A Look Inside Development of Imbrex’s Innovative Dual Subscription Model

And updates on marketing and the community as imbrex roars towards Alpha release

Hello imbrex Community,

There’s been a lot happening under the hood at imbrex recently, so we wanted to take a few moments to update the community on Development progress:

Development

We’re currently focused on building out the Subscription Contract we told you about last month, and implementing attendant changes to the Listing and Listing Rewards Contracts.

For those just joining the community, the Subscription Contract will enable our first wave of participants to use the imbrex global real estate data portal — without having to purchase ETH, or take a trip down the crypto rabbit hole.

While we originally conceived imbrex for a user base that would handle all its own Ethereum transaction fees, the team learned through pitching firms, brokers landlords and agents, that only about half of these users would be interested in purchasing ETH to settle Ethereum transaction fees. Therefore, we decided to develop two models: Non-Subscriber and Subscriber.

First, to manage contracts that run the ImBrexer, we established the RexCoordinator. The RexCoordinator stores the addresses of all other contracts deployed within the imbrex portal. The RexCoordinator can be thought of as the godfather contract that keeps it’s lieutenant contracts in line. Understanding the RexCoordinator should provide a basic foundation as we now explain the Non-Subscriber and Subscriber contracts.

The Non-Subscriber Model

In the Non-Subscriber Model, a user would go to an exchange, create an account, purchase ETH and IMBREX tokens, then send them to their imbrex wallet. The user takes care of paying Ethereum gas fees throughout the entire listing cycle. This was pretty straight-forward for the team to develop. The Non-subscriber model functions like this:

The Subscriber Model

The Subscriber Model, a convenient means for users to participate in the ecosystem without leaving imbrex’s native application to purchase currency, took a bit more effort to design. We hit several speed bumps with the Subscription Contract (legal and technical) that rippled down into the Listing and Listing Rewards Contracts. The largest obstacle was gas automation for imbrex transaction fees, but we’re happy to say that we have ironed out the details and have all of the above aspects in line for a successful launch of the Alpha.

Here’s how the Subscriber Model works: When the user uploads a property, edits or flags a listing, votes, or creates a broker profile, s/he incurs Ethereum gas fees. The user creates a transaction both within imbrex and Ethereum, triggering the user’s pseudo contract that calls imbrex’s Subscription Contract and the Subscription Contract pays the Ethereum gas fee.

We ran into a bit more complexity enacting imbrex’s listing fee. Imbrex’s listing fee is intended to mitigate spam and malicious actors from abusing the Listing Rewards process. Imbrex listing fees are recirculated back into the Listing Rewards Contract, so the contract can continue to reward users for contributing data and flaggers for flagging spam. As most of you may know, the ERC-20 Token Contract is written so that only the contract address owner can withdraw tokens from their wallet. This cannot be a request from the receiving contract. Therefore, in order for the user to pay imbrex’s listing fee, they need ETH to send IMBREX tokens.

However, as we discussed above, the user does not have ETH and the Subscription Contract cannot forward ETH with a guarantee to the contract that the user will follow through paying the IMBREX token transaction. The user could receive the ETH and decide to keep it therefore completely forgoing the IMBREX token transaction. As you can see, this is an expensive risk for imbrex to take.

We have come up with a short and long term solution: The short term solution is that subscriber imbrex listing fees (this will apply to Non-Subscribers too) will be waived for their first five listings. If their listings are not voted as spam by the community, they will receive the Listing Reward and have plenty of IMBREX tokens to use on the platform while the Subscription Model takes care of gas automation. In the longer term, we are in discussions with a project focused on native dApp token purchases. Using their API, users could purchase IMBREX tokens direct with a credit card.

The new frameworks we modeled for the Listing Rewards, Listing, and Subscription Contracts are integrating fluidly. Piyush will complete writing tests for the Subscription Contract this week, and will continue to hook up the front and back end. Contract audits should go out by the end of the month.

Know Your Customer (KYC)

Know Your Customer, the process of a business identifying and verifying the identity of its clients is one of many open questions when it comes to decentralized applications involving crypto-assets. Crypto-assets (digital currencies, tokens, kitties, etc.) are emergent territory when it comes to regulations and compliance. While we don’t know how this will all look down the road, we know we care about our community and making sure that we’re providing a safe space for real estate data exchange.

While we educated ourselves on KYC requirements, we had great discussions with uPort and a few other identity providers. What we realized is that is is still early days in the world of blockchain identity. The team is working with our attorneys to make sure we are appropriately KYC compliant as we build out the beta and move to mainnet. We will finish coding the onboarding process as soon as we have all the facts from our attorneys. In the long term, we expect to migrate to a blockchain-based identity provider.

Marketing

Imbrex’s digital marketing campaign will commence Monday, December 18th. We developed a series of videos, blog posts and project updates via Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other media channels. We are lucky to have two very different but very enthusiastic types of communities: real estate and crypto. We look forward to receiving feedback, launching bug bounties and especially to listening to suggestions from both.

Blog Updates

In the next three weeks, we will be releasing two exciting blog posts. The first focuses on decentralized storage. The second will focus on getting to know imbrex’s awesome development team, Piyush, Brock, Edouard, James, and John who are bringing the imbrex vision to life.

As always, thank you for your continued support. December will continue to be an exciting month!

Imbrex Social

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/imbrex

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/imbrex.io/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/imbrex_io/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/imbrex-io/

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/imbrex_io/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/imbrex_io