Hello, hope you are well!

Thank you for asking about the development, it’s going well!

I actually have recently completed all development, and documentation is also finished. I have focused on writing more clear PHP code and more clear and simple English text at the same time. Hopefully the plugin and its features will be more accessible and less obscure, thanks to the improved documentation. I haven’t yet started improving the website texts but I plan to do this next.

I still have quite a few tickets in my backlog, but it’s all integration testing tickets. I’m trying to anticipate as many problems as possible before the release. I had high hopes of improving correctness with better unit test coverage. But I am quickly gaining more practical experience on this. Contrary to what they teach you in university, unit tests are not all that useful, at least compared to integration tests. If you know how to code defensively, defects are rarely due to errors in the system, usually defects arise at the interface between systems (WordPress API, other plugins, themes, web browser, web server limitations, database peculiarities, etc).

After every major software release, there’s an avalanche of defects that will surface, once more people test on different environments with other themes and plugins. I am trying to mitigate that effort and make the transition smooth for all of us, by formulating a rational release plan.

So for now, I continue testing and preparing the necessary website changes for a few more weeks, then I’ll upload an RC1 version on the dashed-slug website. Then people can test again, likely leading to more Release Candidates. When a release candidate looks stable enough, I’ll upload it to wordpress.org and focus on the complaints that users will inevitably have.

Once support requests die down (sometime in the summer, hopefully right in the middle of the bear market), I will focus on more improvements and will resume advertising and promotion campaigns.

I know I said earlier that I would put my focus on ERC-20, and it might still make sense to do so. My gut feeling is that Eth2 will come out and scale and will displace all the “ethereum killers”. But with the recent Luna fiasco and upcoming regulation, interest in tokens will inevitably deflate somewhat. I believe Bitcoin emerges again as the king of crypto, and maybe I should focus first on interconnection with the Lightning Network before anything else.

On the app side, I have ideas about a paywall extension. This would be similar to the *Tip the Author* extension: it would let you see a page or article only after you pay for it. It should be a simple extension to develop, but with many commercial applications.

I realize that this transition has taken way too long, much longer than expected, and that I have become less responsive to feature requests. But as I work on this project, I am evolving my thinking in terms of what a business is, how to provide a good quality product, and the economics of it all. I’m now trying to take things slow and focus on quality and correctness. Let’s see how it goes.

I know some of you are anxious to see wallets6, I have hyped it a lot lately, because I am excited with it as well.

As always, it will be ready “soon”™ 🙂

with regards