It’s been a while since we penned one of these updates and a lot has happened on planet Slips since we last wrote a piece which introduced the gorgeous Slips “testnet” wallet.
With no lengthy introductions, let’s get right into the meat of this update:
We have received funding from the Expanse Blockchain…
Having cash in the bank makes life easier. In the past few months we had to make decisions and weigh up the opportunity cost of every single action we took. If we spent a month coding, we were neglecting chasing funds or engaging our community. If we decide to set up a bounty system to promote the project and attract people to a potential ICO, we neglected the product and if it was the wrong decision, we’d eat into our valuable runway.
So essentially we had very little room for making mistakes or bad decisions and there was the ever impending scenario that we’d simply run out of money before we got our product shipped.
Kyle, the co-founder and lead creative director of Slips had mentioned Expanse in passing previously but we decided last month to approach them formally and request their assistance to help us bootstrap our project. Expanse is the first stable fork of Ethereum and they currently run a grant programme funding dApps on their platform.
We met up with Chris Franko (co-founder of the Expanse) and his team and there was an instant connection. We obviously impressed them because they agreed to pre-seed fund Slips and likewise we were equally enamoured by the fact that Expanse did not want to take control of our project or give us the arse end of an equity deal.
Chris had this to say about our project.
“Rarely do you see a team come to light that is as prepared to launch as the Slips team is. They came to us with the complete package — white paper, website, pitch deck — you name it. We congratulate Team Slips on receiving the grant, and we shall extend all the help they need to launch their robust solution that will offer value to e-sports enthusiasts as well as to the Expanse community.”
Along with Marcia Danzeisen of Expanse, he will serve as advisors to Slips going forward.
There is also a new sub-channel on the Expanse Discord for Slips where we discussed details of our application in more detail for anyone interested.
Work is under way on the Slips proof of concept…
One of the reasons we manage to convince Expanse that we would be a great project to fund was that we had already started work on our proof of concept.
Kyle has been away this past week on a much needed break which gave us a chance to get the final details for the funding wrapped up. Whilst the discussions were on-going in the past month, we had been busy formalising the specification for what we wanted to build in the proof of concept.
It is the first time we had a chance to revisit our Litepaper since April and it was time to see if our concept was still as sturdy as we had envisioned it to be. As is the nature of these things, sometimes you have to build, experiment and allow real users to play with the tech to uncover issues.
Nonetheless through a series of caffeine fuelled late night Discord discussions, we honed in on certain areas of the specification that we wanted to explore further and made some alterations to the original design. Whilst the techies battled the intricacies of the design, we were also simultaneously working on wireframes for the UI.
At this point, we split up, Kyle had a mandate to turn the wireframes into something jaw-droppingly beautiful whilst Husain got to work coding a less beautiful but functional shell of the application.
We are approaching development as a series of two weekly sprints. The first sprint is due to be completed on the 31st of July.
You can see some of our Sprint goals listed below (the soon-to-be-public Trello board will be a better live indicator of our progress). Our aim is to under promise and over deliver and we’re hoping with increased man power (see below) — we might exceed the reasonable milestones we’ve created so far.
If you are interested in following our progress; please either
- Join our Telegram group:
- Join our Discord server:
- Or join the Expanse Community on their Discord server:
We made our first hire…
Whilst this might not be a huge deal to anyone but Kyle and myself, we were incredibly proud to hire a contract front end developer to assist in our efforts to get the proof of concept built. This was the first hire we have made for Slips, not counting an ill-fated attempt to recruit a bounty campaign manager!
It also necessitated a major change in how we were implementing the front-end. Originally whilst we waited for word from Expanse, the plan was for us to do it all in-house and we’d plucked the VueJS front end framework. Other cryptocurrency projects such as the browser based blockchain Nimiq had made a similar decision.
Our new hire however is an expert at crafting user interfaces with ReactJS. Rather than force him to adapt to an unfamiliar stack, we decided to discard some of the code we had written already and allow him to re-implement in React.
We had to decide whether dependence on a contractor would outweigh the potential advantages of this decision… but it was a luxury to have such a decision and once we weighed up all the risks, we decided to go ahead, re-jig the team and press on. We have already caught up to where we were last week so the disruption was minimal.
It means we now have a specialist front end developer, a specialist UI/UX designer and someone to handle the back end development as well. A more saner workload for everyone I’m sure you’ll agree! :)
We had to cancel our airdrop and bounty campaign…
We decided based on the advice of seasoned blockchain professionals to launch both an airdrop and bounty campaign this year.
Our end goal was to build a community of eSports/gaming enthusiasts who would have a vested interest in the success of Slips. If we did an ICO down the road, we hoped our community would help promote and spread the word about Slips.
The results of the campaigns were incredibly disappointing. The amounts raised by ICOs have dwindled in 2018 as the space is flooded by “cash grab” projects, all employing the same tactics.
We spent a good portion of April trying to battle spammers and other malicious players who wanted to exploit the Slips bounty campaign. Whilst the airdrop resulted in a dubious collection of users flooding our Telegram channel. To add insult to the injury, they weren’t interested in participating but the bots and their “Hi” replies made the project look low rate and spammy.
They were also following referral links instead of the airdrop applications and thus only a few people actually joined the airdrop (we didn’t feel the need to make this obvious to them but changed the application to get people to manually engage us on Telegram).
Bearing in mind we have a small team, it didn’t seem like the very meagre results we were obtaining was worth the effort. We spoke to our active bounty campaign participants and allowed them to vote on what to do with the campaign. Most voted to pause the campaign.
We had to take things a step further and cancel the campaigns earlier this month. There was no huge outcry from the community but we expect some people to pick a bone with this decision as we get closer to launching Slips.
- We are most probably not going to launch an ICO to raise funds. So there is no token to airdrop in the first place. This was the main reason we cancelled the project.
- We do respect people who made an effort to promote Slips and have invited them to engage with us to find a suitable way to re-compensate them for their time.
Please join the Telegram channel if you have any thoughts on the matter.
There is other behind the scene news that we want to report on but we don’t want to tempt fate by announcing deals of any sort until the contracts are signed — but we do want to stress that there is more positive news to come on the Slips front for those who have arduously supported us these last few months.
We wanted to end this update with a nostalgic look back at our journey so we invite you to laugh/amuse yourself at the story board we concocted for a Slips promotional video earlier this year.
With no funding and meagre resources, we decided persuading some stalwarts of the industry to appear in a funny cartoon sketch might give us a shot in the arm. Despite hustling to the point where we had McAfee on the phone to discuss the video, we never managed to sign off on the concept and ended up concentrating our effort on building Slips instead!
But who knows what’s around the corner — we will be launching soon and John is going nowhere soon … r-right?
