Metrix 2020: new direction

The purpose of this article is to discuss the current challenges that the Metrix team has faced and to present our path forward to reunite the community with a common cause.

Our main challenges:

Challenge 1: Reduced team numbers

It’s no news to the community that only Justin, Chris and David Grunge are actively working on the project. We have seen the other team members leave the project. We have not looked to fill any of these positions due to the planned shift in corporate structure as discussed below.

Challenge 2: US Regulation (securities)

One of the hurdles we have faced is incoming US regulations. In addition to recent bills there is another 21 up for debate in Congress. Here is a summary of the bills up for debate. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbrett/2019/12/21/crypto-legislation-2020-analysis-of-21-cryptocurrency-and-blockchain-bills-in-congress/#77253a1b56c1

In summary we need to remain as a utility coin (not a security). Remaining as a utility will require a change to how we operate as a team and as a community, we need to become decentralized and put the decision making back in the hands of the community.

Proposed changes to combat this hurdle:

1. Moving Metrix to a fully decentralized model, with all decisions made by the community.
2. Justin, Chris and David Grunge propose to continue working on improving the coin, including continuing to work on projects that promote the use of Metrix (GMG, MyStakingWallet)

In addition, we propose to allow any community member to put up a vote for the community. If it receives a minimum level of support it will be sent to the full community for a vote. This is the basis for how the coin will make decisions moving forward.

Challenge 3: Regulations (Money Services Business)

Recent regulation has moved anyone who is converting one Cryptocurrency with value to another with value as a Money Services Business. The rules around becoming a Money Services business are too cumbersome for a coin like ours. This has really affected our plans for GrudgeMatchGaming (GMG). Sites like buy.metrixcoin.com are no longer going to be legal so GrudgematchGaming would not be able to build in a conversion service.

This has led to a few issues- the main one being the difficulty of buying Metrix at the moment (lack of liquidity combined with lack of exchanges) will have a profound effect on the ease of use of GMG and the appeal that it has to gamers entering crypto for the first time.

Our Solution is to add a BTC payment method. Similar to how Binance grew BNB by offering a discount on trading fees, we plan to offer a hefty discount for anyone playing in Metrix. We hope to convert users that love the service into Metrix holders, and the best way to do that is with a successful platform.

Challenge 4: Too much developer time taken up on improving the old Linda Chain.

One of our challenges is spending countless hours developing the old Linda chain. Even still, it will always have limitations based on its original fork. We still have many upgrades to get done, and the workload and cost of improving the chain to where it needs to be is restricting our ability to code game changing items.

*Solution to Challenge 4 after Challenge 8.

Challenge 5: Staking payments unsustainable

With a high staking payment, comes a high inflationary pressure. It’s no secret that many people sell the payments as they are received. This has led to a situation where the sell pressure is greater than the buying ability. We can solve this in a few ways. One is to improve the appetite for new users to hold the coin. The other is in our main solution after challenge 8.

In regards to increasing the appetite for new users to hold the coin, this is needs to be achieved by

1. Improving liquidity
2. Listing on popular exchanges
3. Creating partnerships to drive usage
4. Create usage through in-house development

Challenge 6: Large circulating supply and max supply

Having a large circulating and maximum supply is a limiting factor to what value we can achieve.

We plan to tackle this in our main solution, discussed after challenge 8.

Challenge 7: LindaX and forementioned regulation

As per our legal counsel and guidance, obtaining the proper licensing will be exceptionally difficult, expensive (requiring a salaried attorney to join the team), and unfortunately is still approximately 2 years from any real headway. Our challenge operating within the regulations of STO’s is much like the challenge of abiding by MSB guidelines as stated in Challenge 2 section of this article. In conclusion, we are faced with an unacceptable time frame and further taxing and diminishing of resources. This allows LX competitors with larger support and financial backing to penetrate and capitalize on the STO market before LX.

Challenge 8: Price and continuing to create use cases without a development budget.

Exchanges have always been difficult, but after noticing several exchanges relocating jurisdictions, exit scamming, or implementing new KYC policies, we investigated further. Apparently, the US Federal government is requiring any exchange (specifically with US users) to obtain a brokerage license. The fines and penalties are substantial, which is causing even the “Top 20” exchanges to shut down or completely restructure. This dramatically reduces the MRX userbase accessing MRX on an exchange, and their ability to openly trade. There are several options of course, and not all users are affected. However, this is why we’re collectively witnessing more decentralized exchanges being produced.

Without volume and price, it makes continuing to develop the coin difficult financially.

Our Solution-
A New MRX chain.

We know it’s a big move, but it’s not one we have taken lightly. We feel it will assist us in solving the issues discussed above, for the reasons described in each challenge.

It allows the core functionality provided in both blockchains (MRX & LX) to co-exist within a single solution, allowing us to focus our development time on one chain.

It’s a fair solution to LindaX users, and it improves the future potential for MRX holders.

The chain will be a fork of the Qtum codebase and have the following features:

• UTXO based transactions, the same as the current MRX chain, as well as support for EVM(Ethereum Virtual Machine) based smart contract support.
• Maximum Supply would be 200 Million MRX
• We propose to swap MRX 300:1 and LindaX 30:1
• If all coins were swapped, the new chain would have approximately 56.5 million circulating supply.

Rewards
We propose to reduce rewards to 30% immediately for the first 12 months, then scale per the below table. Based on this table we would have a reward life of 82 years.

This would give us a reward life of 82 years based on a 100% stake rate.

Block time would remain at 90 seconds.

Governance:

As part of this large reform, we will be handing the decisions back to the community.

A Governor will hold an amount of exactly 25,000 coins, and will be able to vote on any proposals that are put forward by the community. There is a minimum of 100 Governors that must be active for any votes to process. This is to minimize the chances of one person having 51% of the Governors.
There is a cap of 1920 Governors which is really a computing cap on the contract for technical reasons. We don’t expect the active number of governors to exceed 1000 (based on how many masternodes MRX has running currently).

You can have multiple Governors from the same wallet, and they do not need to be online 24/7. To be an active Governor, they need to have either voted or pinged the network at least once a month.

On how the voting works:

Anyone can submit a budget proposal but there is a 2000 mrx fee. At most 8 proposals can be active at once (this is a computational limit but is coincidentally how many proposals dash has on average each month)

It’s 51% of total Governors to pass. So, if there are 100, 51 of them need to vote yes. If 49 Governors vote yes and 51 Governors do not vote, the vote does not pass. There is a stricter voting requirement for budget voting, which requires 10% greater yes than no vote to pass.

Budgets can request continuous funding, i.e. 3 payments over 3 months instead of one payment up front but that can be rejected at anytime, so you could get 2 months and rejected for the 3rd if you’re not delivering as promised. You’re automatically passing each consecutive month so you don’t need to get a passing vote each time but you just need to not get a failing vote the ROI rate of the governors collateral is what is contributed to the budget each block (plus listing fees) so for the first 12 months this would be 25000*.3/12=600 000 mrx each month (which would be 180 000 000 in todays metrix) which would equate to ~$14 760 USD (which is a lot lower than dash) and is about $1750 per project on average. Any unused budget funds are burnt and removed from the supply.

A full technical guide to how the voting will work will be released with the new chain.

Housekeeping

Grudge Match Gaming

We did want to mention that on top of this GMG will be launching soon. With limited development time we have needed to focus on our core issues above first, but we do still see Grudge Match Gaming as a very important driver of volume. More Information on this will be released in the coming months.

My Staking Wallet

We know that there is great benefit in MyStakingWallet until the swap over, we are hoping that the community will continue to support the service after the swap takes place. There is less requirement to have a server on 24/7, however a lot of our users are supporting the team. We will continue to support this service for as long as there is demand.

My Node Pool

Our MyNodePool service has become a very labor intensive service which takes a lot of time from other development. The solution to saving time with MyNodePool and providing the service that users deserve is to automate a lot of its functions. With automation comes risk, and from our experience with other pools, the risk outweighs the benefit for users. The new reward system for Metrix also doesn’t require pools to support small holders. Also there is a major shift away from masternode / live staking coins in the past year or so. For these reasons we will at some point in the future close the pool service. We will announce it with plenty of notice for people to withdraw, and it will be after the MRX swap has taken place (to help facilitate an easy swap).