Horizon State Developer Update

Hello, and welcome to our first “formal” development update here at Horizon State. Thus far we mainly discussed fragments of progress over Telegram and such, but have not really taken the time to put something out to the community in a less transient manner.
This update will serve as the start of a regular developer update series, so that you all can follow our progress as we reach our development milestones.
Over the past few months we have had four different focus areas from a development perspective. While this may seem to deter the team from a laser focus perspective so admired by startups, there were good reasons to work in this manner.
As we detail below, each one of the deliverables we worked on provides a crucial piece in the Horizon State puzzle — either a foundation, a means to test assumptions, or another layer of functionality that allows us to address a larger market.
First: RemTech Awards voting system
The system that ran the RemTech awards back in April/May 2018 was delivered as two separate applications, each having a different target audience and voting methods. We have set it up with a relatively complex voting data structure that provided capabilities of asking questions, grouping those questions together into campaigns (or categories), providing a framework for possible answers, and values for each answer.
The work on that piece of software was very quick and delivered a good product that was fit for the purpose. We set out to prove that our assumptions around the structure of voting from a data perspective works, that we can send votes to the blockchain without having the user need to know anything about it, and that we can show results easily (while they were, of course, available on Etherscan).

We did take a few calculated “shortcuts” in the development there. This was because we knew the set of users is going to be relatively small, and because we believed that the specific method of voting this application provided will not be used very often by other customers. As we all know, the system worked well and positioned us nicely towards the second piece of work.
Second: CoinPocket
As soon as we finished the work on RemTech, we started working on CoinPocket. Horizon State is committed to donate 5% of its proceeds (in the form of HST) to charity. We came up with the idea that we could let the community (or indeed the world!) vote on how we split those tokens between charities, and that’s how CoinPocket was born.
Pending results of a professional security and penetration testing, we will be releasing CoinPocket on the 20th of September 2018, with a handful of charities competing for your votes in the first round.
We are excited and humbled to announce that one of those charities is the Australian Red Cross! Having such a high-profile organization consider crypto-donations, and sign up to allow us to collect and distribute donations to them is a huge morale boost and confidence milestone for us.

Third: MiVote Model Voting
Building on the foundations laid by RemTech and CoinPocket, the development of the MiVote model of voting is progressing rapidly. MiVote is Horizon State’s bedrock and foundation customer, and when they go and set up chapters in small places like India and the US — they are signing them up to use the system in “The MiVote model” — which is very specific.
Development of this model has been faster than we thought, and we are aiming to complete it by the end of September 2018. This will allow us an early October release in India, where they have already prepared a number of votes they would like to run before Christmas. This means that the last quarter of the year we are expecting exciting work in terms of performance, scalability and development of multi-lingual systems.
Fourth: Community Empowerment
With everything that has been going on around RemTech, CoinPocket and the MiVote Voting model — we did not have a lot of developer bandwidth to focus on the community empowerment side of the system yet. A lot of research work was done, and a mature, cohesive vision was developed. This was augmented by wonderful design work, which will save us time when code cutting starts.
From a technical point of view — only the foundation of creating communities (that may run votes) was developed, alongside an API to create them. This functionality will be released together with the MiVote model — so the first community to be created is going to be MiVote India, with DPI very shortly after.
And — that’s it! The next five weeks or so are going to be busy with launching two products, and development of the next steps will commence immediately after.
So long, and thanks from all the fish!

