Demand for Decred is rising!

The Decred Digest - Sep 14, 2017

Over the last few months we have seen a steady rise in demand for Decred right across the board. We’ve had a big increase in the number of people joining our community on all social networks, hash rate is booming, and relative to inflation the circulating supply of Decred is dropping!

The Decred community is expanding rapidly. As shown above, in just 3 months Slack members are up 59%, Decred Redditors are up 125%, subscribers to our Decred Assembly YouTube channel are up 385%, and our Twitter numbers are up 98% — with an additional 6,192 followers. Furthermore, one of our biggest local communities around the world, the Decred Brazil Facebook group, has now almost reached a staggering 4,000 members! In addition, an extra 5,700 official wallets have been downloaded from Decred.org!

However, our community isn’t the only thing that’s growing — our hashrate is going through the roof! In the last month the network hashrate has reached a peak of 380 Thash/s. It appears that Decred is in demand! All good news, not only is this a sign that Proof-of-Work (PoW) miners believe enough in the future of the project to invest their resources in our network, it also means there has been a huge increase in network security too! But it gets better…

Although approximately 400,000 additional decred have been mined over the last 3 months, the amount of circulating decred is being constricted via an increase in people opting to stake their DCR. Over the last few months the number of decred locked up in Proof-of-Stake (PoS) has increased from approximately 39% of the total supply, to around 42% of the total supply! So despite the addition of approximately 400,000 newly mined decred, around 340,000 additional decred have been locked up in PoS. As shown below, inflation is continuing to drop (block reward). So whilst there’s been a huge increase in community numbers, the amount of decred in circulation has only increased by approximately 60,000. If this trend continues as expected, and more people decide to lock up their DCR in PoS, the available circulating supply of decred will actually start to decrease! Whilst this is yet another sign that more and more people have enough faith and trust in Decred to lock up their wealth for a prolonged period of time, it also means an increase in network security too.

Decred’s novel hybrid PoW/PoS design significantly enhances network security compared to blockchains that rely on PoW alone to secure the network. If PoW miners produce blocks that do not conform to the wishes of the stakeholders of the Decred network, they can vote them invalid. Therefore, in order to attack the Decred network, an attacker would have to obtain at least 33% of the total supply locked up in PoS, in addition to a large proportion of the PoW hash power. When combined with the increase in hashrate, this represents a significant increase in network security.

The last few months have been extremely positive right across the board, however…the rest of the year has even more in store! With the recent translation of the Decred website into 10 different languages, and more due to be added in the near future, I expect our community numbers will begin to accelerate. Furthermore, as stated in the recent roadmap update, over the coming months we will see the release of the long awaited Decred proposal system, Lightning Network integration, Ledger and Trezor hardware wallet support, and a few other surprises along the way! In addition it is also expected that details of the highly anticipated privacy enhancement for Decred will be revealed. There’s never been a more exciting time to be part of the Decred community!

K. M.