Development
General update
Following our announcement last week about three project initiatives, we wrapped up our previous commitments and reallocated our engineering team to staff the announced projects. You will see GitHub activity this week for our Platform project. MatchICO is currently developed in private repositories as these include BitClave’s private IP. These projects will go through refactoring and we will move the functionality that does not include BitClave’s private IP to public repositories.
MatchICO
This week we implemented many important features and fixed major bugs:
- Batch processing (processing of transactions in a group) that helped us to accelerate the distribution of token rewards. Do you remember that your rewards were in pending for a long time? Now we fixed it!
- Fixed the wallet verification process. The API of our wallet verification provider was broken and was causing a 500 error. We decided to design out the third party provider and implemented our own solution.
- Launched the referral program. Now everyone can earn 20 CATs if he refers a new investor with a wallet balance more than 1 ETH.
- There were cases where investors searched for offers but did not get any results. A common scenario for this case was when an investor had less funds on his wallet than what a business required as the minimal amount before extending the offer. We implemented a message box notifying investors of these situations. It is important to clarify that MatchICO is a platform facilitating a direct connection between ICO projects and ICO investors. It is the business who decides on the rules of the offer and the investor who decides on search criteria. The MatchICO search engine just follows the rules and matches ICO projects and ICO investors that have matching criterias.
Bitclave.com
We redesigned our landing page and are actively implementing the frontend.You will be able to see the new design shortly.
Platform
This week we focused on refining the requirements and scope for the 1st deliverable of the Platform project. A lot of work happened including product development like MatchICO (product) and Android BASE (early prototype) in private repositories and as part of technology evaluations in public repositories. We leveraged what we have learned during these phases and now we can define a better implementation plan for our Platform.
The scope for the 1st deliverable of the Platform has the following requirements and goals:
- Deliver the platform with clean, documented API that will be used internally in BitClave products and by our 3rd party partners
- Define an API and abstraction layer between DAPP and Platform layer
- This will allow us to adopt the best decentralized technologies that will be available in the future with minimal disruption to the application layer.
- API for the 1st phase shall cover the following use cases
- Registration
- Updates of personal information
- Authorization of access to personal data to a trusted entity
- Access to the personal information by an authorized parties
- Performance and economics of the deliverable shall be reasonable and be comparable to what is expected in the current centralized world
- To satisfy this requirements some of the capabilities will be implemented using centralized technologies
The main value of this deliverable is an API for internal and external use and access to the anonymized data that was collected in BitClave products. With this deliverable, BitClave in it s own products and any 3rd party in their products can start using this API and build DAPPs that use and contribute to BASE anonymized data store.
Events/meetings
We attended two conferences in Bay Area and several events this week
- Blockchain Protocol Analysis and Security Engineering 2018 at Stanford University — https://cyber.stanford.edu/bpase18
- This conference was very technical and academic as is expected from a conference held at Stanford. It was very encouraging to see hundreds of scientists talking about issues and solutions in blockchain space. You can see new research domains are being developed in academics around blockchain. Seeing this gives us more confidence that blockchain is here to stay. There are many issues with the current blockchain state but the best minds are working on finding solutions to these issues. There was a talk that had a direct relation to the issues that BitClave is attacking and it was about anonymity and linkability by Rebekah Mercer — Mobius. While a “user friendly” presentation is not available yet, here is the link to the research paper https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/881.pdf.
- Blockchain Technology Evolution in US and China — http://www.goblockchainconnect.com/
- One of the popular events in the Blockchain community with attendance of our partners ICON, QTUM and others. We met with several ICOs and continue to see a lot of interest for MatchICO as several more projects will be added to the mix.
- An evening with Jay Clayton — https://law.stanford.edu/event/evening-jay-clayton/
- An interesting panel at Stanford with the SEC head. It was very interesting to listen to Mr. Clayton, who presented his views not just on the state of ICOs,, but the overall view of the global investment climate. As the US government continues to study the phenomena of Blockchain, we see the role of technology companies continuing the path of innovation while making sure they closely follow any new legal developments and regulations.
Marketing
- We continue our search for Head of Marketing https://angel.co/bitclave/jobs/264172-head-of-marketing. We have made several hires in the marketing team. If you are interested in joining us, please drop us a line.
Community
Here we have collected the top questions we have received from our community this week
- Why there is no GitHub activity.
Answer: To add more details to the answer given above on this topic. BitClave plays two roles in building the BASE ecosystem. The 1st role is building the open platform to enable 3rd party development and the 2nd role is building Products and Services on top of that platform. A lot of activity happened in building products in BitClave’s 2nd role, but this activity was happening in private repositories on GitHub as it included BitClave’s private IP. The reason we have chosen to focus on products and prototypes 1st (our 2nd role) is to better experience the need of the 3rd parties and to better define the requirements for the platform (our 1st role). We kicked off the Platform project and you will see more and more activity in this direction as we ramp up. - Why there are so little updates to the community and requests to improve marketing efforts
Answer: We hear your feedback. We took actions to improve in this area. As you can already see, we had 3 AMA sessions, we started to publish a weekly newsletter and we are in final stages of hiring and extending our marketing team. - Why can I see CAT balance on my Bitclave account if I already withdrew tokens
Answer: What you see on your BitCalve dashboard right now is the information related to the event of Token Sale. It shows the contribution you made and the tokens you got. This dashboard is NOT a generic CAT wallet at this stage - Where can I find my tokens after I bought them on your site
Answer: You refer to a feature where you can buy / sell CAT. This feature is powered by Bancor. It allows you to buy / sell CAT tokens without any need to register on exchanges or even Bancor. All you need is a MetaMask wallet. All the transactions will happen on the MetaMask wallet. Metamask is a mandatory requirement to use this feature. - How many tokens should I withdraw
Answer: This is completely up to you. You can keep your tokens with BitClave or move to your own Ethereum address. - Where can I buy these tokens?
Answer: You can buy the tokens on exchanges, on BitClave site using the Bancor-powered wallet or as a business you can buy tokens in MatchICO. - What GAS to set up
Answer: GAS price fluctuates a LOT in Ethereum network based on the load on Ethereum at the time of transaction. We recommend checking https://ethgasstation.info/ for the average GAS price before you issue your transaction. - MatchICO: Do we really need to have 0.5 ETH in the wallet constantly to get offers?
Answer: Businesses decide on the criteria for their offers and what rewards they are willing to pay for using an investor’s personal information in extending the offer. Businesses might decide they are not interested in extending offers to potential investors that have less than 0.5 ETH on their ETH wallets.
