Monthly Recap | April 2019
One more month has passed and many things have happened since.
As always, we want to communicate this progress with you in form of a monthly report and thus be as transparent as possible.
Let’s start with the marketplace:
New Inventory
In early April, we have completed the first version of our in-house inventory mapping technology, which we regard as a critical investment with high immediate and long term returns.
Since then, we have also successfully mapped the 300,000 extra hotels which were pending. Thanks to our in-house tool, we were able to do this in a much quicker and more efficient manner than before.
Right now, we are testing the deployment on our staging server to work out final bugs and instabilities. Once completed, the full version will be deployed on our production version marketplace.
UX Improvements and Design Contest
In April, we have conducted a contest among website designers and received examples from more than 50 contestants. In the coming days, we will share a new design prototype and ask you for your feedback.
This will also kick-off the active phase for UX improvements, which leads to the growth stage of LockTrip according to our roadmap.
In addition, we have released an internal version of the mobile apps with our native search feature being deployed. This on its own will improve the user experience considerably for mobile users once launched publicly.
LT Blockchain
Thanks to the valuable data we have gathered during the testing campaign of the testnet (which is still ongoing), we were able to improve network stability through multiple measures.
One of these was to strategically set up core nodes across the globe. They are already live in Mumbai, Frankfurt, California, Sao Paulo, Singapore and Ohio. Now nodes should have better chances to find and connect to healthy core nodes.
Another step for improving network stability during high transaction loads has been taken by altering the blockchain settings themselves. We have successfully initiated and completed a governance voting on the blockchain, which increased the average block time from 32 to 48 seconds.
Nodes will now have more time to synchronize with each other, making disagreements among peers less likely. The network is now more resistant to corner cases during high network stress. We will publish a dedicated explanatory article on this and how it relates to global the connectivity and our TPS rates.
This marks the 4th voting on blockchain settings since the launch of the testnet.
In addition, we activated the fiat rate oracle, which will be used to fix transaction fees at predefined fiat values. The fiat gas rate is currently being updated on the Ethereum layer of our blockchain.
Regarding the LT wallets, work has been initiated for an upgrade to the Bitcoin core 0.17 version. This means that all improvements from the Bitcoin wallet version 0.17 will be inherited to the LT wallet, while maintaining all progress we have done separately.
It will likely solve some of the connectivity issues that had their roots in the previous Bitcoin 0.16 version.
Work on the blockchain explorer upgrade has taken longer than initially expected, but we are now nearing completion. More than 4,000 lines of code are being restructured as we speak to make the blockchain explorer well equipped for high network loads.
A final note to the Evedo project: Their Initial Exchange Offering (IEO) has been completed successfully and they were able to reach their soft-cap within the first 24 hours.
This reaffirms once again that the EVED token will be the first one adopting the LT chain.
We want to thank you for your support on yet another highly busy month!
LockTrip is the first marketplace with 0% commission where you can save on average 20% on your hotel and rental bookings compared to anywhere else. Read how to buy LOC tokens here!
