Happy 5th anniversary to every NULS supporter!
A letter from Reaper Ran, the co-founder of NULS to the community.
In this letter, we’ll find out how the first path was created before and how the obstacles were overcome in the past five years.
To the NULS community:
Hello everyone, I’m Reaper, one of the co-founders of NULS blockchain, you might not be familiar with my face but I’ve been communicating with the community members most of the time since the day NULS was born, mainly providing technical suggestions and solving product issues for every NULS blockchain user.
At the time of NULS 5th anniversary, I’m representing the NULS team, delivering our appreciation to every NULS supporter! It is the passion for NULS blockchain and your support that bonded us closer and gave us the strength to thrive in this competitive field.
5 years ago, on 27th Sep, the NULS project was officially established. We, the NULS team, had the most difficult time during that September as the whole cryptocurrency market was going downhill. The good thing was that the launch of NULS brought us some hope to maintain our work, but in general, it was quite tough in an era when blockchain hadn’t been widely known. The idea of NULS blockchain was an innovation, we were the first ones that used the most-friendly developing language (JAVA) for smart contract coding, meanwhile, the implementation of modular architecture empowered any developers to build a customized blockchain in the simplest way possible. Naturally decided by its blockchain data structures, we believed that cross-chain/multi-chain is the future for NULS, not long after that, we had the first NULS parallel cross-chain protocol — NerveNetwork. The future of blockchain was bright we had no doubt, but it was not easy, we spent days and nights cultivating our research and developing, working towards our early direction, it was the passion and belief that walked us through the hardest times.
After 10 months of developing and testing, here came the first significant milestone on July 12th, 2018 — NULS mainnet activation. To celebrate this mainnet launch, we had a small release conference and met lots of NULS supporters from the community.
In November 2018, the NULS team launched NULS 2.0 proposal, the goal was to make blockchain more accessible and easier. Based on that idea, we redesigned the NULS blockchain framework with micros-services and modular features, this enabled all NULS modular the ability to function separately and allowed any developers to carry out underlying modular programming with different coding languages.
The technology and underlying designs of NULS were beyond the era, our team was growing rapidly with tremendous support from the community members and community technical developers worldwide.
The market changed in a blink of an eye, the whole crypto market situation started to get worse that year. With every member of the team getting paid with NULS, we realized that we didn’t reserve sufficient team funds at that point so we had to release more NULS to cover the team expense, including advertising, marketing, community, and team paystub.
From 2018–2019, which was the hardest crypto winter season, unfortunately, many team members left, and many community members walked out on us. We have experienced lots of market crashes but luckily, some of the community supporters chose to stay, and we eventually pulled through.
On September 12, 2019, NULS 2.0 was finally launched. At the same time, we also launched Nulstar (a microservice administrator ), NULS nodes include (consensus, account, ledger, chain manager, storage, cross-chain, protocol upgrade, and other microservice modules), putting these different modules together, we had NULS ChainBox, NULS POCM, and other products.
Our primary goal shifted from underlying construction to ecosystem building After the launch of NULS2.0 mainnet. We did spend a lot of time, and energy, organizing campaigns and hoped to attract more projects and developers to build within the NULS ecosystem. However, what we’ve done was far away from enough, limited team funding was another trouble that stopped us from attracting ecosystem builders. But the most important thing was when we compared NULS with some of the popular EVM blockchains, we realized the missing part: NULS’s NVM is not compatible with EVM coding, and most ecosystem builders embraced EVM blockchains. We knew that changes had to be made, otherwise we would be left behind, so we began to build the NULS ecosystem through technical support, and the idea of connecting NULS to other EVMs was born. A few months later, we supported NerveNetwork to create the first ecosystem cross-chain bridge, meanwhile, this also enriched the NULS module factory. In future upgrades, we added more features and modules to NerveNetwork, such as heterogeneous cross-chain module, BFT consensus module, order book DEX module, AMM module, fixed ratio exchange module, etc.
Even today, we are still helping the NULS ecosystem projects to grow through technical support. As you can see now, many NULS ecosystem projects have started to grow. When we look back on the past five years, we have come all the way, fallen to the ground, and moved on, we believed that every fall will only make us stronger. We have also experienced many hacking attacks, but that never stopped the growth of the team as we have already seen this as a part of our life-term contribution. We have spent 5 years, 12.5% of an average person’s lifetime working time contributing to NULS, and we will be spending many 5 more years to make it last as long as it could be.
The development of blockchain is strongly being affected by big capital, but there are always great communities and true believers. One of the greatest examples is Ethereum, a community where innovation never stops happening! Maybe that is why they are always leading the industry!
Speaking of NULS itself, although the microservice architect and NULS NVM have not been widely applied, our vision always stays the same. We will be working hard as we always do to bring NULS towards a new level.
Hope all of our devoted time and efforts will leave a light beam in the crypto-metaverse. We appreciated you all for supporting us along the way, the journey finds no destination.
— — Reaper
A quote from what Reaper said in the article: We will be working hard as we always do to bring NULS towards a new level!”
The journey will not end! Thank you for your strong support!
NULS Team
2022–09–27