We have just finished our very first fundraising round with $2.5M. It went smoothly despite the downward trend of the crypto market at the moment. For this, we would like to share our most gratitute to our early investors: Coin98 Ventures, GBV, Impossible Finance, Kucoin Labs, Kyber Ventures, GuildFi, Avatar, Mexc, TPX, Vanda, Redline, DEO, OIG, Ahamove, Ecomobi, Pencil and others.
There are also a huge number of community members who recognize our potential and decide to follow us on social media. However, there are a lot of things that we are building and certainly, we cannot meet all of your demand at the moment. Through this post, we would like to share you some information from ourside and our near future plan.
Testnet progress
Aura testnet is on its way to the first release version. Due to the huge number of updates we are doing every day, we decided to split the current "testnet" into 2 independent networks:
Stable Testnet (code: Serenity): This is a testnet that will mainly be used by developers and users who want to experience Aura Network. Serenity network validators are controlled by the Aura team and a few of our partners. It is not open to public validators. We will minimize updates to this network to make it as stable as possible.
Experimental Testnet (code: TBD): This is a network that is open for other validators to test new Cosmos modules, stress testing, security testing, etc. Basically, we will do a lot of stuff and reset here so we do not recommend anyone to build apps on this network. However, if you are a new validator and want to test something out, this is your place.
Both testnet releases are scheduled for the first week of May, so don't be surprised too much if things you are seeing on our applications don't work at the moment. It is updated every day!
Staging Network (Euphoria)
Staging Network will be released after 1 or 2 months after releasing Testnet. This is the closest to mainnet that we actually want to have external, reputable validators to join to secure the network. We might aim for 15 - 20 validators in staging and they will be prioritized in the Mainnet genesis validator set.
Please be noted that in order to ensure the best experience for users and maximize decentralization, we will introduce a very strict policy of selecting staging validators. We believe a validator list with enough diversity in terms of localization, VCs, professional, KOL, exchange, etc. will tremendously help to bootstrap our Mainnet.
Aurascan
Aurascan (or the current Aura explorer) is still in development. That's why a lot of features like Delegating, Smart Contract, etc. are not working at the moment. You will experience slow performance or wrong display when you play with it.
Software development is not easy, especially for a project of this scale. We hope that a basic version of the tool will be ready by the time testnet is released.
Faucet
A huge number of community members are wondering why the hell Aura Faucet does not work. Actually due to a lot of changes in the network that we are working on, the faucet is unstable as well. That will be resolved after we release Serenity. Please don't be impatient with the faucet at the moment, there is no point in using it at the moment besides developing applications and trying to play with the network. We suggest that give it another try with Serenity.
Wallet
A lot of you might already know that we support Keplr. However, Aura's official wallet is Coin98 Wallet. Apart from being one of our partners, investors, and long-term friends, Coin98 offers one of the best multi-chain, non-custodian wallet with all DeFi and NFT support. We and Coin98 are working very hard to give you the best wallet experience on Aura Network. But stay tuned, new features and support are coming!
Community
Over 3 days, we saw a huge impression and new members from Indonesia. This is such an honor as well as pressure for us to make better things for you. We also see a lot of other friends from Vietnam, Singapore, China, Russia, Japan, and so on. At the moment, we don't have that many personnel to support you immediately as most of the team are full-time working on developing for the testnet release. But we appreciate your attention and will try the best to give more information to you in your native language.
This development blog is entirely open source on Github, if you are genuinely interested in Aura and want to translate this post into your native language to reach more people, please feel free to submit a pull request on Github. We will try our best to translate some parts of it as well.