What is Gridcoin?

Gridcoin is a POS-based cryptocurrency that rewards users for participating on the BOINC network. Gridcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority - managing transactions, issuing money and contributing to scientific research are carried out collectively by the network.

For Gridcoin binaries, as well as more information, see https://gridcoin.us/.

Building Gridcoin

These dependencies are required:

Library	Purpose	Description
libssl	Crypto	Random Number Generation, Elliptic Curve Cryptography
libboost	Utility	Library for threading, data structures, etc
libevent	Networking	OS independent asynchronous networking
miniupnpc	UPnP Support	Firewall-jumping support
libdb4.8	Berkeley DB	Wallet storage (only needed when wallet enabled)
qt	GUI	GUI toolkit (only needed when GUI enabled)
libqrencode	QR codes in GUI	Optional for generating QR codes (only needed when GUI enabled)

To build, run ./autogen.sh && ./configure && make. For more detailed and platform-specific instructions, see the doc folder.

Development process

Developers work in their own trees, then submit pull requests to the development branch when they think their feature or bug fix is ready.

The patch will be accepted if there is broad consensus that it is a good thing. Developers should expect to rework and resubmit patches if they don't match the project's coding conventions (see coding.txt) or are controversial.

The master branch is regularly built and tested, but is not guaranteed to be completely stable. Tags are regularly created to indicate new stable release versions of Gridcoin.

Feature branches are created when there are major new features being worked on by several people.

Branching strategy

Gridcoin uses four branches to ensure stability without slowing down the pace of the daily development activities - development, staging, master and hotfix.

The development branch is used for day-to-day activities. It is the most active branch and is where pull requests go by default. This branch may contain code which is not yet stable or ready for production, so it should only be executed on testnet to avoid disrupting fellow Gridcoiners.

When a decision has been made that the development branch should be moving towards a final release it is merged to staging where no new development takes place. This branch is purely to stabilize the code base and squash out bugs rained down from development. This is Gridcoin's beta testing phase.

Once the staging branch is stable and runs smoothly, it is merged to master, a tag is created, and a release is made available to the public.

When a bug is found in a production version and an update needs to be released quickly, the changes go into a hotfix branch for testing before being merged to master for release. This allows for production updates without having to merge straight to master if the staging branch is busy.