Decred is based on an alternative implementation of bitcoin called btcd, written in Google’s programming language Go. The project’s core ideas stem from a white paper titled “Memcoin2: A Hybrid Proof-of-Work, Proof-of-Stake Cryptocurrency.” Similar to Bitcoin, Decred has a 21 million supply cap. But unlike Bitcoin, 1.68 million (8 percent) of Decred’s coins were pre-mined. Of those, half went to pay developers who contributed to the project early on, while the other half was airdropped (given out for free) to ensure a wide distribution in the network.In Decred’s consensus system, proof of stake works alongside proof of work to give coin holders more of a voice in the system. Anyone who owns decred can buy tickets to participate in the protocol. The price of tickets (currently around $8,000) fluctuates based on demand to ensure that around 41,000 tickets are active in the network at any given time. When you buy a ticket (a process known as “staking”) your coins are temporarily locked up for several months. When a new block is created, five tickets are chosen at random to verify the block and vote on outstanding issues. As an incentive to participate, voters get 6 percent of the block reward.Now headed into its second year, Decred recently released its 12-month roadmap. Bitcoin Magazine spoke with project lead Yocom-Piatt to get a sense of the highlights of the roadmap.Autonomous TreasuryDecred’s most important project, by far, is its treasury system. Last year, Decred applied voting to unactivated consensus changes in the daemon. Similar to how soft forks get activated in Bitcoin, stakeholders in Decred vote by flipping a version bit in a block header. Once a majority threshold is reached, the new code activates automatically. Now, Decred wants to completely decentralize the control of its development funds. (Other projects are working toward similar goals, but if Decred pulls this off, it could be among the first to fully disintermediate the handling of treasury funds.)As it stands, 10 percent of Decred block rewards go into a development fund to create a consistent cash flow for the project. Right now, control of the funds (currently valued at $28 million) is in the hands of the Decred Holdings Group LLC. Plans are to pass control of those funds to the community via a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), a type of smart contract that requires stakeholders to approve all spending. How it works is, anyone in the community will be able to
