Ivy Project Updates (November)

Updates from Ash, IvyPay update, AMA info and more…

Updates From Ivy President Ash Shilkin:

Hello to our community & token holders,

It’s been a busy first few weeks in the new role of President. We are making some positive progress in a number of areas.

During my initial AMA I spoke about exploring lower bank integration models from a technology perspective. I also spoke about the need to improve our business development efforts to attract more banks and financial institutions to partner with Ivy.

Ivy Network Lite

The Company is making progress with exploring a rescope of technology to deliver a lower integration model for banks, as a stepping stone towards the full Ivy Network. DxDigital came to Los Angeles last month to commence discussing a rescope. Since then we have been working together to identify a model which will still add more value to banks from a KYC / KYT point of view, get the token more in use than with IvyPay, but avoid the need to stake reserves within the financial institutions.

Subsequent to confirming the go-forward position, we plan to publish key delivery milestones as we work towards the development and roll-out of the lighter integration model.

The re-scoped technology plan is a key dependency to moving forward with business development in a meaningful way. Critically, if we are of the view that a lighter integration model will be an easier sell to banks and financial institutions, we need to be in a position to clearly articulate how it will work, including delivery timelines. Even the preparation of updated marketing materials is dependent on being able to clearly articulate how the lighter integration model works.

Testnet

I want to provide additional clarity around how we are defining the testnet. We currently have a functioning testnet environment for internal use and for our external technology partners to access and interact with. There are four environments within our testnet: 1. Developer, 2. Test, 3. Staging, 4. Demo.

We will refer to the above as our Internal Testnet. The next iteration of the testnet will be an environment to demonstrate our system to banks, financial institutions, and potential business partners. We will refer to this as our Public Facing Testnet. This Public Facing Testnet will be available in H1 2019. We will update our website and various other touchpoints to better define our testnets, and to update timing on when each will be available. We will also update this milestone in the next versioned update of our Whitepaper.

Business Development

We are actively recruiting a VP of Business Development. We are also speaking to some existing Ivy advisors about a more executive role in exploiting commercial opportunities, particularly partnerships with banks.

Both business development resourcing and confirmation of the technology rescope are planned to converge before the end of the year, so we are in a great position to hit the ground running with a better product offering, and improved sales capabilities first thing in the new year. You can see a full list of open roles at Ivy here: https://ivy.workable.com/

Regulatory White Paper

The regulatory white paper is still in development and scheduled for completion this quarter. The purpose of the regulatory white paper is to continue dialogue and engagement with the regulators, helping them to understand the value-add Ivy plays within the payments / regulatory landscape. Additionally the regulatory white paper is envisioned to be a powerful sales tools for banks and financial institutions, to clearly articulate the deficiencies of existing payment networks, and how Ivy fits into the landscape to add value.

We appreciate the community’s support for the Ivy Project, and we will continue to keep the market informed as we progress on this exciting journey.

Sincerely,

Ash Shilkin

IvyPay Beta update

On November 1st, we launched IvyPay in Beta to the community. We wanted to share with you a little bit about the process thus far:

What we built: IvyPay is a single page application website built on Next JS and hosted statically on Amazon S3 and distributed via cloud-front on all edge nodes. The backend is served by a Python Flask API gateway that is bundled together in a container with a Node JS websocket service that listens to the Ethereum blockchain on the Ivy contract for transactions. This container is then deployed on AWS elastic beanstalk and communicates with an AWS RDS database for storage. An AWS Lambda function is also utilized as a cron to run every 5 minutes to check for expired payouts.

We use the third party identity verification services of Green ID for KYC (know your customer) and AML (anti money-laundering) checks as compliant with AUSTRAC regulations. We also utilized Bitgo for managing our crypto wallets. We use exchanges within Australia to liquidate the crypto.

IvyPay so far: We had some delays with processing the transactions at the beginning due to working out the process of parsing the payments that have been exchanged to the finance team but have since fixed the process by having documentation and communication channels set up so we can make the process of transferring it to our customers much smoother.

Our partner HiveEx made the business decision to focus their energy on IvyPay and so have rolled their HiveSpend customer base into the IvyPay product. After the first week, we have around 60 users registered (inclusive of HiveSpend customers) with around 16 payments successfully processed.

The average transaction size is $148.55 with total volume paid at $2,376.78. BTC is the most commonly transacted coin followed by ETH. The vast majority of people are using Ivypay to pay out to bank accounts. Whilst these numbers are modest, we are excited to see this grow as we kick off a major marketing push to the Australian market the week of November 19th, this coupled with our much lower fees should help kick-start our customer base. Stay tuned for more!

Ivy in the News

PaymentsSource — Cryptocurrencies require a more transparent blockchain to fight laundering. https://www.paymentssource.com/opinion/cyrptocurrencies-require-a-more-transparent-blockchain-to-fight-laundering

ValueWalk — The Role of Blockchain in Traditional Banking https://www.valuewalk.com/2018/10/role-blockchain-traditional-financial-institutions/

Bitcoin Warrior — The Role of Blockchain in Traditional Banking https://bitcoinwarrior.net/2018/10/the-role-of-blockchain-in-traditional-banking-challenges-and-possibilities/

Drug Barons, Rogue States and Terror Groups Use Banks — Can Blockchain Stop Them? https://cointelegraph.com/news/drug-barons-rogue-states-and-terror-groups-use-banks-can-blockchain-stop-them

We were also in the print edition of the Credit Union Times — Why CU’s Need to Understand and Leverage Blockchain :

Upcoming AMA’s

We wanted to share with the community our planned AMA’s for the remainder of the year and early next year. We are planning on 1 per month, covering the following topics:

November — IvyPay (Ash Shilkin & Fred Schebesta)

December — Product Roadmap Update. (Mike Beck & Bob Murray)

January — 2018 Recap and 2019 Milestone & goal update (Ash Shilkin, Markie Bryant, James Caskey)

Exact dates and times will be released closer to the AMA’s with a minimum of 7 days notice to the community. Be sure to be following us on Social Media to ensure you get the updates.

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