June Development Update
OAM Model, Alpha Testers, and Team Expansion
Just six months into 2018, we have already hit several pivotal milestones, and June has been particularly eventful. We made significant progress in implementing our Owner Address Management (OAM) system and onboarded our first round of alpha testers. We also launched the imbrex Ambassador Program and expanded our core team!
OAM Recap
We developed OAM, a system that allows us to create and manage additional accounts, to increase the number of transactions our platform can handle on behalf of our subscribers.
Our Dual Subscription Model allows us to sign transactions on behalf of our subscribers — users who do not wish to purchase the ETH necessary to handle gas fees incurred using our platform. The system works by creating a transaction object and signing it with one of our accounts, but it does not scale well. One of the challenges we encountered while building it was figuring out how to increase our transaction signing capacity. We were able to overcome this challenge by creating Owner Contracts, which allow us to create and manage additional accounts while decoupling the transaction signing load.
Since some of our contract functionalities have time limits, it was important to prioritize how transactions are handled so they can be signed before any time limits expire. We addressed this issue using a pool system, where different pools of accounts handle transaction signing based on their priority.
Finally, we needed to build the Admin App. This is a Web2/Web3 hybrid Đapp that provides a user interface to allow us to handle all Owner Contract operations, such as adding or removing an owner address. The Admin App is a multi-admin panel where an admin can request to add or remove an owner address, and other admins can vote for or against the request.
Alpha Testing Program
Imbrex has been built over the past two years and it’s almost time to share it with the world. We have had our smart contracts audited by Consensys Diligence and tested all aspects of the platform internally; however, until recently, we were still missing one key element…you!
Two weeks ago, we started the Alpha Testing Program to collect feedback from within our community and it was an overwhelmingly positive experience. Participants tested various elements of our platform including sign up, search, filter, add a listing, and arbitration. Through in-depth evaluation, we were able to pinpoint and resolve potential friction in the sign-up process for non-subscribers. Overall, participants were thoroughly impressed with the elegant user interface and smooth functionality of each feature.
If you are interested in this opportunity, please join our Telegram channel and request access. Thank you to all those who participated in the first round. Your feedback is invaluable to our success.
Team Expansion
We are pleased to announce that two new members have joined the imbrex team: John O’Sullivan and Oliver Lai. These individuals help bring a fresh new perspective to the development side of our team, and we couldn’t be more pleased to welcome them aboard.
John O’Sullivan
John is a back-end engineer with a Master’s in Computer Science from Loyola University Chicago. His experience spans both software and hardware, working with everything from high-performance computational systems and decentralized technologies such as Ethereum, IPFS, and Solidity, to IoT sensor arrays and radio communications (SDR). His language specialties include JS, Node.js, C#, C++, and SQL. When he manages to pull himself away from his computer, he enjoys cooking international dishes and playing soccer.
At imbrex, John’s roles include, API endpoint development/testing, infrastructure management, and deployment. API development details working with the frontend team to agree on endpoint and datastore requirements, thus once they have been built out they will work seamlessly connected. Infrastructure management requires John to built out our AWS configurations and setup to allow issue free deployment, as well log report so we are alway in the know. Lastly, John leads the deployment of imbrex product stack.
Oliver Lai
Oliver is a full-stack engineer with experience in JavaScript and NodeJS. After earning his degree in Sociology and Economics at Emory University in Atlanta, Oliver began a technology career that has included tech sales, web optimization, and software development. Outside of programming, Oliver enjoys reading, lifting weights, and binging on horror movies.
Oliver’s main responsibilities will be helping to maintain and build features on the front-end Mithril codebase and helping to transition the old Mithril to a modern JS framework called React/Redux. His responsibilities will later expand to include back-end development.
Join us in welcoming John and Oliver on board!
Moving Forward
Each month that goes by seems to get busier and busier, but our team remains in high spirits. We are proud of the work we’ve done over the past two years and can’t wait to share our progress next month at Inman Connect in San Francisco.
Thank you for your continued support.
Onward & Upward,
The imbrex Team
