TradeStuff Development Update — August 2019
Hello from the TradeStuff team!
Over the past year, we’ve been fairly quiet with our heads-down in development of our “Closed Alpha Release” product milestone, which included our minimum viable product features. Our goal for completing this milestone was to prove the concept of simple peer-to-peer barter on the blockchain, and test a working version of our mobile app user interface design.
We’ve been asked why we’ve been so quiet within the community, and why we have not allocated many resources towards community-building and creating product-hype. Despite having gained over a thousand web subscribers organically in the last year, early on we made the decision to focus on building our TradeStuff product until it could speak for itself. Given our limited resources, we chose to allocate all our attention towards building a great product under the premise that “If we build out our vision, they will come! No valuable product, no glory!”
Our mission is to build a disruptive, new medium of exchange that attracts users through value, not merely promises absent of a product. We want our product be the attractant of users in the likeness of Google’s early days.
TradeStuff Alpha? Check!
Today we’re happy to announce that we’ve successfully put a checkmark on this important milestone; an initial phase which took us on a journey of learning, iterating, and proving concepts that allowed us to make necessary adjustments and strengthen the confidence in our direction moving forward.
Web and Mobile User Interface
The Alpha version of our user interface consists of a web version and a mobile app built on React Native. We chose to keep this version “closed” to the public since we expect there will be some significant changes needed to accommodate our next phase, which includes multilateral advanced trading, staking, dispute resolution, and more.
Our Alpha technology stack is comprised of the following:
- Local single node running a dedicated EOSIO blockchain
- V1 of our P2P barter smart contract
- Local state history database with front end API
- Mobile & web app user interfaces
User Testing Demonstrates Great Potential
On August 2, 2019, we invited a handful of users to test this release in a closed group, demonstrating great potential and boosting our confidence, passion, and motivation for building out our vision! In addition, we were able to gather a lot of valuable feedback to help shape the direction of our future product.
Check out the video:
While including only basic bilateral offers and trades, we were able to successfully prove the concept of blockchain-based, systematic non-verbal trade negotiations and trade confirmations, all occurring on-chain. Further, we validated our user interface design for sending and receiving trade negotiations and receiving confirmations of accepted trades.
Other Notable Achievements
As part of this initial development phase, we’ve also made many important developments and decisions, including the decision to launch a dedicated blockchain to power our application’s smart contract as an alternative to deploying on a public blockchain network sharing resources with other apps.
In this consideration, we evaluated many options, including deployment on the EOS Mainnet, sidechains, and second layer solutions; ultimately coming to the determination that having a purposed blockchain will suit our needs best, primarily due to the dedicated on-chain resources.
The STUFF Network Protocol
The STUFF Network is the blockchain-based protocol #BuiltOnEOSIO which hosts accounts, stuff details, utility token & staking, trade activity, dispute resolution and eventually a DAO for governance which will include worker proposals, etc.
Initially this chain will be operated by the TradeStuff team, with a roadmap towards decentralization to satisfy an ultimate goal of becoming fully decentralized. More details to come on that front.
We also look forward to seeing EOSIO’s vision of inter-blockchain communication come to fruition to facilitate interconnectivity between separately operated blockchain networks to allow us to expand data access across various networks for a “network effect.”
The STUFF Network’s Utility Token
Our STUFF utility token serves the above-mentioned utility within the protocol and application layer, and will be transferable between our dedicated blockchain and the EOS Mainnet through an intermediary solution.
We designed our distribution model to correlate token quantity with the expected rate of network adoption and growth to avoid fueling a speculative secondary market and prevent other associated problems with excessive token quantity. Our token model is configurable through governance and is designed to evolve with the needs of the network.
When Beta? — The Next Steps
Having reached this important milestone has allowed us to shift focus towards our Beta product launch, which we’ve targeted for Q4 of 2019. This next phase is our most exciting phase since we’ll be opening access to the US market and will include many of our most innovative features.
First off we want to thank the hundreds of people who signed up for our beta testing. We promise you will be among the first to get access to our Beta product upon completion. For those who have not signed up, you can still do so on our website https://tradestuff.com. Those who have, we sincerely thank you for your desire to take part in shaping this new disruptive medium of exchange.
We will give everyone who signed up to our beta an opportunity to participate in testing of large scale multilateral trading, and will be rewarding those who do with our STUFF utility token.
Our beta release will include market-ready features including:
- Multilateral trading P2P2P
- Collateral Staking for Security
- Dispute Resolution
- Optimizations to our Web App
In the meantime, if you have any questions or comments, please join our Telegram group https://t.me/tradestuff or via Twitter at https://twitter.com/TradeStuff_
