Sprint Update week 32–2022

GM ixonauts — here’s our latest Sprint Update!

The ixo team has been busy and we’re excited to deliver this update to the community. The Launchpad is edging ever closer and development on other tools in the ixo tech stack has come along nicely, of which you can find a few sneak peeks in this update! On Tuesday Shaun, Alwyn, and Mike hosted the weekly ixo Twitter Spaces with Gilad Goren from Bitgreen. Bitgreen is a new blockchain launching soon on Polkadot and is also focused on ReFi and social impact. It was a lively conversation which encompassed various topics such as bridging the funding gap for sustainable projects, different approaches to blockchain design, the stakeholders involved in the ReFi ecosystem, and many more, if you haven’t heard it — be sure to listen to the recording!

Blockchain

Layer 1 infrastructure for the Web3 Internet of Impact.

A significant upgrade to the flagship AlphaBonds module has been in development for the past 6 months and is now heading into a Testnet upgrade this week. We are busy finishing up unit testing this sprint. This upgrade offers bond issuers new ways to configure bonds, based on a target capital raise and minimum expected yield. With this we have also improved the user experience for bond investors, by providing the option to either specify an amount they want to bond, or the number of bond tokens they wish to buy. The module returns spot price estimates based on order volumes. The AlphaBond algorithms have been fine-tuned to deliver much more robust pricing within limits such as total supply, minimum yield, and ranges of Alpha predictions. These features will become delightfully noticeable in the Web Portal UI for creating Investments, and for staking in bonds. A more detailed description of all the new features and improvements in AlphaBonds will follow in a future article.

Impact Portal (Web Application)

Web application platform for decentralised Impact Marketplaces and Impact Exchanges.

Implementation of Web3Auth is almost complete and this provides a much more user-friendly way of managing keys and DIDs for logging into the web application and to sign transactions. Next we are deeply connecting the Web Portal with the Impact X Wallet mobile app, using WalletConnect to provide a seamless cross-platform user journey.

The decentralised Impact Exchange design got a design update for transacting with cross-chain liquidity pools. We submitted a grant proposal to the Osmosis network, to bring selected Osmosis Liquidity Pools for IXO:OSMO and IXO:ATOM into the Launchpad instance of the Impact Portal and demonstrate how cross-chain exchanges can be configured to meet the needs of specific marketplaces, and provide a great user experience. We have asked Osmosis to allocate an allowance of FeeGrant OSMO tokens that will enable users of the Launchpad to make exchanges on the Osmosis network without having to first purchase OSMO for gas.

The team has starting experimenting with a desktop application for the Impact Portal that will be aimed at power users who manage impact marketplaces and exchanges, have significant numbers of projects, agents, investments, and assets to manage, or offer services to a large number of users, such as Verification Oracles. A first build was deployed for internal testing and feedback, to get a deeper understanding of how this product should be further developed.

Impact X Wallet

Mobile applications for iOS and Android.

The mobile application is under fierce development to get a release out within the coming 2 sprints. We have been squashing styling bugs and improving user journey flows for claims submissions.

The main focus of the team in the coming sprint is to hook up the Contextual AI Assistant (more about this below) to show how at least one end-to-end story is implemented, from a user’s intent through to successfully sending tokens from the wallet.

EarthPort

The Developer Portal for the Internet of Impact

The JAMBO dApp Kit for drag-and-drop creation of Web3 applications for the Opera mobile browser is taking shape, with further improvements in the feature to set the styling options for the application. Configuration of User Actions feature is now also implemented and the next step is to integrate these actions with chain services, using the latest release of the ixo ClientSDK.

The yDS Team working on this developer tooling has also been experimenting with the infrastructure for JAMBO dApp developers to independently host and deploy their Apps using an integration between GitHub and Netlify. Steady progress is being made towards having an incredibly versatile developer platform for rapidly prototyping mobile-first applications and then deploying these at the scale that is needed!

New! AI Assistant

Helping users seamlessly find and execute whatever they’re looking for

The ixo Contextual AI Assistant has been in the works for a couple of years and now is finally becoming fully integrated with the web and mobile applications. Built on the Rasa open-source framework, the Assistant uses the latest Natural Language Understanding models to predict what a user’s intentions are and respond intelligently with conversations that assist the user to get their intentions fulfilled. Whether this is your first time making a blockchain transaction, a question you need to have answered, or a complex multi-step claim evaluation workflow you need to implement, the ixo AI Assistant will become increasingly intelligent in its ability to make life simpler. Okay, so right now this is a not very clever Bot! Over time, with supervision and machine learning, the ixo AI Assistant can become the intelligent guide to the Internet of Impact.

With a Custom Actions server that can be programmed to perform any imaginable tasks on Web 2.0 or Web3 by interacting with web services, searching and matching, accessing all sorts of information sources, and leveraging the capabilities of other intelligent services. We can’t wait to show how much of a game-changer this can become in enabling many more people to use and contribute to the Internet of Impact, perform services such as digital verification, and also learn

New Team Member Profile

We welcome Uday as a new member of the core ixo developer team, to lead the Conversational AI engineering efforts. He will ensure that the ixo Assistant doesn’t give too many irrelevant answers and that it is always awake to assist users!

Uday has worked with ixo over the past 2 years in a part-time role researching and developing the use of Conversational AI in Web3. He has more than 4 years experience in this field and has already contributed to the development of over 50 virtual assistant solutions, as well as to the Rasa open-source development project. When he is not engineering conversations, Uday looks after the scalability and availability of the AI Assistant infrastructure. In his time off, he loves to play cricket and enjoys watching tech podcasts.