such constructions without forks.
Ergo is going to be not just a chain, but a king of chains (which will improve the crypto-economic security of the protocol as miners will get additional rewards from sidechains).
On performance of the network, the reference protocol client (Ergo node) is getting different performance improvements in the P2P layer.
Quick bootstrapping without compromising security using UTXO set snapshot and NiPoPoWs are in progress
The 5.0 soft-fork is going to be proposed to miners soon, the main change is about switching to just-in-time-costing in ErgoTree evaluation which will provide a 5-6x boost in scripts processing (on real blockchain data)
It’s now time to consider the long-term crypto-economic security of the protocol, discussions already started here