Ferrum Network Community Update — December 8, 2019

Ian M. Friend, Esq.
FerrumNetwork
Published in
5 min readDec 8, 2019

Dear Community,

What an exciting and jammed pack few weeks it has been — with the launch of staking, the 2Key Network partnership, and a major Kudi update — to name a few!

But as the profile of Ferrum continues to grow, it is essential we never stray from the fundamentals that got us this far: hard work, transparency, and a commitment to community.

In this community update, we provide a recap of the last few weeks, and look ahead to a few initiatives we are planning.

Business Update

With the release of the FRM Flexible Staking platform, we took that opportunity to kick the marketing into high gear. These marketing efforts paid off, and we were fortunate to be picked up by top influencers like Teh Moonwalker, Oddgems, and Micro Cap Gems. Here’s what happened the past few weeks.

  • Released FRM Staking version 0.1 with the 18 month staking pool selling out in about 15 minutes. The total amount of FRM locked for staking is 8,412,666 + 2,397,260 locked for rewards, which equate to around 10% of FRM circulating supply.
  • Conducted no less than 10 AMAs in the past 4 weeks in major channels like Moonwalker’s, the AMA Room and CryptoCabital, among many others.
  • Announced a partnership with 2Key Network to utilize their Smart Links technology so our community can be rewarded for referring Ferrum Network products.
  • We’ve also seen strong growth of the Social Mining platform, with over 50 members now actively participating in the community created Social Mining Chat, and no less than 3,083 members signed up for social mining.

Tech Update

For those who missed the Tech Update from our CEO Naiem Yeganeh, PhD, here are some highlights:

  • Backend. we have made major progress in the backend which is enabling us to launch products faster and cheaper, such as building abstraction layers around security and chain access to speed up the development process
  • Coding. The dev team have been working on more than 25 repositories and has averaged around 1.5 commits per day, including weekends.
  • Open source. if you check our github, you can see around 10 public repositories in the last few months. We have forked and modified several popular Javascript crypto libraries so they share the underlying core crypto libraries. We did this to reduce the attack surface, the code size related to crypto libraries, and make them all compatible with various environments such as React Native. Examples are hdkey, elliptic, tweetnacl-js, bs58check, bip39, and more. We have also contributed to Binance chain ecosystem by creating a transaction parser that their JavaScript SDK was lacking.
  • Products. In the past 3 months we have built several products including KYC collection, management tools, and the Token Bridge. Last product is our staking platform built on top of Ethereum network, which is a flexible staking system for ERC20 tokens and a MetaMask integrated UI.
  • First Kudi. Significant progress in improving, refactoring, and adding features including one-click bank accounts, POS improvements, automatic invoicing, and more.
  • Unifyre Wallet: Backend is mostly complete, and we are working very hard to make it ready for Beta testers by end of year. Unifyre will be a unique multi-chain crypto wallet. It will be the first wallet where you completely take control of your private keys, but can benefit from server side security checks such as two factor authentication, AI based fraud detection, geo-fencing, locking account on a lost or stolen phone, and other security features. You will have access to buy crypto around the world and will work seamlessly with other Ferrum products.
  • Network and other products: Most work on Unifyre and Kudi are architectured in such a way to optimize code re-usability. We are making progress toward some other products and the mainnet, which will be announced accordingly.

First Kudi Update

The First Kudi team on the ground in Nigeria continues to make significant progress.

  • Announced the new First Kudi website along with the upcoming initiative with the Kudi Bank card
  • Added a major feature to the app which gives all our users their own personal bank account through our partnership with Providus Bank!
  • Our Referral Program has seen major growth, with nearly 100 users being referred in the past few weeks and growing daily!
  • Apple iOS has been preliminarily approved! However, Apple is requesting certain accommodations so the app works on the iPad, which may require more development work. We appreciate your patience.
  • We released an early version of a video showing merchants using the app. More videos will be released soon.

What’s Next

It is critical we capitalize on the attention we have garnered from the team and community efforts, and to start 2020 with a bang. Here are some of the upcoming initiatives we are working on.

Flexible ERC-20 Staking v0.2

We are strongly considering launching another round of staking. We are taking the lessons learned from the first round and improving the experience. Community feedback will be key to make version two even better, so expect to see a series of polls in the coming days.

A Trading Community

A strong group of FRM traders who post technical analysis on social media is great for exposure and great for liquidity. We are currently laying the groundwork to build a trading community to come up with initiatives like trading competitions and special trading rewards. Anyone interested in joining such a community should PM Ian on Telegram.

FRM on Kudi

We have been working hard to add FRM and ETH to the Kudi app so our users can buy it directly with Naira. This will also open up additional utilities for the FRM token, including a premium membership program that will reward users for holding the token and using the app. More details to follow.

Expansion into other Markets

As you may know, one part of our business model is to partner with top notch teams in emerging markets where our fiat gateway + payments app technology can be successful.

We are happy to report that we have started to work with such a team in Brazil and they are in the early stages of launching their own product powered by Ferrum Network. More news to follow.

Conclusion

Thank you all for your continued support of Ferrum Network. 2019 was a really special year that we will never forget. But together we can make 2020 even better!

Very truly yours,

The Ferrum Network Team

Ferrum Network Links:

Website: https://ferrum.network/

Telegram: http://telegram.ferrum.network

Twitter: http://twitter.ferrum.network

LinkedIn: http://linkedin.ferrum.network

YouTube: http://youtube.ferrum.network

Reddit: http://reddit.ferrum.network

Bitcoin Talk: http://bitcointalk.ferrum.network

Facebook: http://facebook.ferrum.network

Github: https://github.com/ferrumnet/

Instagram: http://instagram.ferrum.network

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Ian M. Friend, Esq.
FerrumNetwork

Co-Founder, COO and General Counsel at Ferrum Network — a fast interconnectivity network for decentralized cross-chain financial applications