iExec Dev Letter #9: The iExec Explorer — 03 Oct 2017

This developer letter #9 introduces the first release of the iExec Explorer, and presents our new hires. We also take the opportunity to answer the recent concerns our community has brought to us.

First, let’s start with our new team members:

• Jean-Charles Cabelguen joins iExec as its Chief Innovation and Adoption Officer. You may read the full announcement this week.
• Vladimir Ostapenco joins iExec as Junior Sysadmin. More on it soon.

Preparing for V1 Release and Devcon3

We are marking an important milestone today by releasing the iExec Explorer, go check it out at https://explorer.iex.ec

It will continue to lower the entry barrier for development on the iExec stack, by providing a very convenient way for developers to track the progress of their running computations on the iExec network.

Technically, the explorer works similarly to Etherscan by monitoring and keeping track of blockchain transactions, and displaying them into a browser.

Coupled with our new Katacoda video tutorial, it’s now easier than ever to get your feet wet with iExec development, and we hope you like it.

• We have improved the integration between the Ethereum blockchain and XtremWeb-HEP (unifiying the various ids).
• You can now retrieve the off-chain computation result from the smart contract using the Ethereum submit transaction hash.
• Ability for developers to deploy their own off-chain applications is getting closer as well. Ethereum login with the JWT token is now working, and the iExec command line tool will be updated in the next iteration.

Answering community questions

To finish this letter, I’ll try to briefly answer some of the questions raised on Reddit by cryptox89, who wrote an article entitled “Why am I doubtful about iExec?”. Most of his concerns have been addressed already, or are currently being addressed.

Hiring: As of today, we are 12 people working full-time at iExec, and we should be around 15 by the beginning of December. The new additions have already been recruited, and we are just waiting for them to relocate to Lyon. There will be a new series of interviews introducing our team members, at the rate of one per week.

Location: We are not solely recruiting from Lyon. Many people of our team members have relocated from Paris and abroad (China, Hong Kong, Brazil, Morocco). There are many good points for being headquartered in Lyon, which is an attractive place for startups and the second biggest digital hub of France. Note that France is becoming a key place for startups in Europe: venture capital and funding deals last year surpassed that activity in Germany, making it second only to Britain.

Website: The design of our new website is 100% complete, while implementation is at its final stage. We’re currently reviewing the website contents. Once last details are sorted, we’ll still have to install the website on our own servers. Therefore, the website will be ready and running for Devcon3.

Marketing: The marketing team has grown to 3.5 people: Julien, Wassim, and Eduardo who is working half-time on producing graphical content. The team is now lead by Jean-Charles. In the beginning of December, we’ll welcome a new member who will manage the industrial partnerships and our innovation program. More on that later.

Community: Our focus is now on building a developer community. Half of the team will be at Devcon3 with a booth to demo our solution for off-chain execution. In November, we will attend SC’17 (Denver, CO), which is the main conference around HPC and Supercomputing. Just before Devcon, we’ll spend a full week in the Silicon Valley organized by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We will communicate in the following weeks on the other major conferences we will be part of.

Team Communication: We acknowledge that the last days have been terrible, in particular because of the Slack spam bots that have been a real plague. At the moment, we still don’t have a definitive solution, and we’re looking to move to another platform (Rocket Chat) depending on the community choice.

Technical Outlook: As described in the white paper, V1 allows off-chain execution from a Solidity smart contract. You can already play with a mock-up (see our last dev. letter), and I think that we’ll be on time to demo all the basic features for Devcon3 (payments, explorer, and others). Preliminary research works have started this week, with Hadrien working on the PoCo. At the moment, he’s reviewing projects such as Truebit and Plasma.

Partnerships: Not so many new partnership at the moment, because we are focusing on delivering V1. However, we have excellent contacts who are also waiting for V1 to build their apps using iExec. A good example is the recent Request announcement.

Strong competition: Competition never hurts, and you will see that off-chain computation will be a hot topic at Devcon3.

Trading: As many already know, the latest events in China have seriously compromised our efforts to be listed on a Chinese exchange, which was one of our top priority. We’ll continue our efforts to create partnerships in China, with a focus on technology first.

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