The market cap of Substratum soared on Monday, as the open-source network’s ERC20 compliant token – Substrate (SUB) – appreciated some 40 percent in value in the hours following a three-part technical announcement communicated by co-founder and CEO Justin Tabb.
Substratum, which held its ICO last August, saw its SUB token dramatically spike in value en route to a three-week high of $0.655 that was achieved on early Monday evening (PDT).
Whilst the price of one Substrate has since retraced to $0.567 (at the time of writing), it does still represent a 24-hour double-digit percentage gain; no easy feat considering the nasty state of the cryptocurrency market.
The first news shared by Tabb was that SubstratumNode v.0.2.0 is complete, and would be emailed to one hundred beta testers later on Monday.
Secondly, the Substratum co-founder told viewers that their “very first open public release – to the general public – is the version [being worked] on right now.”
Anyone can install it, Tabb explained, and the team will be reaching out to more beta testers for feedback. SubstratumNODE users will be able to surf most of the Internet in the same (traditional) manner that they’ve grown accustomed to.
As the final of their three-part announcement on March 12 (i.e., the very date of the tenth annual World Day Against Cyber Censorship), Substratum announced that – along with the imminent open release – they will open source their SubstratumNode code under the GPL v3.0-only license, as previously promised.
Following the news, the popular cryptocurrency-related YouTube channel, DataDash (278k subscribers) uploaded a twenty-minute interview with Tabb, who not only spoke in more detail about the three announcements, but also why Substratum’s timing was so significant (something he has outlined in his own videos, and other recent interviews).
Indeed, the team believes this early stage of 2018 is “the perfect time for Substratum,” given there are three major upcoming Internet-related regulatory events. The last week of March will see two such events: (1) China ending overseas VPNs, and (2) the final vote on the European Union Copyright Directive (which includes the contentious Article 13).
Then, April 23 will see the United States officially reverse their classification of broadband internet as a Title II public utility. This means that throttling, blocking, and paid prioritisation will no longer be banned; reversing the decision reached by the FCC roughly two years ago that formed part of their plan that saw net neutrality approved.
Yesterday’s announcement came as little surprise to Substratum fanatics, who knew the news was imminent after Dan Wiebe (Technical Lead) all but confirmed version 0.2.0 of the Substratum Network’s node was operative back on March 7. Weeks earlier on February 19, some optimistic speculators (correctly) interpreted this tweet (also from Wiebe) to mean that a beta release was soon approaching.
Coming as further encouraging news for Substratum, the open-source hosting network will be a focal point of an upcoming short documentary (7-8 minute duration) which, in exploring their unique concept, will try to explain the underpinnings of blockchain technology, and indeed the entire cryptocurrency movement.
The team is quietly confident that the mini-documentary will air prior to the important date of April 23. Impressively, it is anticipated to reach some sixty million homes thanks to some major networks having agreed to broadcast it, such as CNN, Fox Business Network, and CNBC.
The making of this documentary was fast-tracked in order to capitalise on hot topics like ‘information censorship’ and ‘net neutrality’. Such terms have burst on to the public forum in recent times, mainly because of the imminency of the aforementioned events.
2018 certainly appears a hectic one for Substratum, especially when you consider their ambition to also launch CryptoPay, an e-commerce payment gateway tailored for cryptocurrency; a market Tabb believes “so few people [are] trying to hit,” despite the fact that “a huge percentage of shopping is done…online.”
To help shorten its development timeframe, the team recently hired more staff to work exclusively on CryptoPay. The payment gateway portal is the first dApp being written on top of the Substratum Network.
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