You may be wondering why you've never heard of Rise, or maybe you heard about it, but forgot about it. Given the project's tumultuous history since it’s ICO, and non-existent marketing in 2017, that's understandable. It’s time to check in…...
I’ll outline my understanding of the project's vision and a number of details I've found relevant in my assessment. Seriously, it’s a project worth looking into.
The Rise Vision
Rise is building a development platform for decentralized distributed applications, smart contracts, and side-chain / token asset creation. Rise plans to increase the accessibility of the platform to developers by offering Software Development Kits, which support multiple programming languages: JavaScript, Python, C#, Ruby, and JAVA. Eventually, they plan to offer an interface with drag-and-drop building tools. (Think WordPress for blockchain development).
In addition to the development platform, Rise offers an incubator service for developers to help create blockchain projects. It's not easy to develop a new blockchain project as the talent pool is limited, but Rise plans to offer their expertise, advice, and funding to help.
As an additional benefit, 20% of all newly-issued incubator project tokens will be allocated to $RISE holders. At present, the Rise team has released notice of two incubator projects underway; Interlet – an Airbnb competitor, and Chipz - tokens for an online casino.
In order for projects built on the Rise platform to be used by the general public in significant numbers (think millions of users), they'll need a "home". In the long-term, Rise plans to build a mobile application store (like the Google Play Store) for Rise Apps.
Applications with in-app transactions or fees, will likely use $RISE as the native currency. Rise will need to integrate fiat gateways, likely with a platform such as Waves, for your average user to conduct transactions.
If it's easy to develop and deploy applications, and easy for users to access and use those applications, $RISE holders should stand to benefit immensely.
This isn't an overnight project, but I look forward to watching their vision develop over the next few years.
Team
The team is currently led by Cormac Lucking (aka Alty), the founder of Cloakcoin and previous Project Manger of Mintcoin, Steven Remington (aka Scifi.rem), and Frank Thijssen (aka McVenture).
Details on the Rise team can be found here: Rise Team
ICO
Rise originally announced their ICO on Bitcointalk in April 2016. The ICO ran from May 10th, 2016 to June 24th, 2016, which raised 1,700 BTC from over 6,000 participants worldwide with an ICO price of 2061 satoshi (or 1649 satoshi if you participated in the first week with the 20% bonus).
The total supply at the time of the ICO was 100 million coins of which 88 million were distributed to ICO participants.
The remaining 12 million coins were split with 9 million coins held by the development team, and the remaining 3 million coins reserved for bounties and campaigns (translators, twitter, dApp builders, etc.).
RISE was initially listed on the Bittrex exchange for trading on June 24th, 2016, the same day the ICO closed.
Development
Initial RISE development was outsourced to Don't Panic Consulting Inc. out of Lewiston, Maine, during 2016.
However, development progress during the year was significantly slower than hoped for and the community began to lose confidence in the project.
That loss of confidence was also shared by both Cormac and Steven. In February 2017, Rise announced Don't Panic Consulting Inc. Inc. was no longer working on development of the project, and Cormac and Steven were taking over.
And then panic ensued....
The Rise community completely lost confidence with the project, with RISE trading as low as 160 satoshi in the days following the announcement. There was not enough development completed, and too much uncertainty around its future.
However, the remaining development team remained committed. Cormac and Steven still maintained full control of the Rise development fund, but they had their work cut out for them.
From the beginning, the Rise codebase was a Lisk clone, primarily due to how it was designed to run Smart Contracts, dApps, and offered ubiquitous programming languages from the start.
After the development team transitioned in February/March, the remaining Rise team decided to update the codebase from Lisk to Ark (which was a modified codebase of Lisk anyway) in the spring.
The team felt Ark was a more advanced and suitable codebase for them to expand upon. However, Rise needed dApp functionality and a web-wallet, which Ark had removed from the code. The team eventually decided to create a hybrid code with these features coming from Shift.
In order to combine the code, the team contracted Jan from Shift to help, given his expertise.
Once the new codebase was complete, a 1:1 coin swap to the new mainnet network was necessary. The swap was scheduled to run from June 21, 2017 to July 19, 2017 at the Bittrex exchange.
The coin swap completed successfully, with a total initial new-coin supply of 110 million. In the following weeks, coins have slowly moved off of the Bittrex exchange into both new web-based and desktop wallets created for the new mainnet.
This is significant progress over a relatively short timeframe, especially given what had been completed in 2016.
With the mainnet swap complete, new nodes could be set up and begin securing the network to participate in the forging process.
One highlight to make is the development team primarily works within private repositories on Github, so don't expect to see frequent commits on the project. If that turns you off, all I can suggest is wait for them to make code publicly available and you can make your assessment then.
RISE Delegated Proof of Stake and Forging
RISE runs a Delegated Proof of Stake network, maintained by 101 Delegates, which are elected by the Rise community.
Community members cast votes using either the web-based Rise Wallet or one of the desktop wallets.
Holding $RISE on an exchange prevents you from voting or participating in the forging process.
Each wallet can only cast 1 delegate vote. The weight of each wallet’s vote is proportional to the amount of $RISE it contains. Elected active delegates earn additional $RISE rewards for running nodes that secure the network and confirm transactions on the blockchain.
New blocks are created every 30 seconds, with a full round taking 50 minutes, 30 seconds (101 delegates, each processing a block during that time).
When delegates confirm a new block, they forge new $RISE with the following inflation schedule, which began on July 19, 2017:
Year 1: 15 $RISE per block (14.33% inflation)
Total Coins: 125,768,000Year 2: 12 $RISE per block (10.03% inflation)
Total Coins: 138,382,400Year 3: 9 $RISE per block (6.84% inflation)
Total Coins: 147,843,200Year 4: 6 $RISE per block (4.27% inflation)
Total Coins: 154,150,400Year 5: 3 $RISE per block (2.05% inflation)
Total Coins: 157,304,000Year 6+: 1 $RISE per block forever.
In addition, delegates collect a fee of 0.1 $RISE for each confirmed transaction.
Each active delegates that remains in the top 101 list, should expect to forge the following:
Year 1: 427.7 $RISE per day + transaction fees
Year 2: 342.2 $RISE per day + transaction fees
Year 3: 256.6 $RISE per day + transaction fees
Year 4: 171.1 $RISE per day + transaction fees
Year 5: 85.5 $RISE per day + transaction fees
Year 6+: 28.5 $RISE per day + transaction fees
Delegate List
Top 101 delegates by vote weight
If you’re lucky enough to run your own node and own enough $RISE to vote yourself into the top 101 delegates, then you’ll receive 100% of all forging rewards. If you’re like most people, you’ll probably need to find someone to vote for. That’s where voting pools come in.
Delegate Voting Pools
Delegate pools share a percentage of forged $RISE with their voters, ranging anywhere up to 100%.
When you vote for a delegate pool, you'll share in whatever percentage $RISE you own in relation to the total RISE votes in that pool.
For example, in the first year:
If a pool shares 90% forging rewards, they’ll share ~385 $RISE with their voters (427.7 $RISE forged * 90%).
If the pool has votes totaling 500,000 $RISE, and you’re voting for the pool with a wallet that holds 10,000, you'd receive 2% (10,000 / 500,000 = 2%) of the 385 $RISE, or ~7.7 per day, 234 per month, or 2,810 per year.
Get $RISE
$RISE can be obtained from the Bittrex exchange.
Wallets
Rise provides both web-based and desktop wallets. Both wallets are secure, and sign transactions on the client-side, so use the wallet that is more appropriate for you.
Desktop wallet installation guide
Voting with Desktop Wallet
If you’ve got your desktop wallet set up and ready to go, it’s time to research delegate pool proposals.
I’d start with the delegate analysis page, and then head over to the official delegate proposals to confirm the details of who you plan to vote for.
Once everything checks out, follow these instructions to cast your vote with your desktop wallet:
Community
If you’d like to learn more, I’d suggest heading over to the official website and join the Slack channel.
The Slack community is probably one of the most entertaining and supportive communities I’ve been in.
One unique feature of the Rise Slack channel is Risebot. It’s an integrated Slack app connected to the Rise blockchain, which allows you to send, receive, and bet $RISE with other users directly within Slack.
Once you’re inside the Slack channel, open a direct message with Risebot by clicking on the + symbol on the left hand side of your Slack window, then type help. Risebot will provide you all of its commands and how to use them.
Additional Resources
Rise Website: https://rise.vision/
Rise Slack: http://slack.rise.vision
Rise team handles: @alty, @scifi.rem, @mcventure
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/risevisionteam
Rise Forum: http://forum.rise.vision/
Rise Twitter: https://twitter.com/RiseVisionTeam
Github: https://github.com/RiseVision