O3 Labs — Year Overview
What an amazing year it has been. I think everyone was expecting 2018 to be a bit different than it turned out to be. It’s definitely been a tough year for many projects and companies in the crypto space, but we’re happy to say O3 Labs is still standing, stronger than ever. And we don’t even have a token! Who knew you could develop and do so many things without an ICO and without making your own token?? 🤭
Back to all seriousness, we would like to give a short overview of everything we have done throughout 2018, and a preview of what’s coming in 2019. If you just want to get the summary of 2018 and see what’s coming up scroll down to the middle of the article! 😁
2018 — Q1
Officially O3 launched in 2017, but the first quarter of 2018 was when things really got started. We started 2018 without an Android app, and technically also without an iOS app because it got removed from the Apple App store. O3 consisted of just our two co-founders, Apisit and Andrei, but that changed quickly.
January
- Released the O3 app for Android on the Google play store 🤖
- Got accepted into an incubator program run by Recruit Holdings and moved into our first office space in Shibuya, Tokyo 💼
- Participated as speakers at the first NEO DevCon ✈️
February
- O3 rereleased to the Apple App store thanks to the community! 🍎
- Met Arco at a NEO developer meetup in Tokyo, shortly after which Arco started helping out at O3 (we even started doubting if we should rebrand to A3 😬)
- Rataphon started to help out with development 👍
- Added full support NEP-5 tokens on both Android and iOS applications 📱
- Supported the NEO ecosystem by launching public nodes for the NEO blockchain in Japan 🔧
March
- Met Nick at a NEO meetup in Tokyo 🙆♂️
- Started talking to Alex about joining O3 ✍🏻
- During visit to the NEO hackathon in Taiwan, we declared a partnership with NEL at Hooters 👀
- Began finalizing the NEP-9 URI standard for NEO, allowing for easier client interaction with the NEO blockchain 🤓
2018 — Q2
Quarter two was all about getting O3 in a good place for further growth. We grew to the six-man team we are today, and as a result had to find a new office that could hold us all!
April
- Greatly improved our approach to planning new feature delivery 🗓
- Began the search for a larger office space 🏢
- Launched our community forum 💻
- Add Japanese and Chinese language support 🇨🇳
- Started automatically adding all NEP5 tokens, removing the need for the user to work with script hashes 🕶
May
- Officially registered our company in Japan 🇯🇵
- Nick and Alex officially joined O3 Labs! 👨👦👦
- Had our first company BBQ 🍖
- Improve the app infrastructure stability, and added notifications for receiving tokens 🔔
June
- Officially moved into the new O3 office in the Tokyo bay 😳
- First O3 token airdrops 📦
- Improved new user on-boarding process 🆕
- Ontology integrations begin 💙
- Spoke at several big crypto events in Tokyo 🎤
2018 — Q3
We got our team together, got an amazing office, so time to get to work! The third quarter was all about getting new apps and new updates out there, with better features.
July
- Met the Switcheo team and started exchange integrations into O3 🤝
- Met the RyuCoin team 🐲
- Started working on development of the O3 Desktop app 💻
August
- Released O3 v2.0 with shiny new interface, introduction of our mascott Luna (moooon), integration with Switcheo, dApps page and the token marketplace! 🙌
- Added the long awaited Dark Mode for Android 🌚
- Participated in the first Ontology event in Japan 🙋♂️
- Summer Takoyaki party to celebrate all the hard work 🐙
September
- Held a closed beta for O3 Desktop with some of our diehard users 🔒
- Back into planning and developing for Q4 🧐
2018 — Q4
So we got into a good place in the first 9 months of the year, but this is where we start to get serious. We build out a plan for the long term vision of O3, and start setting clear goals for 2019 and beyond.
October
- Launched O3 for Desktop, meaning O3 is available on all platforms! 👌
- Launched native trading in O3, allowing you can buy and sell tokens straight from your wallet! 🔁
- Started supporting NNS, enabling users to send to .neo addresses instead of the normal long and inconvenient wallet addresses 💵
- Welcomed the Ryucoin team to Japan 🎊
November
- Launched multi-wallet on mobile 📲
- Moved to new key management format, moving new users to encrypted key for more convenience for the user 🔑
- Announced we are aiming to run a consensus node for NEO 📢
December
- Finished work on O3 NEO-dAPI and started work on O3 ONT-dAPI 👷♂️
- Met with the Ontology team in Tokyo and joined Ontology hackathon ⚒
- Launched O3 Store 🛒
- Development on some new apps for the O3 apps page 📟
2018 — Summary
Somehow it feels like 2018 went so very fast, and so many things have happened that it’s hard to keep up with everything. But for O3 it has been a year that helped us define who we are, and made us think of who we want to be. We went from zero to being the main gateway and application for users interacting with both NEO and Ontology blockchains. We have gained many fans and supporters and always are happy to see positive reactions on social media, our community forum and through our support channel. Thank you for all of you O3 fans and supporters, you help us keep going! Look at how much O3 has changed!
What we also realized as we built more and more functions into the O3 apps and started mapping out the future of O3, is that even though our core product is a wallet application, we are not ‘just a wallet’. In 2018 we have built a solid base product. 2019 will be the year that we add some key pieces to the infrastructure, and from there we will start bringing in real use cases and easy accessibility from within the O3 apps to make actual use of the NEO and Ontology ecosystems and everything in them.
2019 — What will it bring?
We have great plans for 2019. Of course we will try to bring out better and cooler versions of the O3 applications on mobile and desktop, but a lot of work will be done in improving the O3 ecosystem itself, better integration between our applications on different platforms, and we want to improve general stability of the apps. Last but not least and maybe most importantly, we will be bringing applications to O3 that you can use (and want to use) on a daily basis.
A few things that are coming very soon are:
- NEO fiat gateway (we have been saying soon, but now it’s very soon.. 😋)
- O3 Swap (buy NEO/ONT with other currencies from within O3)
- Ontology staking (first desktop, then mobile)
- Automatically adding Ontology OEP4 and OEP8 tokens
After that we will be moving on to the infrastructure improvements. First we will be working on finishing up a few other important parts of the O3 ecosystem for other developers. Working out an easy way for developers to hook up their websites and (d)apps to O3 will be important to bring more apps on board, and we made a good start on the foundation for this in 2018 (the O3 dAPI). After the O3 dAPI for both NEO and Ontology is in a good place we will do a bit of a redesign and work on better integration between our apps themselves and external apps or websites for an even smoother experience and more use cases.
In the end, all that matters is usability. To get a bigger and more active ecosystem, we need more active users. And to get more active users, we need to look outside of the current crypto sphere. We would like to be able to give the O3 app to a person that knows nothing about cryptocurrency or blockchain, and still be able to do everything they need to do or want to do with the underlying technology. A new user would need to be able to:
- Onboard and get NEO and ONT with fiat or other cryptocurrencies
- Switch the NEO and ONT in-app for tokens/currencies needed
- Spend the tokens/currencies held in the O3 wallet in any available (d)app
Having a stable product and enabling the complete process above for new users to easily get on board is a necessity to grow, so this is where our focus will be lying in the first part of this year. Some parts are already there, some parts have to be improved and some parts still have to be built. But when we get this into place and offer the safest, most user friendly and fun way to do all of this with a single click from within O3, we believe we can lead the way in this new blockchain era and become something that will become an inevitable part of everyone’s daily lives.
Thank you once again for all your support this year, stay tuned for more and enjoy the ride! 🚀
P.S. We hope to see you all at the NEO DevCon in Seattle ✈️
If you have any questions, suggestions or remarks you know where to find us:
