"Hi everyone, good time for another update 
Asian tour postponed till February or March due to cancellation of Proof-of-Value conference (and also our partners in shanghai pulled out of joint meetups, it seems now it is not good time to do events in Shanghai).
Spent some time over the weekend to read about popular PoW coins. I wasn’t impressed at all! Some are planning or have done recently hard-forks to change monetary policy, PoW function or even to replace PoW with some other consensus. How long-term investors can trust them? Hardforks could be done only to fix critical security vulnerabilities not to please wishful thinking of devs not done their homework before the launch properly.
Please note that Ergo is for long-term HODLing, thus there’s commitment (clearly formulated in the whitepaper) to avoid hardforks.
There’s also need to make Ergo more friendly to long-term usage by introducing better tutorials, lighter clients and applications (to make valuable things with the digital gold, such as financial apps, derivative instruments, mixing etc), and that’s we’re are working on. More details below.
There’s also new and good introduction to Ergo, please check and distribute: What is ERGO and Autolykos? (ERGO) - The Crypto Associate
Trading
Our exchange guys are now targeting bigger exchanges, and talks are not going fast for this case. So no concrete news to announce at the moment, but there’s progress here.
HODLing
For helping users running fullnodes, we’re going to publish new tutorials in coming days. It is much easier to run a node now that few months ago, but there are no new tutorials on that at the moment. Also, we’ll explain soon how to run a lighter node which is not holding UTXO set but still have full-node security guarantees (based on Improving Authenticated Dynamic Dictionaries, with Applications to Cryptocurrencies).
BUIDLing
With initial applications done in September-October (Ergo Notary, Ergo Crowdfunding CLI, Ergo Oracle) it became obvious that better support for custom tracking rules could help
external applications a lot. Version 3.2.0 implementing EIP-1 (https://github.com/ergoplatform/eips/blob/master/eip-0001.md) is about that. It is conceptually done, it requires just more testing, polishing and documentation.
A tutorial is coming on Ergo AppKit (GitHub - ergoplatform/ergo-appkit: Appkit: A Library for Java/Scala/Kotlin Development of Ergo Applications).
More
3.1.4 version is finalized and merged: https://github.com/ergoplatform/ergo/pull/980 . The release will be done tomorrow. This version is not big about new functionality per se but is a good preparation for 3.2.0 internally.
Collateralized and semi-decentralized pool is mostly ready, as reported by its devs, private testing is to be started within few days."
Update from Alex Chepurnoy