Sit Rep on Dawn - What's going on?

Well, I think the fans need to know, because things are in a bit of a hiatus at the moment. We are not exactly sure of the details, but @faddat is currently indisposed, and isn't participating due to other parties considering him to be legitimate ransom for whatever their demands are. I don't think it's a matter of life and death, just procedure and money. We will be helping him out of his mess, if we can. But this does not stop development.

I am building the core components of Dawn, the Nexus, an account registry and modern chat system - that can become the backend of any number of collaborative editing systems. I am still in the midst of becoming familiar with the systems I am integrating this with, Dgraph database and Tendermint.

Jake (@faddat) was building, and will be building, if he can, the Agora routing system, which is how we propose to monetise delivery of content without forcing copyright on people.

I made a new friend, by chance, an american Java coder by the name of Mike. He happens to be unavailable to us currently because he is building a peer to peer marketplace (classifieds) system. When he is done making that client happy and getting his pay so he can keep paying rent, he will be building the same kind of system for Dawn, as he already just built. Not just that, but largely he can stick to his native Java to implement it. Based on Tendermint (which Cosmos is using), we can create blockchain applications in any language, and, at least, the platforms already developed for ABCI (tendermint's app framework) already can be coded with java, javascript, go, python, ruby, probably even C, C++, and anything else like this.

With Nexus, Agora and a marketplace application ready to all talk Dawn, we will be negotiating with the potential population of Validators who will certify the system, and building up a userbase.

We just are not ready yet to really release anything more than this, because key team members are not yet on board. I am going to continue to develop Nexus as I can, but right at the moment, I am getting my residency permission sorted out, and my workflow and necessaries organised for doing this.

update

I have now begun the process of getting a work visa for staying here in Novi Sad, and once we land a contract to build something specific that builds on Dawn, we will be gathering @ebryans, @faddat and @grammyleung, the fundseeker, chief software engineer, and hardware specialist, with me as chief architect, and we will be hiring probably 3 or 4 Serbian programmers to deal with the parts that me and @faddat are not so good at (node.js/react interfaces, probably someone really good with gRPC and Go, and maybe a graphic designer to flesh out the work of the interface developer), and probably my java coder friend Mike will be building a marketplace application as the first thing beyond the content delivery monetisation.

We will most likely rent a large villa not too far out of Novi Sad, somewhere in Vojvodina (northern Serbia), and be doing a 2 month incubation process to get everything to beta stage.