Karma Development Plan

Hello, dear friends!

Lots of people asking us to provide some details on our dev plans.
Okay, let's make it!

Here's our task list for 2018 Q1:

Move all personal data to the middleware database

After a long time of legal consultations we've decided to move ALL personal data from public blockchain to middleware database. Due to the regulations we have to change our current architecture to the following:

• Use blockchain only for transaction ledger. Transaction types: wallet creation, token transfer, voting, signing a message, loan deals updates. This info can be viewed in public blockchain explorer.
• All personal data (email, phone number, passport, bank account etc.) and all heavy data (photos) will be moved to the middleware. Blockchain will only store the hash of that data. So, everybody could verify if the data is correct (if he knows, for example, the passport number of a user and wants to check if it's real).

This update will provide us some wonderful opportunities:

1. User data will be visible only to the data owner.
2. We will store personal data depending on local legal environment. In most countries key points are: high security level of storage, plus, local server allocation for every country's residents.
3. Our blockchain will be more lightweighted and fast. Yes, our current blockchain version allows up to 100 000 transactions per second, but we should consider how to handle millions of users and billions of transactions. The less will be the blockchain weight, the easier it will be to run a node, synchronize blocks and perform transactions.

Turn on the loan feature at the mainnet

The loan feature was delivered on testnet (https://testnet-app.karma.red) in December 2017. But we've decided to hide that feature on mainnet due the huge amount of support work. Because we've saw hundreds of emails from the people about losing the password or sending money to the wrong address. That's why we've decided to turn on the features step-by-step, and let the community slowly adopt new functionality.

We will also update the loan application form, to make it more closer to the borrowers' and lenders' demands.

Turn on the BTC/ETH in-out gateways at the mainnet

Same as loans feature: both gateways were delivered on testnet in December 2017. But we deliberately blocked the BTC/ETH deposit-withdraw because we are worried about the current level of attention and security checking in our community.

Seems, we also got to update the UI to lower the probability of losing the password or sending money to the wrong address. We should take care of the people, not blame them not being cyber-security geeks :)

Alpha-version of deal commission algorithm

As written in Karma white paper, we will deliver and constantly update the mechanism of commission distribution between all loan deals participants (sales, insurance agency, scoring agency etc.).

In 2018 Q1 we will deliver separate commission distribution module and basic API for connection with other apps.

Alpha-version of Karma reputation calculation algorithm

Karma reputation is the core value of our Economy of Trust. That's why we will deliver the first separate reputation calculation module and basic API for the external apps in 2018 Q1.

Salesman social role (referral program)

There's a lot of social roles described in Karma white paper. We've already delivered borrower and lender role. Salesman will be next, because we need to grow our community.

New block explorer version

Thanks to Jesta: he have launched the Karma block explorer in December. We've collected a lot of messages from our community and now working on new version of block explorer with some new useful features:

• Voting page like https://cryptofresh.com/ballots. That feature allow us to upgrade our project governance from Telegram chats to the blockchain voting of the token holders. Let's build a transparent and fair governance.
• Transactions/blocks unique URL. Everybody will be able to send a link to the transaction and easily check the token transfer status.
• Several UI updates.

Currency exchange oracles

The nature of blockchain leads us to create oracle mechanisms for connections with outer world (read more here). First Karma oracles will work on providing up-to-date currency exchange rates. The rates will be used for:

• Calculating loan/collateral ratio when starting a new loan inquiry.
• Updating the loan/collateral ratio to check if there's a margin call event to be triggered. For example, somebody lent 2000 USD considering 1 BTC as a collateral. While 1 BTC = 11 000 USD investor is safe. But if 1 BTC suddenly drops to 2500 USD, thing are becoming scary for the lender. That's why we need a margin call algorithm to unlock and sell the collateral if it's value has fallen too fast.

The exchange rates will be provided by the delegates. By the way, we already have 40 witnesses and 15 active delegates, spreaded all over the world.

Several UI updates to increase usability

Thanks a lot to our community for helping us get better!
Almost all of improvements came from Telegram.
Special thanks to Evgeniy Ovcharenko :)

Establish continuous integration process

JIRA bug tracker, sprint planning, GIT integration , dev/stage/prod environments for blockchain/middleware/front, backups, unit testing etc.

Perform the third-party security audit

Security is the core value when we talk about finance. That’s why we will perform the third-party security audits on a regular basis. We have 2 different partners to complete the task. But, if somebody knows experienced security team — please, let us know.

Also we have a bug bounty (already paid some in January, thanks for the white hackers). So, if you’re good at security testing — feel free to test our software and report the bugs to hello@karma.red.

Cheers
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