Happy October! We hope its full of spooky, fun times.
Before we jump into the good stuff we wanted to briefly go over our social posting schedule. As some of you may have figured out by now, we always try to give you a blogpost, a product update, a TokenTimes episode, and this newsletter once a month. It isn’t always clear what order it comes in — so from now on you can expect the following:
- Week 1: Product Roadmap Update + accompanying blogpost
- Week 2: Blogpost (topic will vary)
- Week 3: Monthly Newsletter
- Week 4: TokenTimes
Now, back to your regularly scheduled newsletter!
Updates from the Tech Team
Testing AML & KYC
This month the team has started work on testing and implementing our KYC (Know your Customer) and AML (Anti Money Laundering) processes. As we mentioned in the blogpost ‘What does Soon™ mean?’ this is essential for us to both sign with and work with the card issuer. For us to put cards in hands, we have to demonstrate we’ve got a rigorous approach in place.
Both our commercial and tech teams have been involved in designing and formulating the processes, which involve working with a number of third parties with expertise in these areas. Over the last month agreements have been signed, and our tech team have been working with partners’ APIs to implement and test the processes.
Alpha Testing: An update on the delay
Last month, we asked you to register interest in alpha testing. We recognise that October has come around and we haven’t yet invited the next batch, and many of you are asking why. Broadly speaking, we’ve encountered 3 challenges and wanted to explain a little about what they are, and what we’ve learnt from this process.
- Rocket ship vs webapp development:
It’s commonly accepted in development that you build an MVP and get it into peoples’ hands as quickly as you can. This means you can more effectively user test and also identify bugs rather than it all being done in-house. If problems are identified, they can be fixed as you go along. This (obviously!) can’t apply to smart contract development. It’s more akin to Nasa building and launching a spaceship — they need to have absolute confidence in what they are putting out.
- Tools to test
How do we get this confidence? We will rely on external auditors — as others do — and we also lean on our own expertise. We have a great team, who over the last month have got together for a couple of days and worked in sub-teams to interrogate the code and identify bugs. We’ve also (spoiler alert) been working on our own tools for code coverage painting that we plan to open-source for the wider community so that we can all benefit.
- Estimating timelines
All of this has meant we’ve got our timelines wrong. It’s hard generally to estimate timelines, and given how new this type of development is, it’s even tougher.
Mischa will be writing in much more detail about this in an upcoming blogpost. The good news is that we’re learning! And we’re much closer to moving to external alpha testing (think weeks not months) so if you are interested — please sign up here.
DevCon Prague
Some of the TokenTeam will be attending DevCon Prague at the end of this month, if you happen to see any of us, please say hi — we would love to meet you!
Office Happenings
We had our summer TokenTeam party this past month and we decided to have a friendly competition of Go-Karting! Anthony (Product Manager) came out victorious with our CEO Mel coming in at a close second!
Susanna, our Head of HR, celebrated her birthday on 13th October, Mel and Alex also celebrated their birthdays too! Lots of birthdays!!
In Case You Missed It!
There are lots of things to catch up on if you weren’t around this month!
We let you guys know why we use the term ‘Soon™’ so much and what it actually means. If you are curious you can check it out here.
The Founders, Mel and David hosted a Reddit AMA on October 9th! You can read the original thread here.
Our Director of Risk and Compliance, Ben, took a deep dive into the relationship between Crypto and Regulations and why we are choosing to go this route ourselves. Check out the article here.
We made an important post about the Short Address Attacks affecting users using older versions of Gnosis and Parity multi-sig wallets. If you hold TKN in either of these multi-sig wallets, please read the article and follow the instructions to get in touch!
See you next month!
