Important Dec Update on LOC Token, Technology and Partnerships

Over the last 3 weeks, and immediately following our successful token-sale event, we have managed to get a lot of work done.

This post is to give you an idea of what has been accomplished and what is to follow in our short term agenda.

For this purpose we are dividing the work into three main categories. a) Token AfterMarket, b) Technology and c) Partnerships

LOC Token AfterMarket

• Listed on HitBTC — this was done in accordance with our promise of listing on the 15th Dec. During the launch the volumes were ranging between $150k and $500k per day throughout the first week.
• Listed on Mercatox — 23rd Dec
• Concluded agreement for listing on Gatecoin.com (integration is pending on their end and all has been approved) — ongoing
• Listed on Coinmarketcap, Bitgup, and a lot of additional third party apps that are vital for the token credibility.
• Integrated with Metamask. Token integration is not only important for exhange trade, but also for wallet support. This is why we are continuously working towards having the LOC token integrated to as many wallet applications as possible.
• In addition we’ve worked together with our community to get the LOC listed on a number of additional applications for porftolio tracking

What is to follow:

• Listing/integration with Gatecoin.com — ETA Mid January. It is important to be listed on Gatecoin.com since they support fiat currency trading. This will give access to people that do not posses any cryptocurrencies.
• Listing with top tier exchanges — This will be a never-ending process for us. A lot of people are asking about Binance an Bittrex, and it is very important to have perfect understanding that we are going to make everything possible for LOC to be listed there. Top tier exchanges are extremely important as they add not only liquidity, but also increase the overall confidence in the token. We see this an invariable move in the development of LOC and Lockchain. However our community should know that getting listed on Binance and Bittrex takes effort, resource and most importantly, time. All exchanges have specific requirements for tokens to be listed, and the top ones usually require volumes. So in reality you need volume to be listed on the high volume markets. From our perspective, by listing LOC as soon as within the 1st month from the tokensale event on exchanges that have a combined volume in excess of $1BN, we’ve made the most important first step towards building the token credibility from exchanges perspective. ETA on listing on Binance and/or Bittrex is impossible to be made at the moment. We’ve been in communication with both and as soon as we see any resolution, will make an announcement.

Technology

We’ve been working day and night to be able to deliver updates on the LockChain alpha marketplace. Ever since 20th Sept, we’ve been sprinting with both of our teams (the marketplace team and our DAPP team), to release key features that could make the retail use of the service as soon as possible. The reason why we have not made announcements on those updates is because we want to get a nice stack of features, that are properly tested and make a special announcement with an “official” launch of our alpha marketplace. Nevertheless, for the more impatient users, you can get an idea of the latest staging iteration pre-launch at this link : https://dev.lockchain.co/

Here is a log for the more important tech updates:

• Dec 10 — We’ve completed the UX/UI front end PSD design and have converted the PSDs to HTML templates. A total of 70 PSD designs have been created by our front end team. You can check them out by using this link (click on arrows on right/left to browse through the screens) : https://projects.invisionapp.com/share/G4DUK00QM#/screens/259720264
• Dec 15 — Released a major update on the marketplace in which we switched the pre-alpha iteration of the marketplace (which was in plain html/Jquery with direct API integration) to React JS and Java backend. This eliminated caching issues that the html was causing.
• Dec 22 — A lot of functionality to the marketplace has been added. This includes features such as user registration/login, profile management and booking requests. For the impatient users, you can check those at https://dev.lockchain.co/ . There are a lot of bug fixes yet to be done.
• Ongoing — We’ve been expanding our marketplace development team to meet the increased need for delivery. We’re hiring (if you are developer get in touch with our team)
• Dec 28 — We’ve added 2 additional servers to use for staging and development.

What is to follow:

We are currently working on the official launch of our alpha marketplace. With this update we are aiming towards adding vital features such as:

• host registration
• property listing
• calendar/availability management
• internal booking requests management
• “my trips” listings
• property editing
• user friendly dashboard
• tens of other features associated with the user interface, adding photos, descriptions, property amenities etc.

90% of the work on the above has been completed (in terms of coding). What we still need to do is do proper testing and a final deployment. We are working towards testing and bug fixing on the dev environment: https://dev.lockchain.co/. We will be launching the “official” alpha marketplace on https://alpha.lockchain.co/ . If you are opening this link and you are seeing a blank window is because we have not yet completed the testing and debugging process. Once it’s done, we will deploy there. After we deploy, we will announce it via reputable media as well as via our lockchain channels. Our ETA for this update is anything between 3 to 15 days depending on the number of bugs that we identify.

Very important

Most people don’t realize how much resource, effort and energy it takes to build a platform like this. To get a general idea of what has been done, you can imagine designing and discussing over 70 UX designs with all the involved functionality with designers. Then from there on, you need to convert those designs into HTML with front end developers. And at that point, you haven’t even scratched the surface, because you need to start developing the back-end in a way that it can effectively support all the front-end functionalities and at the same time the whole platform to be scallable and reliable. The back end and front-end are integrated, staged, tested for bugs and finally deployed.

Building such a marketplace, essentially means building a platform that matches airbnb in terms of speed, design and functionality. Doing that as soon as 30–45 days after the end of the tokensale event should give you an idea of how much dedication and work we are putting into this. And simultaneously with the above, we have the development of the blockchain based engine/DAPP which will be integrated with the marketplace via an API. You can check the progress of the DAPP development directly in our GitHUB — https://github.com/LockChainLtd/DApp. There have been 52 commits over the last 30 days.

The end goal is to have the marketplace up and running, that no other competitor has so we can retain the title of being undisputed leader in the blockchain accommodaiton niche (we know some new projects are popping out, and this does not concern us, on the contrary it re-affirms the need for such a project).

Building the service is what is important, everything else would be pure noise and speculation. This is also the reason why you don’t find 20 logos of “partnering” companies on our site without actually knowing what such partnerships are specifically about.

Our strategy is to show you actual hotels and properties that you can book with your LOC and save money as soon as possible and we are doing everything possible to make that happen.

By providing a working service, we will eliminate the need to constantly inflate the interest of the token by doing hollow publicity.

Partnerships

Strategic partnerships provide us an opportunity to save time

• We’ve signed strategic deals for securing global hotel inventory coverage. We managed to sign deals with key accommodation partners that secure LockChain 100,000+ hotels with very aggressive pricing. When comparing the inventory with leading OTAs, the prices were -17% on average (experiment was made with 21 real hotels in London, Paris and Tokyo). USA was excluded from tests, because OTAs tend to show prices without sales and additional taxes for USA which makes it hard to get an idea of what you are paying until you are on the checkout page. So you can consider the effectiveness of this inventory yet to be validated for the USA, but our expectations are for -9% -10% on end price for USA (including city tax, sales tax and additional taxes).
• Have been reaching out to individuals and companies that have shown interest of adding their vacation rentals to our marketplace and have created a database with “waiting list” for people to add their properties. We will be contacting them as soon as we launch our official alpha marketplace.
• Work with leading companies in the industry to exchange experience and business contacts.
• Have been making meetings with potential applications that can connect to the LOC Travel Engine. We’ve been working on developing a model which would provide a turnkey solution to application owners. The feedback has been very positive so far.

What is to follow:

Continuous effort towards securing more and better priced hotel inventory and arranging integration for leading PMS and channel management companies. Securing deals with strategic partners for USA and exotic destinations.

Conclusion

December has been very dynamic and we made great progress not only with the post ICO, exchange listing, integration and overall structuring of LockChain as a business, but also with the tech development and the strategic business development of the company. If everything goes as planned, in Q1 2018, we should be able to have a pretty nice iteration of the marketplace with a high value that would generate actual demand for LOC token.

We want to thank our community and supporters for the trust and are open for any discussions in our official Telegram channel. Feel free to join and ask any additional questions.