Evolving the BlockCAT Story
Over the last six months, we (and the rest of the community) have learned a lot about cryptocurrency, usability and blockchain applications. We have come to the conclusion it is time to evolve the messaging — from the website and future plan to how the community interacts with the brand, it is essential to get the story correct.
Our story has not changed, but the focus has really doubled down on smart contracts for everyone. This means really highlighting the focus on user experience, on deployment and interaction tooling for regular users and on the big questions of identifying the ideal application areas, resolving challenges like scalability, comprehension, error resistance and education. We’re still working on producing the set of tools, libraries, codebases and understandings that integrate coherently and clearly highlight the benefits and challenges.
Immediate next steps are the release of Tabby Rewards, our platform for allowing marketing teams to straightforwardly make use of token distribution: from token sale integration to real world marketing teams. This product will eventually optionally integrate with Tabby Pay, our wallet and toolkit platform for error resistant Ether and token management that is designed to maximize usability.
The next integrated piece will be a sophisticated token creator, with the appropriate story for tying in to Rewards (distribution) and Pay (receipt, secure and reversible transactions).
Aligned with this story, we are working on a major overhaul of the website, to highlight the “smart contracts for everyone” message and solutions to major challenges more directly: high-quality, audited accelerators for smart contract development, a deep understanding of the user experience challenges and the major next steps for how all the pieces fit together.
The Depth of Staking Models
As we lightly introduced last update, another product on our immediate radar is the first step in understanding staking models. Nearly a majority of cryptocurrency projects released in the previous year have been predicated on the use of a staking model, but to date, there has been few very successful applications of the idea.
A small side project we have been working on is an in-depth understanding of where staking models are appropriate and where they are not. We intend to tie this together with a demonstration product that allows users to set up their own staking and voting environments.
To give you an idea of some of the challenges that arise in staking models, we have come up with 16 distinct “models” that are appropriate in different environments. These are informed by other cryptocurrency projects, the Ethereum research community and game theoretic research dating back to the 1960s. These include 2- and 4- stage staking environments, round-robin staking and secrecy-required and secrecy-optional models.
A functional understanding of staking models is an asset that a significant fraction of serious crypto- projects proposed in the last year requires — including our marketplace and security-focused smart contract tooling — and we’re at the point we are pretty sure we’ve “got it.” We’re currently doing security, economic and game theory review on the conceptual side, while trucking forward on the engineering aspects necessary to build the first demonstration platform, with a number of target partners in mind.
That’s it for this week! If you have any questions, be sure to join our Discord channel, tweet to us on Twitter or chime in on the /r/BlockCAT subreddit!
