Security & Trust
The start to 2019 has been an interesting time in the world of cryptocurrency. There has been issues with exchanges being hacked and shut down which resulted in the loss of millions of dollars worth of crypto. There are still “scams” being promoted on social media sites promising to double returns on crypto.
What can we learn from this? Well, clearly some of these issues are security related. Whether it is flawed code or poor business decision making, users have not always been protected. Security should be in the forefront when developing and managing Ethereum DApps. Business leaders and developers can only build solid infrastructure and trust with users if there are appropriate security measures in place. That may mean testing and re-testing products over and over until there are no flaws. Or, it may mean delaying the release of new applications.
Theoretically, transactions that occur on the blockchain should be secure as they are immutable. Ledgers that cannot be edited must provide users with trust. How do we measure, evaluate and rely on this when we have cases where millions of dollars are being compromised, stolen, or lost? Even in the ideal case, we expect people to adopt this “trustless” technology, but there still needs to be trust in the development of the products being used. Users have to trust that there are no bugs, flaws, or compromises in the software.
At BlockCAT, we are committed to creating DApps for everyone. As you know, we’ve partnered with an number of real world businesses with little knowledge of blockchain technology. Together, we continue to discuss ways that this technology can serve these businesses and their missions.
According to Forbes, last year — fifty of the world’s leading companies invested in or began exploring blockchain technology. Even with trust and security concerns, it is promising that these real world businesses recognize that blockchain truly has something to offer.
Roadmap
We have received requests to update our roadmap to reflect the progress of the development of our DApps — this is in progress. One thing that we have learned since starting out is how unpredictable everything is within the “world of cryptocurrency”. We can tell you that we are getting Rewards ready for launch, but we likely won’t announce a release date. We have an expectation to provide a DApp that is secure, reliable and most importantly received well by the marketplace — not to release a DApp on a specified date. For the sake of our customer’s security, we cannot afford to release a DApp with bugs; for the sake of our business, we need to be certain we’ve reached the addressable market. All of this needs to be sorted out beforehand, and if that means delaying the release of a product by a week or a month to await appropriate opportunity or resolve uncertainties, we’re going to do what is best for the product and get it right. Some community members may perceive this as being ambiguous or misleading, but we can assure you that our number one priority is the security of our customers.
We continue working on the design of the ERC token creator — we have expanded a bit of the feature set and user understanding to ensure a smooth user experience for the class of users we hope to reach. Our work with partners has expanded the interest in using fungible tokens to represent supply constrained items or uniquely identified inventory; our internal discussions with regard to partner needs continues to focus heavily on viable staking models as a unique angle for blockchain and specifically valuable token use in real world businesses.
