BlockParty x Status Incubate
- BlockParty x Status.im
- BlockParty x Status Incubate
- Makoto x Ram x Jeff
- Makoto x Jeff x ENS?
- BlockParty x all other mobile wallets?
BlockParty x Status.im
I met Carl Bennetts and Jarrad, the founders of Status.im , back in April 2017 at Ethereum London when I first talked about BlockParty to Ethereum community in public. They happen to be the speakers at the same event alongside with Etherisc.
While my BlockParty stayed as my pet project, Status.im went into massive Crypto roller coaster of going through one of the biggest ICO of that time which put both Ethereum and BlockParty into pressure and becoming one of the most community orientated blockchain companies.
BlockParty x Status Incubate
When I decided to go 100% Blockchain back in April 2018, I applied to various grants and incubation programs to turn BlockParty into reality and Status Incubate was one of the programs which showed great interests in our project. Status incubate is very much focused on contributing to Ethereum community and they have a great reach to every Ethereum community around the world. As a meetup Dapp which is focusing on solving no-show issues on free meetups, it makes perfect sense to team up with Status incubate.
We just had our kick-off meeting and we had a very warm welcome from Status incubate team who includes various members from Status.im, such QA engineers, product managers, UX designers, smart contract developers and they are very eager to help us. It is great that they are passionate about passing on all the experience they went through to us. I feel as if we are accepted to their “Status.im family” as little brothers (please forget the fact that I am probably a lot older than any of them…).
Makoto x Ram x Jeff
With the funding help from Status incubate, I can finally form my “dream team” with Ram and Jeff.
Jeff Lau (aka. “Brother from another mother of Brett Sun“) is a front-end developer currently working with me for ENS.
He is actually the first person who commented on my medium post when I first started blogging back in March 2016. I recently wrote a blog post about him on “Interview with ENS team (Jeff Lau)”.
Ramesh Nair (aka. Hidden Tao) is a full stack JavaScript developer who used to work at Ethereum Foundation’s Mist team. I got to know Ram through Jeff when they were both based in Taiwan. They have collaborated in the couple of projects such as EtherPing.
Both three of us are currently based in UK, but some of us are constantly moving around like many other Crypt digital nomads. While many incubation programs ask you to collocate into one area, Status incubate is dedicated to Decentralization and they have wealth of experience managing remote team so this is another area we are looking forward to getting their advice and mentorship.
Makoto x Jeff x ENS?
For people who have been following ENS may wonder what this means for Jeff and my involvement with ENS. The Status.im team (as well as Nick Johnson, lead developer of ENS) are very accommodating about our commitment and they are happy for us to work on ENS while being incubated by Status incubate.
Not being able to focus on one project is another no-no for the conventional incubation programs but thankfully the Status incubate program made an exception for us given the importance of ENS project. Ethereum is still in the very early stage of development and it is sometimes inevitable to work on multiple projects to make the entire Ethereum ecosystem going forward.
BlockParty x all other mobile wallets?
As one of the early Dapps which have been active on mainnet, I enjoyed having close communication with various wallet providers exchanging ideas about how to improve end user experience.
As BlockParty goes through Status incubate program, I would like to clarify what this means to other wallet providers.
In short, not much. Status.im is aware of the fact that locking down our service to only their platform does not offer any good to BlockParty nor entire ecosystem so they don’t impose any restrictions on our service offering.
They also do not impose us using the functionality only available to them.
What we do differently, however, is that we work more closely with the Status.im team to ensure that users can enjoy bug free experience through their mobile wallet. If we explain some mobile specific features to users, we are more likely use the Status.im wallet as an example.
This does not mean that we do not test functionalities against other mobile wallet providers. If you are keen to work with us testing our service against your wallet, please feel free to reach out to us. I am more than happy to share my experience working across multiple wallet providers.
Summary
I am super excited to finally announce this partnership. Please stay tuned for more exciting announcements to follow.
