🎛 Manager Updates: Token exchange, unique tokens (NFTs), support for multiple languages & the addition of Trezor Wallet
Big improvements to our tool for managing Ethereum wallets
We have been really blown away by the response to Manager. We wanted to make it easier for everyone to see and send the tokens stored in their wallets.
Balance has shipped a few products that people like. Manager is the first product that people want.
🖲 Exchanging Tokens
I have always found exchanges incredibly hard to use. You have to understand order books, candle sticks, bids, asks, and spreads. There are a whole bunch of terms that have been cribbed from the closed source financial system that I think have no place in the token economy. We want to make it simpler for people to exchange one kind of value for another. Our integration with ShapeShift is our first step in this direction.
Thank you to all of the people in the Balance Forum for testing out this feature and giving us fantastic feedback. Our plan is to work with 0x Project, Airswap, Kyber Network, Oasis DEX, Uniswap & Dexy to find the best place for you to make your exchange.
This project involved an enormous amount of work from Pedro, Jin & Christian. We hope that this product will help us to start generating free cashflow so we can become a sustainable company and invest in the team.
📟 Open Source Hardware
We have a huge amount of respect for the way Trezor does business. They open source the vast majority of their design and engineering. They know that code and hardware designs are a small part of the process.
Creating, securing, distributing and supporting the Trezor hardware wallet costs money and people are willing to pay for the finished product. No one wants to make their own hardware wallet.
We also think Trezor’s approach to responsible disclosure is amazing.
We really appreciate the work StevenJNPearce did on this.
🐱 Crypto Kitties, Unique Tokens or “Non-Fungibles”
We love our kitties and really dislike the acronym NFT (Non-Fungible Token). Crypto-assets are already confusing enough. When I first heard the term fungible I thought the topic of conversation had moved to mushrooms. 🍄
We need to use clear language to help people grasp these concepts and acronyms seriously suck. We like the term collectible but that doesn’t work well for tokens that represent debt, insurance and options. We have decided to call them Unique Tokens. Although the community understands what NFTs are, our customers do not. People understand the concept of unique tokens a lot more easily. They grasp the underlying concept quickly and see how exciting these unique digital assets are.
A huge thank you to Palevoo and Igorline for their time and effort. We connected with them through Gitcoin and they have been great.
🗣 Managing Multiple Languages
The Balance Community has translated Manager into 🇪🇸 Spanish, 🇩🇪 German, 🇷🇺 Russian and 🇮🇹 Italian.
We have open issues on GitHub for 🇰🇷 Korean, 🇯🇵 Japanese, 🇵🇹 Portuguese, 🇵🇱 Polish, 🇧🇷 Brazilian and 🇨🇳 Mandarin. If you would like to help us translate the product into your native language, please get in touch.
💻 Contributors & Collaborators
Now that Balance Manager is open source, we welcome any open source contributions from the community. If you would like to collaborate with us and earn money, we would love to work with you. We are using Gitcoin to help us attract and reward remote collaborators. As Gitcoin matures and Balance starts to generate free cashflow we plan to deploy a lot of capital very quickly to help us design the best user interfaces for promising protocols. If you want to earn tokens, check out: https://gitcoin.co/profile/balance-io
🤓 How can I help if I am not an engineer?
The biggest non-technical things we need help with are in community buidling. The only moat in the world of open economic protocols is the community of people who believe in the code. We need to widen that moat as quickly as possible as people start to move their assets out of closed source banks and into open source ones.
If I forked Bitcoin and called it Burtoncoin, no one of you would support it. In the open source world the community has to be earned; it cannot be bought. That is what makes this movement so hard for traditional entrepreneurs, economists, bankers, politicians, investors & journalists to understand. Economic protocols are digital religions that people can believe in and benefit from.
A lot of the discussion goes on in our forum. We would love to welcome you to the Balance Community: https://spectrum.chat/balance
📈 Better Beta Data
Nearly all of the customer support requests we have received have fallen into two categories: feature requests and data issues. We are working incredibly hard on getting clean data out of Ethereum. It turns out that counting all of the tokens within an Ethereum wallet is not an easy task. We are partnering with The Graph Protocol to get an open interface for token balances specified and shipped as quickly as possible.
We also have lots of issues with the price data. This is a really hard problem to solve. Lots of tokens trading in lots of places makes it hard to find a good provider. Lots of people refer to CoinMarketCap.com but they have a bunch of issues. We hope that a combination of efforts in this space from projects like Messari and MakerDAO will help us improve our pricing information.
When we are happy with the quality of our data sources, Manager will finally lose the Beta tag and we will call it a 1.0.
😍 Thank you for all of your help
We really appreciate all of the people who are helping us buidl Balance. Your friendly tweets, feature ideas, thoughtful links and recommendations really motivate us.
Onwards 🖖
