Development Update 014 — Recent Progress & Upcoming Release
Hello all! On behalf of the entire Social team we would like to wish you all a Happy New year and we hope that you had a fantastic Christmas.
Firstly, we’d like to apologise for how quiet we have been over the last few weeks. Some team members took some long overdue time away from work, while others only took a few days off over the holiday period to keep working on the development of version 2.0.
The entire development team (Ryan, Gareth and Amir) worked throughout the holiday period. We’d like to applaud them very much for their hard work and dedication, and thanks to them, we still see a Q1 release of version 2.0.
We still have a spare desk at the front of the above picture. We may bring on another backend developer closer to the release of version 2.0 in the coming months to assist us with backend admin systems. There is enough room in the office for 3 more developers, so shortly after the release of version 2.0 we may fill those spots in-house to accomodate for the exponential growth in the platform that we are hoping for.
New Exchange Listing Soon
As we stated before the new year, due to the recent price rises in ETH we have decided to lift our exchange listing budget slightly.
Our priority was Binance and KuCoin, although Binance has been under pressure lately due to the influx of new users and coin listing requests. So instead we will be putting all of our efforts into getting SCL listed at KuCoin as soon as possible. This is not a promise that SCL will be listed there, it’s just us saying that we are prioritising KuCoin over any other exchange for the time being. KuCoin’s trade volume has been growing rapidly, and we believe that it will be a huge competitor in the coming months. Its nice user interface and simple sign up process make it a monster of an exchange. We believe strongly in transparency, so we will keep you all updated as best as we can during this process.
We will not be slowing down our efforts on a Binance listing though. Once the trade volume for SCL increases slightly and we have a solid product behind us (being v2.0 of course), then we will have more leverage when contacting major exchanges for listing.
December Progress
As mentioned above, we completed a ton of development work in December and over the holiday period. The boys worked extremely hard and we now have a solid backend foundation that our APIs are being built on, our streaming micro-service is under way for a socket connection, our identity server is complete, our CI (Continuous Integration) and deployments are working perfectly, the front end UI framework is looking fantastic, the on-boarding process is complete, and much, much more.
What we see from January
January is going to consist of work, work and more hardwork. Gareth is still in DevOps mode, while Amir is smashing out the frontend of the website, and Ryan is working on the Storj integration and setting up APIs for Amir to implement into the frontend.
The most important job for the backend guys this month is definitely Storj setup and the SignalR (sockets) connection for faster connections to the database and better user experience when receiving notifications and instant messages.
February, March & Beyond
February will mainly consist of polishing off the platform, bug finds and fixes from our in-house support team, device testing, security checks, and other important features before the release. We’re hoping that a very exclusive private beta may be available to a few select users by the end of February. Even if it does not contain all components for the initial release, having more users testing the platform can help us find problems that we may not see in-house.
Now, as you all know we have been saying that version 2.0 will be released inside of Q1 2018. As of now, we see this being inside of March. If things go smoothly (and we all know that in the development world, “smoothly” is a myth) we may see a release at the end of February — although it’s a long shot.
We’re still on track with our updated roadmap from a post in late 2017. You can read all about that here.
If by any chance we see that March is not in sight for a release inside of Q1, we’ll be sure to let you all know. Development hurdles happen all the time, but we are trying our best to have v2.0 to you all inside of this quarter.
Marketing
Onto the exciting stuff — marketing. Since we realistically see a release inside of March, our marketing will begin in early February — so around 3 weeks away from now. This will contain a series of press releases, quality publications and videos on popular YouTube channels. We will see how that goes for the time being and if it proves to be successful and is gathering many new members to the platform and raising awareness for SCL, then we will ramp it up dramatically. If it is too slow, then we will adopt other approaches such as digital advertisements on Google, Facebook and Twitter.
We also have a few conferences in mind that we want to attend shortly after the initial release in late March. Once we know the exact ones we’ll be sure to let you all know.
New Domain
We are very close to securing the domain we have our eyes on. We will hopefully have some updates for you all regarding this in the coming weeks. The old domain of https://nexus.social/ will be redirected to the new domain after v2.0 is online.
Website Changes
Over the next few weeks, you may notice some changes to the token sale page (https://ico.nexus.social/). We need to make this reflect our rebrand from “Nexus” to “Social”. We will also be updating our roadmap to reflect the new improved dates and features. We are also retiring all languages from that page besides English due to the sheer amount of time, effort, resources and money that it costs to keep them all updated and in sync.
The current version of the platform (https://nexus.social/) may also be retired soon to make way for version 2.0. It is a tedious process to keep an old version online while all development resources are being dedicated to v2.0. So by deprecating it fully and taking it offline, we’ll be able to hopefully have version 2.0 online much sooner.
Whitepaper Changes
As per the above changes to the website, these will also be reflected in the whitepaper. We will also be retiring other language versions of the whitepaper for the time being as it costs a lot of money and time to keep them all in sync while we are doing slight changes before the initial release of the platform. We understand that language versions are very important, so that is why we will be getting more quality translations completed once we have released v2.0.
We hoped you enjoyed our first update of 2018. We are confident that this year will be a very successful one for Social and SCL. As always, please email us at support@nexus.social or reach out to us on Telegram if you have any questions or feedback.
