Monthly Recap | July 2019
Web-Marketplace
Coding of the new design has been completed for all pages and sub-pages. We have deployed the new UI on our internal staging server and went through a strict Quality Assessment procedure to ensure each and every detail performs as intended.
The above steps have been completed for both the desktop, as well as the mobile web version separately.
In addition, both our frontend and backend have been subject to heavy modification in order to support the massively modified interface. To date, we’ve integrated roughly 90% of the UI frontend with the backend, which covers all booking-critical steps and functionalities.
The entire booking flow has been tested at all stages and the functionality of the design has been confirmed.
Nikola Alexandrov, co-founder and CEO of LockTrip, commented:
What remains makes up roughly 10% of the body and consists of secondary pages, which are non-critical to the actual service. We will nevertheless be aiming for 100% feature delivery prior to going live in order to provide maximum user experience.
In addition, our team has developed multiple improvements that will enhance the user experience:
- An improved interactive map that transitions much more smoothly as opposed to the current “hectic” experience
- Added pre-loaders that show up during search to bridge the time until results have loaded in the background (animation shows up instead of keeping with the static page)
- Improved filtering times for a much quicker reorganization of the search inventory
Unavailable Hotels
As some of you may be aware, we’ve had an issue with some hotels showing up as unavailable shortly after the deployment of our new inventory. Tackling it down showed that there are two unrelated cases:
- A bug that displays available hotels as unavailable. This has been fixed.
- A third party caused phenomenon, which displays hotels as available, but in some cases gives an unavailability error after keying in guest details.
This one is not a bug, but the result of receiving different data for hotel and room level availability from our providers. We are working on solutions that would be added to our backend as automated processes to proactively avoid such errors.
Aside from all above, we have made multiple backend improvements including our mail services and notifications. Coupled with newly developed email templates and improved display of vital information, that aspect of our service has become very reliable and mature.
We have also invested time and resources into our security through dependent code upgrades. These are accompanied by a massive upgrade to our anti-fraud system and the introduction of account verification.
Lately, we had increasing fraud attempts on our marketplace. Since the upgrade outlined above, we have prevented 100% of them to date.
Blockchain
On the Blockchain front, we have deployed the upgraded Blockchain explorer on our internal servers and successfully synchronized it to the latest block. Compared to the previous version, it can handle much higher loads and display network activity in real-time without delays.
As a next step, we plan to deploy it on our public servers.
Elsewhere, we have made significant progress with the chain stability improvement. Team Blockchain has set up multiple test environments in which artificial forks are induced constantly, followed by a close observation of consolidation behavior.
The next 2–3 weeks are reserved for heavy testing. So far we have identified a number of weak spots in the code, but we want to be absolutely sure that nothing is left out. Depending on the results, additional steps will be decided on and shared in our next monthly recap.
We have developed strategic options for different scenarios, which means that we are well equipped with backup plans for pretty much any test result.
On a final note, we have completed all merges with Qtum and Bitcoin’s latest code upgrades. This means that once we decide to launch our Mainnet, we will immediately be up to date with the latest tech standards.
Business Development
Calculations for the Testnet bounty rewards have been completed for the most part. We are currently in the process of resolving a few selected cases for participants where the data is incomplete or contradictory. The process should be completed in the next 1–2 days.
We have completed our final LOC economy simulation and developed a tool, which we fed with real market data of LOC price action and marketplace bookings. It allowed us to draw valuable information for all kinds of scenarios. Based on those insights, we will be suggesting an economic upgrade that will significantly improve the risk/reward factor for LOC as a whole.
We will be providing a lightweight version of the tool together with our “Economy Upgrade” post to our community later this month. You will thus be able to replicate many of the insights we gathered and confirm our reasoning first-hand.
We are specifically excited for that announcement and will be looking forward to your feedback.
— Your LockTrip Team
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!
