As the Etch team looks forward to 2019 — here’s a look back at some of the highlights of 2018.

The long awaited token issuance!

The year began with the successful disbursal of the Etch Supply Token. All thanks to James and his amazing hat! It was clear that gaining the confidence of our community was №1 priority for the year ahead and we had just the platform to do that…

The N.O.M.A.N. Meetups

Here’s a selection of those evenings:

Introducing the Etch Economy

John Sweeney explaining the core idea of Etch — building the Etch Economy.

When we turn static monthly payroll into a stream of wages we’re creating a new economy — The Etch Economy. …

“Did you hear that? This *Ethereum* will give us programmable money…. think of all the cool things we can do with that!”

But the guy sitting next to me at the London Bitcoin Expo back in January 2015 was only interested in the free Dogecoins that this crazy guy was throwing around.

Sigh!

I decided there and then that I was going to do my bit to make “programmable money” a reality.

When the Etch whitepaper was published nearly eighteen months ago we had a clear vision of the end goal — bring real-time wages to hard-working employees and introduce them to the Etch Economy (this is all the cool stuff you can do with money when it is programmable and flows like a stream directly from the employer). What we did not realise or appreciate at the time was to do this we had to come up with a solution to the scalability and security limitations of the blockchain first. …

Donut?

You wanna pay people in Donuts??

Yes, and no.

At ////Etch we are building an employee bonus platform that we see as a small step, but critical for companies to experiment with paying staff in crypto without jumping straight to payroll. If we can show them in the real world how this works, then paying the staff in real-time is the next logical steps. (but 1000x easier to explain to the FD/board at that stage)

Our platform will allow employers to assign bonuses to individual, team or company-wide. …

The Pier Protocol

////Pier is an open initiative to tackle one of the most significant and essential need of the cryptocurrency world — a decentralised stable token. Brought to the world through a collaboration between the Etch Foundation and AvalanChain, ////Pier aims to be a fully decentralised project administered by its community. We’re taking this approach because this challenge is too big for us to fix all alone, and the opportunities are so immense that we would like everyone to have the chance to benefit. And to be honest, we do not have all the answers. …

The №1 risk for Etch to fail is that as the CEO I will make bad choices in hiring the right people.

“Why №1?”

Well, the technology is there. We are simply bringing it out of the crypto world and into the real world. Customers? It is only three weeks post-ICO, and we already have more enquires than we can cope (hence the need to hire more people).

“But why not hire the conventional way like everybody else?”

I’ve hired many times over the years, and to be honest, I’ve always done a bad job of it. …

Dear Ethel: I have recently started a new job. I get paid at the end of the month. Is there a reason why my employer is paying me monthly and not weekly, or even daily?

Dear John: Every time a company pays its staff, they have to work out the tax and NI, and record this. Payslips is next, followed by the payment — by cheque, cash or direct to bank account.

Therefore, if they paid you weekly, they would need to do this 52 times per year.

Whereas if they pay monthly, they only have to do this 12 times per year. …

“I can pay your invoice direct to your bank account…” I said….

“No thanks.”

What do you mean, no thanks?

“I want a bloody check — I can cash that f****r in tomorrow.”

So cash really is king. But at a cost.

This labourer was willing to reduce his wages by 12% to get his “cash” from one of many high street vendors, what, three days sooner than waiting for the check to clear.

But his main reason to do this is he did not want that check to hit his bank account at any cost. …

My worst moment on a building site was the day I was lowered down on a rope to unblock a manhole. I will never forget the putrid smell of months of backlog of human waste that rushed out. Oh, the irony of wearing wellingtons that day.

Since then I’ve become a bit of an expert in the inner workings of good manhole design. I had a standoff with a groundsman contractor recently over my insistence of the use of an extra “45-degree bend” to ease the flow.

The conversation went like this: “So basically, you are telling me that in all the years of installing sewers that I’ve been f*** doing it wrong?” …