Founding Team Hardships

It is important to be transparent on all fronts, so with that, comes the financial situation of the project. When Jason Crowe (Crowetic) took over the development of QORA in 2016, it was determined that the QORA code would not be practical to continue building on. Therefore, the decision was made to rewrite the codebase in a clean Java code. Furthermore, the decision was made to completely rewrite every aspect of code that was to be considered from the original QORA and ultimately a new project was born that encompassed ideas from QORA and new concepts for an all-inclusive project known today as Qortal.

During this time, Crowetic was actively trading cryptocurrency on various platforms, had a small mining operation between two houses, and a self-started business providing computer repair, IT service, and blockchain consulting. Crowetic never expected to have to fully fund the Qortal Project on his own, but that ended up being the case for most of the story to be told. With the vision of what Qortal could offer the world, and how the current blockchain space was beginning to look less promising for a future where its applicability seemed to be overlooked, Crowetic made the decision to make a full commitment to Qortal’s development. He and the main core developer ‘Cat’ worked tirelessly to design and build a working core product. Crowetic devised a plan for a large mining operation to be done in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He and a couple partners pooled funds together, purchased land when an agreement was made with the agent on behalf of the local power company, and had the perfect plan to create cash flow for Qortal’s development. Thereafter, the power company went against the agreement and raised the price of power to an unfeasible rate as the operation was just underway. Having gone ‘all-in’ financially between the partners, there were no financial means to prevail from a mining operation stand-point. Crowetic did what he could to help smooth things over with his partners, and try to focus on the day trades and asset HODLing he was already engaged in daily.

The next big hurdle was the unexpected issues that arose with the implementation of BTC in the Trade Portal. Ultimately, trades were too slow and expensive so LTC was added to replace BTC. BTC trading was deactivated while BTC wallets remained. The hope was that the Trade Portal could provide liquidity to the market immediately, and coins could be sold to help keep the developers moving full time. Unfortunately, that did not go as planned and cost us a lot of time.

With only one core developer, who by the way is extremely talented, the development within the core carried on but to no surprise was not at a sustainable rate (concerning the current financial constraint). Attempts were made by Crowetic and others to secure funding for the development of Qortal. These attempts led to the project carrying on for some time further, but ultimately led to October of 2020 where everyone involved including Crowetic and Cat have no other choice but to secure day jobs, a base income, and less time to allocate to development. Surely no one involved has given up nor will they, but with a project still in the works, so much to be done, and hardly any marketing done while waiting for the project to reach certain milestones, the time has come to adapt. There was a considerable funding opportunity on the table in the earlier part of 2020, although as petty as it may sound to blame COVID-19, the truth of the matter is that it derailed and postponed a critical funding opportunity. (Currently Cat and Cal are the two core developers working in their free time as they both require full time jobs as primary sources of income as of 2021, again, updates won't be made here.)

Qortal has a lot already built on the core, a decent start within the UI, and a very promising group of developers and community members. It is time to share with the world what all has been in the works, share the big picture, and hopefully be able to obtain funding for further development. The Founders hate to sell people on a dream, although there is already a considerable amount of proof in the codebase and ‘beta-testing’ of sorts that we have a capable core team, but surely the right minds will see what we have in our reach.

The Founders hope that this document will be studied by its current community members and shared with people around the world. That those newcomers will study and see what this project truly aims to provide the world with. Qortal welcomes people of all types from around the world, no matter your technical expertise, availability to engage within the community chat channels, geographical location, or financial status. It would be highly appreciated if everyone would help share the good word of what Qortal aims to provide, and by more exposure, hopefully we can be successful in pursuing the CrowdFund idea.

Two ideas that the core team believe would be well received by the public are CrowdFunding for 1) ad space on other platforms to discuss the concepts of Qortal and rouse the masses, and 2) development of a first-of-its-kind mobile app and wallet for Qortal with basic Q-Chat functionality. The mobile app version will likely utilize load-balanced core nodes hosted by the team to access the basic wallet and Q-Chat functions in Qortal until one can be built with a more enhanced core that does efficient trimming and allows a top-only sync method. This will create a new core syncing method that will allow for mobile app minting and various other functionalities!