Time yet again for another Blocktix Development Update! This is #7 of the bi-weekly update on everything Blocktix and this time we are very excited with the news we have to show. It’s that time where we are close to showing the world what we’ve been building over the past three months!
Besides all the testnet stuff, the new website and the general development on Blocktix we’ve also seen quite some growth in our community. Our public Discord channel grew 50% in this time and we now have over 600 people in our public chatroom. Twitter also grew with 500 followers and we broke the 3000 mark not too long ago. Welcome to everyone that has joined our community over the past two weeks.
New website
This week we officially released our new website. With our crowdfunding over and the listing on several major exchanges done we have chosen to move Blocktix.io from a crypto audience focused website to one for a more general public. We expect to do small updates on the website over the next few weeks to make it even more attractive to new users. One big part of the website is of course our e-mailing list to which people can subscribe. We’ll use this in the future to announce the going live of the production version of Blocktix.
Development Team
While we are getting closer to our MVP (Minimum Viable Product), or from here on out called Blocktix Alpha, we want to start making our first partnership announcements. First up is of course the development side of things, as that is the most important part of Blocktix at the moment. As all of you know Ryno ‘rynomster’ Mathee is our CTO and Lead Developer.
Since 2014 Ryno has been, besides developing in the cryptospace, working on building his own development company, Lunatech (Pty) LTD. With currently a team of seven, it’s one of the main reasons behind the quick progress we are currently making with Blocktix.
Another big reason is our partnership with Iterate. A development company with years of experience and many high-profile clients in the past. Companies like DreamWorks, Riot Games and Izea are amongst those that have apps and systems developed by Iterate. Iterate has been instrumental in the past few months with the progress we’ve made on Blocktix Alpha and we’ll be continuing working with them in the near future as Phase 2 of Development starts.
Testnet Release
In the past two weeks we’ve been quite busy setting up the Blocktix Testnet, and we almost ready to show it to the public. As we don’t want to overflow our server we’ll currently limit the amount of Testnet invites to 50 people, slowly adding these over time.
The Testnet will be released this coming Thursday, the 16th of November. If you are looking for an invite please join #testnet in our Discord. Spots are limited so just join the channel and leave -one- message that you’d like an invite. We’ll randomly pick from the list there and you’ll receive a private message with instructions starting this Thursday.
Phase 2
As you might have noticed we have been slowly talking about Phase 2 of Development. As we never spoke about ‘phases’ publicly we thought an explanation might be in order. Internally, in an effort to keep our focus in the right direction, we have divided the coming Blocktix system in several phases:
Phase 1 = Blocktix Alpha (MVP)
Phase 2 = Advertising system
Phase 3 = Fiat / Credit Card Integration
Phase 4 = — —
Phase 5 = — —
etc
As you can see they are quite literally the building blocks that will together make the ticketing system of the future that Blocktix aims to be. Our initial expectation was to start Phase 2 somewhere around the start of Q1 2018, right after we release our Blocktix Alpha. We are happy to announce we expect work to start quite a bit earlier, as we expect development on Phase 2 to start in the beginning of December. This is very much thanks to the fast work both Iterate and Lunatech have been delivering over the past weeks.
Development of Blocktix
Since the last update we’ve been working on setting up the testnet infrastructure and getting that all in place. We’ve successfully got it setup, and are in the process of internal testing as well as some basic documentation for usage. Currently we have deployed the New Event creation flow, the My Events page as well as Ticket listing.
The event creation flow was revised after working a bit with the previous flow, to allow for a better experience.
We’ve also finalized the designs for the event feed and event map views.
We’ve now started working on the mobile applications, as well as looking at improving the ticketer / ticket usage process, as we don’t want attendees to wait 16 seconds or more to use their tickets.
The mobile ecosystem is maturing in Ethereum but there are still quite a few components missing, especially for iOS. We’ll be going a bit deeper into how we’ll get the iOS application implemented, but for Android it seems that everything we need already exists.
For the ticket usage, we are looking at implementing a federated service or middleware that will allow ticketers to scan and verify tickets instantly, and then slowly broadcast them to the blockchain. It will still be possible to take a naive approach and use the tickets directly on the blockchain, but these services will just allow hosts to get their attendees checked in faster.
For our entire Blocktix Alpha, including the web application and mobile applications, we are about 60% complete. We aim to be finished with the web application in December, with the mobile applications testing starting in January.
In Conclusion
It’s been another two busy weeks and with our goals set for the remainder of 2017 we are quite excited for the remaining updates we’ll bring this year, including the release of our Blocktix Alpha.
As per usual, we’ll see you guys in two weeks when update #8 is scheduled for release, and if you want to join the Testnet, please join our Discord, and leave -one- message in #testnet.
