The Upfiring Dapp— June Progress Update

Dapp Scaling Update, Upfiring OU, Bitfinex and Ethfinex Exchange Listings, Feedback and Restructuring Period Review, Build Automation, Bounty Campaign, Marketing, Finances, Budgeting

A lot of necessary reworks have taken place over the past few months on both a corporate level and development level to ensure the continued growth and development of Upfiring. The past few months, while overall “quieter” than in the past, were necessary to address several vital aspects of the project. In this post, we will provide an overview of what we’ve accomplished and what lies ahead in the coming weeks.

Marketing, Finances, and Budgeting

It is important for those who follow this project to understand where we stand financially and how our decision-making process works. A lot of this may be already-known information for those who have been with us since 2017, but neverthelesss it will be beneficial to go over it again.

In our contribution period, Upfiring raised approximately 250k USD, mostly in ETH, to fund the project. In the world of startups and especially cryptocurrency, this is a very small amount. We have had to be very careful regarding the use of these funds over the past 2 years to ensure we can build out our project and accomplish everything we have set out to do. Projects that raised 10s or 100s of millions of dollars have designated social media managers, community managers, marketing and sales teams, writers, and more. Upfiring does not have these luxuries, and we’ve had to do things a bit differently to compensate. As a result, our team consists of developers who wear multiple hats and are responsible for managing many different aspects of the project all at once. Here is a review of each stage of the project over the past 2 years:

1. Initial Community Growth (March 2017 to October 2017): We started by gauging community interest on the idea of incentivized torrenting on Ethereum and started building a team. We found that many people were passionate about this potential application of blockchain technology, so we organized a contribution period (ICO) in order to generate and distribute UFR to interested users, as well as raise funds to build out the dapp and run the project long-term.
2. Heavy Development (October 2017-December 2018): Following the success of the contribution period, the main goal of the project was to deliver exactly what was outlined in the whitepaper, at the highest quality possible. All other expenses took a back seat during this period. We set out to create something that had never been built before — a P2P blockchain torrenting platform that could support multiple seeders via smart contracts in a fully decentralized ecosystem. We made realistic promises backed by sound technology. During this time, we also used a small portion of the contribution period funds to secure our initial exchange listings and engaged in a bit of marketing to help grow the community. We held bounty campaigns, created marketing videos, and engaged in several other growth tactics to promote Upfiring to potentially interested users.
3. Product Release Period (December 2018-February 2019): During this time, we successfully released the Alpha, Beta, and Official versions of the Upfiring Dapp, as well as completed everything that was outlined in the Upfiring Whitepaper. The Upfiring Dapp worked for the majority of users looking to seed/share small to medium quantities of files, and the product release was largely a success.

Current: Feedback and Restructuring Period (February 2019-June 2019)

While the product release period in early 2019 was a major event — as it showed the Upfiring community and the cryptocurrency space overall that torrenting on Ethereum could be done successfully with multiple seeders — it also presented us with several other new issues that needed to be addressed before we could properly grow the project.

• The dapp was struggling to handle both very large files (several GBs) and very large quantities of files (30+). Because Upfiring aims to empower seeders to the highest degree possible, this needed to be fixed in order to ensure seeders’ potential earnings (and thus, growth of the network) would not be limited by the dapp.
• A legal infrastructure needed to be put in place. While the application is decentralized and we do not run any servers, a corporate entity needed to be established so that Upfiring could expand as a company. In addition, several major exchanges that we are interested in listing on require a corporate account, so this was a necessary step to take before applying to them. We established Upfiring OU, a private limited company based in Estonia, to distribute Upfiring’s software going forward. This process took several months to complete due to processing times at various stages. The country of Estonia is very supportive of cryptocurrency and blockchain startups. In addition, they have an extensive cryptocurrency exchange licensing infrastructure in place that allows Estonia-based cryptocurrency businesses to obtain a license to legally operate an exchange. This will likely be necessary for Upfiring during the release of the Upfiring DEX in 2020. For these reasons, along with their excellent e-residency program, Estonia was an ideal place to incorporate.
• Upfiring needed a software license/security certificate so that users could be sure that their software came directly from Upfiring HQ. At the moment, downloading the dapp results in a notification that the application came from an unidentified developer. We needed to incorporate before being able to obtain this software license. This will be an important implementation going forward because Upfiring features a wallet and allows users to access their UFR balances in the smart contract, so we want to deter phishing attempts by bad actors as Upfiring’s software becomes more widespread.
• Upfiring needed legal documents drafted. When users download the application, they will need to check a box indicating that they have read the legal disclaimer. This will essentially state that the user is responsible for all their actions within the application, and that Upfiring OU is solely responsible for developing the software. This document, along with several others, will be posted this month on the website.
• The Cryptopia hack occured right before our official release, which is where the majority of our trading volume was. As a result, further exchange listings were immediately necessary to ensure UFR had good liquidity.

Essentially, this Feedback and Restructuring Period was used to convert Upfiring from the speculative project under development that it was in 2017 and 2018, to a business capable of limitless growth in 2019 and beyond. While the above processes were taking place over the past few months, we felt it was best to conserve funds and not engage in any unnecessary expenditures. If the past few months felt more “quiet” than usual, that is why. As we have said before on Telegram and elsewhere, this was just a temporary period where many things took place on a corporate and development level, while marketing and community expansion initiatives were placed on hold.

Dapp Scaling Update

After a complete rework of the dapp and many, many bugs, we finally have a build nearly through testing! Upfiring 1.2 will allow for both very large files and large quantities of files to be uploaded into the dapp without issue. Many processes had to be separated, rewritten, and optimized to get this build working properly. In addition, the encryption/decryption algorithm was changed to further optimize performance. Upfiring 1.2 is backwards-compatible with all previous versions as well, so you can still interact with other users using an older version.

If the current build for Upfiring 1.2 passes final testing this week, we plan to release Upfiring 1.2 on Monday, June 17th, 2019. We will provide updates in Telegram, Discord, and on Twitter if this changes. Assuming the successful release and deployment of Upfiring 1.2, marketing efforts will begin immediately. Other developments on the roadmap, such as Batch Uploading, will be added shortly after Upfiring 1.2’s release. Lastly, the Stress Test will be planned once the application is stable on the Ethereum mainnet for some time.

Build Automation

One of the latest additions to our development environment is a build automation system that will allow us to quickly deploy and test versions of the Upfiring Dapp on 3 different virtual machines at once (Windows, MacOS, and Linux). This will significantly speed up the time it takes us to test and deploy new builds in the future!

Upfiring — Summer Community Growth Bounty Campaign

Upfiring is a hugely community-driven project, and we want to get the community involved as much as possible in our expansion efforts. This bounty campaign will be the largest one yet, with opportunities for developers, graphic designers, translators, or anyone with a social media account who wants to contribute. The details of this campaign (tentatively set to take place in late June into July) will be shared in its own Medium post, but there’s a few things you should know if you’d like to start preparing:

1. We need many more communities to share UFR files — there are very few up and running right now. Community development will feature the largest rewards for this bounty campaign, so start working now if you plan to develop a community. All existing communities will be welcome to enter as well, given that they are open and functional. You can submit your community fully anonymously if you wish to remain anonymous — all you need is an ERC20-compatible Ethereum addresss to collect your reward. If you are developing a file-sharing community, there will be a very large bonus reward if you are able to successfully display the seeder count next to each file that is uploaded, and an additional reward for being able to sort files by the number of seeders as well (so users can filter out all the files with no seeders/easily find available files).
2. There will be a bounty for getting existing file-sharing sites to support .ufr files. If you know of a file-sharing site of any kind, can contact them, and successfully get them to integrate .ufr file support, there will be excellent rewards for this. There is no limit to the number of sites you can submit for rewards. Start gathering a list of sites to contact to prepare! Simply reaching out will also get you a small reward — the more sites that know about UFR and the more users who request integration, the better!
3. Unlike the last bounty campaign, there will not be a community vote. As great as the decentralized community voting process was, it resulted in some sub-par projects ranking too high and some excellent projects placing too low. In this campaign, contributors can be sure that they will be appropriately compensated in UFR for their submisssions.
4. We plan to release the Upfiring dapp in several other languages, including Chinese (Madarin), Japanese, Spanish, French, Russian, and Arabic. As a result, we will likely be needing translators! We can provide you with all the texts used in the application, you provide the translations, we reward you with UFR. Native speakers only — no translator apps will be allowed to be used. We will provide more details about this later on.

Upfiring OU —Estonian Private Limited Company

This was discussed in detail above in the Restructuring section. Essentially, we:

• Established Upfiring OU as a private limited company in Estonia to distribute the Upfiring Dapp Software.
• Applied for a software license so that all releases of the Upfiring Dapp will be considered “verified” and have an identifiable developer.
• Created Terms of Service and Disclaimers to accompany Upfiring OU’s Dapp Releases

New Exchange Listings — Bitfinex, Ethfinex, and beyond

Now that Upfiring has a working product and dapp, we have the green light to apply to major exchanges. As we have stated in the past, we wanted to give Upfiring the best possible chance to be listed on major exchanges, and have waited until release to begin these applications. Currently, UFR trades on over 13 exchanges — including ABCC, COSS.io, Yobit, Stex, IDEX, RightBTC, and several others. As of three days ago, UFR has been officially listed on Bitfinex and Ethfinex — our largest exchange listings to date! As of now, Bitfinex has nearly half a trillion USD in daily volume while Ethfinex has approximately 3 million. Deposits, withdrawals, and trading have been enabled — follow @UpfiringHQ and @Ethfinex on Twitter for real-time updates. We’d like to thank our awesome community for voting for us and helping secure a top 3 spot for UFR in the last voting round — we couldn’t have done it without you all.

While we cannot discuss progress regarding other potential exchange listings here, we are hoping to get listed on at least one of the following this year: Kucoin, Binance, Bittrex, Kraken, and/or Coinbase Pro. We have other exchanges on our radar as well, but we’d like at least one of these to become the primary exchange that UFR is traded on in 2019 due to each of their stellar reputations, large userbases, and enthusiastic communities. As usual with exchanges, we cannot guarantee anything or provide any further details.

Download Upfiring and start earning UFR for sharing files at https://www.upfiring.com. If you have any further questions about the project, feel free to post on our community pages or send us an email at support@upfiring.com. Come join us over on the official Upfiring Forums, Reddit, Twitter, Bitcointalk, Telegram, and Discord as we continue our mission to change the future of P2P file-sharing.