Themelio has four phases of development.
Our first step was to launch a public alphanet by the end of 2020. This gives us a proof-of-concept to tinker with that nevertheless has a degree of public participation. At this point, development is highly "agile" and prioritizes flexibility over stability.
In 2021, we launched a public betanet. This is a fully peer-to-peer blockchain network with a consistent, brand-new history, albeit with periodic hard forks and centralized governance. The betanet lets us experiment with tweaking and optimizing the protocol for real mass usage as well as gain wider usage in "serious" applications. In the betanet, history consistency is guaranteed, while consensus is gradually decentralized. Consensus-critical protocol updates ("hard forks") will happen, though with decreasing frequency.
Later into the betanet period, we will also launch token bridge contracts between Themelio and Ethereum. These contracts will allow Themelio tokens like the mel and sym to be traded in the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem as ERC-20 tokens, furthering the potential of financial instruments based on an endogenous stablecoin. This will also allow our main cryptocurrency, the mel, to start trading on major decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges, such as Uniswap.
Finally, our stable release is planned for some time in 2023-2024. This will permanently freeze the protocol specification, permitting no consensus-critical updates unless to fix critical vulnerabilities. The betanet will shut down, with its history being entirely inherited.
Let's look at a timeline of our work related to Themelio.