Community Development
Over the last two weeks, we’ve been polling our community to see which networks and platforms they felt were the most influential for learning about new crypto/blockchain projects.
While we were excited to see that Reddit, Twitter and Telegram ranked high on everyone’s list, one of the most common answers actually ended up being Bitcointalk.org.
While we have had a thread live since our token sale, we haven’t exactly kept it as up-to-date as we probably could have.
However, knowing just how important this channel is to our community has bumped it back up to the top of our list.
Going forward, we’ll be giving Bitcointalk.org as much priority as the rest of our social channels; including images, branding, active engagement and updates on a regular basis.
Product Development
This week the dev team is coming up to completion on core frontend infrastructure. Details include:
+ Considerable data storage mechanism improvements: full structure for distributing smart contracts in the front end interface.+ Extensive validation, automation and testing work. Integration tests for all desired user behavior. We’re spending a lot of effort on getting these details right, because the stakes are high, and the security and reliability of the product depends on it.+ Further work on joi-json for our new validation platform, with all the appropriate tools for working with smart contracts: https://github.com/BlockCatIO/joi-json+ Further work towards users managing multiple contracts and arbitrarily many contracts.
Next week, we expect to be transitional — wrapping up these infrastructure changes and moving on to core user facing functionality for actively managing contracts.
Legal Priorities
We’ve been working closely with external legal counsel since the kick-off of our token sale to ensure our compliancy across the board.
Recently, we made the strategic decision to bring our lawyer on as a full-time employee at the company. We’re happy to announce that David Kemp has officially joined as an employee of BlockCAT.
“Wait — Isn’t it unusual for an early-stage tech startup to have a full-time lawyer working for the company?”
Well, yes. But, as cryptocurrency and blockchain enthusiasts know only too well, this isn’t your typical tech sector.
The short of it is that our legal requirements go far and beyond just the legality of smart contracts themselves and include a bevy of regulatory issues around our token sale, intellectual property, corporate structuring, and employment.
There’s very little written in the form of legislation and regulation in this area, so tasking a traditional law firm to guide us through these murky waters would be incredibly inefficient; and quite frankly, risky.
By bringing a lawyer onto the team, it not only allows us to tackle these meaty issues head on, but it also ensures our compliancy with both provincial and federal regulations.
As well, having full-time legal counsel allows us to participate in the discussion about developing regulations and legislation that will help the blockchain industry grow in a positive way. Look for us to be involved in advocacy organizations and to publish articles on legal issues faced by blockchain companies.
Ultimately, David will help ensure the longterm success of our company and we’re incredibly excited to have him on board.
🔗 Read more about David’s role at BlockCAT here
Radar Relay Announces Ledger Integration
While exchanges seems to be the hot topic of discussion of late, we actually have a quick update to share about Radar Relay — the exchange we listed on in Q4 of last year.
For those who aren’t familiar with Radar Relay, they’re an exchange that is essentially opening a whole new path towards the token economy by utilizing the 0xProtocol. Here’s a quick video that explains exactly what a Relayer is.
In addition to supporting MetaMask, Radar Relay recently announced that they will officially begin supporting Ledger hardware wallets.
This is a huge stride forward which will make their exchange even more secure and user friendly. We’re very excited to see the progress they make this year and highly recommend checking them out.
That’s all for this week! Be sure to join the conversation in our Discord channel, follow us on Twitter or subscribe to the /r/BlockCAT subreddit.
