Dear Shift Community,

The last half of 2020 has been an exceptionally wild ride. Our community suffered when smaller, second-rate exchanges broke down due to hackers preying on weak infrastructure and a lack of backup plans (going forward, ShiftNrg commits to only list on secure DEXs and top-tier exchanges). Despite these unfortunate setbacks, we’ve made incredible progress on the development front, pushing the needle definitively forward with several updates throughout 2H2020. Most importantly, our community has grown and united in our mission to decentralize the web!

Read below to catch up on details of our progress during the last six months of 2020 (or skip to the end for a tl;dr).

For answers to any questions you may have, join our Discord server — our community is always willing, ready, and able to engage you!

Progress Achieved Q3 & Q4 of 2020

First and foremost, our decision not to implement CMB paid off — ShiftNrg’s community came through! New voters and old voters alike banded together to unvote red delegates with unmaintained nodes and vote in new, green delegates: We now have a 100% healthy mainnet network with 101 green delegates. A big thank you to our new node-running delegates who joined and were able to convince voters to trust them to help secure our blockchain!

This progress alone is a huge testament to the faith that our community has in us, your new ShiftNrg Team. Thank you — we couldn’t do this without your support!

Transfer of Resources

In addition to what’s already been listed in the previous newsletter, here’s the list of newly acquired resources; this completes the transition process as no more resources are outstanding or pending transfer to the new team. A big thank you to TerraBellus and Ralf for working with our new team to make this possible:

• Jenga source code — a bridge connecting the decentralized Web and the classical Internet
• Twitter Account
• Shiftnrg.org domain
• r/ShiftNrg & r/ShiftProject subreddit pages and ShiftNrg Reddit account
• ShiftTeam account on BitcoinTalk.org
• Remaining Team Funds: 8 of 8* wallets below. Total ~835,000 SHIFT: Shift team reserves 1, 2, and 3, Shift community wallet, Shift development wallet, Shift donations wallet, Shift forging (salary) wallet (which has been split between the new and old team: Ralf received 100K SHIFT, while the new team received 60K SHIFT; new team’s 60K Funds are here).

* The previous team did not transfer Shift team reserves 1, 2, and 3 to the new team. Attempts were recently made to settle this outstanding balance, but these 3 accounts are locked behind a 2/3 multi-sig which requires at a minimum 2 out of 3 of Ralf, Craig, and Heisenberg to work together. Ralf was willing to transfer these funds, but the other two remained in an unknown state. An incentivized offer was made in a generous attempt to complete the transfer but remained unanswered and has since expired. We are still unable to reach either Craig or Heisenberg.

Given the circumstances, we decided to take matters into our own code. ShiftNrg developed guard-rails to lock these 3 accounts into a transfer of which only 1 valid address can receive without the transaction failing. That address is under our control. This was released in the latest Lisk-based mainnet update. With this update, the team funds are secured and will be migrated to wSHIFT to be placed in a time-hold smart contract (i.e. vesting). They will later be migrated to our Substrate chain once our mainnet is live within Polkadot’s blockchain ecosystem. In summary, the new team is in control of all funds.

Exchange Issues

• Livecoin delisted SHIFT, then soon after restored SHIFT, then shortly afterward was hacked. Their wallet here.
• Altilly was hacked, as well. Their wallet here.

Due to the nature and increased risk associated with smaller exchanges, ShiftNrg will no longer list itself on small exchanges — we will only be targeting DEXs and top-tier exchanges from here on out. We commit to this standard for our community’s sake and for the sake of ShiftNrg’s future.

Technical Details

Below is a bulleted summary of technical progress to help our readers catch up on ShiftNrg’s latest dev updates.

• ShiftNrg’s Substrate testnet v0.0.1 was launched. We have reached over 2MM blocks published and finalized via two validators as of this newsletter: https://telemetry.polkadot.io/#list/ShiftNrg%20Testnet

• “ShiftNrg reserve SS58 address id 23” PR created and merged into https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/pull/6942. This means within Polkdot’s ecosystem, ShiftNrg has an easily recognizable format for our Substrate wallet addresses. In a nutshell, our Substrate addresses begin with the number “3” as seen above.

• ShiftNrg’s Wrapped Shift ERC20 token contract was created by us and audited by Monte Labs: https://github.com/ShiftNrg/wrappedShift

• Two mainnet updates were released: v6.9.0 and v6.10.0, as well as, several testnet updates: https://github.com/ShiftNrg/shift-lisk/releases. Be sure to update your Shift Nano software to our latest version: https://github.com/ShiftNrg/shift-nano/releases.

We collected over $10,000 USD in community donations for the redenomination effort to create Wrapped Shift, allowing for ShiftNrg’s token to trade freely on decentralized exchanges. Uniswap is the first DEX we’ve targeted to create a liquidity pool, enabling anyone to obtain wSHIFT now. Read more about wSHIFT here.

The aforementioned updates were crucial to securing funds and enabling a burning address for people to migrate to Wrapped Shift. The first set of individuals have completed this process becoming Liquidity Providers for the wSHIFT:ETH pair in Uniswap.

• Our Lead Developer took part in the Polkadot Hello World Hackathon hosted by Gitcoin. He completed 18 challenges, 1 out of only 39 to do so.
• The shiftnrg.network domain was acquired for future use, as well as, shiftcommunityproject.[com | net | org]. You will see future use of these domains as we make progress on Substrate.

Team & Community Updates

We formed an advisory council from trusted members of our community. This allows us to create and refine proposals for our 101 delegates to vote on and for our community to benefit from and participate in.

A Code of Conduct was constructed (thanks Drew!) and enforced on Discord (thanks mod team, Drew & Ghost!) which has cleaned up our community server so that we may provide a constructive and supportive environment for our community to engage with each other.

Alexa101 and Mikegg89 have begun work to update our website’s content. We greatly appreciate their work in the web-dev space. Thanks Alexa and Mike!

JJ has volunteered to update our subreddits. Thanks JJ!

Jones helped us curate this update by keeping track of the events that occurred and providing that list to us, saving us time. Thanks Jones!

The road ahead, what’s next?

Release a new Substrate testnet version with more functionality.

Getting the Phoenix demo back online.

Increase liquidity in our Uniswap pool.

A new website.

Revamping our public image and increasing community outreach:
It’s been brought to our attention that newcomers to the ShiftNrg realm can become easily lost and confused, part of this is due to the recent transition to our new team — we are working to streamline our processes and trim the fat where possible. Over the last few months, we’ve successfully updated and finalized our project logo and name, brought on new team members, increased liquidity, unpublished and unlinked stale social websites, and we are working on all fronts to improve the user interface, user experience, and our general marketing.

Based on community feedback, ShiftNrg is refocusing our marketing efforts to better inform the public of our progress. Stay tuned for the next installment of our now Quarterly Newsletter that will go into more detail about all the exciting happenings at ShiftNrg.

TL;DR

1. Team resources have fully been transferred or secured
2. Several big steps have been taken to fulfill the initiative of migrating to a Substrate-based blockchain
3. Wrapped Shift, our ERC-20 Token, is on track for Ethereum mainnet deployment
4. Cleaning up & streamlining ShiftNrg’s resources — a work in progress
5. Call for community support — join our Discord

🎉 Happy (much belated) New Year 🎉

Sincerely yours,

The ShiftNrg Team

About ShiftNrg:

ShiftNrg combines the transparency, immutability, and decentralization of blockchain technology with distributed hosting. We are a community of crypto-enthusiasts who believe in your right to a decentralized web. As an exciting 2021 begins, our project is continuing to develop technology to decentralize the internet as we know it and overcome censorship throughout the world.

Follow us on Twitter, connect to our Discord, join our Telegram, study our code on GitHub, and ask us on Reddit.

Feedback? We’d love to hear from you! Reach us as above or by email: [email protected]

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