#1 Product Cycle Update — Q3’18 Recap + Deliverance
Welcome back to our Product Updates!
Last week we gave you an in-depth view of how we, as a product team, are working to make cryptocurrency payments simple and safe. We are changing the way we communicate by dropping you a line to keep you updated on every product cycle. In case you missed last week’s team insights, check them out here.
The Voyage 34 — Phase II cycle is over and now we’re on to the next one, Deliverance! We want to take this opportunity to share our current short term goals and wrap up our third quarter.
Voyage 34 — Phase I & Phase II
Both cycles took five weeks with an additional week for planning and research, which means Voyage 34 covered most of the Summer ☀️.
Throughout this period we focused on ensuring a smooth payment experience. This meant taking special care to cover edge cases while connecting all the different components of our platform. While this might not sound like the most exciting work, it’s fundamental in order to make a great product. Just having killer features isn’t enough for the UTRUST platform, so we keep striving to provide a great experience end-to-end. All in all, testing was the core of this quarter as we engraved it even more in our culture.
Now its time for us to take a closer look at each of our products, and you’ll notice how some correlate directly with our squads:
Payments
If you’ve been in crypto for a while, you know how frustrating it can be to make a transaction. You’ve seen how many times a payment has failed to go through or how difficult it is to adapt to different systems in order to make a simple deposit. This is why we dedicated our time to polishing edge cases in our payment flow so that we can take the frustration out of crypto.
Blockchain Integration
UTRUST is a payments platform, so the ability to detect transactions (both internal and on the blockchain) is crucial. These past few months, we identified a few issues which slowed our validation process, one of which was related to the support of Ethereum’s internal transactions. However, after squashing all those pesky bugs, we’re closer to our intended goal of creating a safe, quick, and simple payment experience. We realize there is still plenty of work to be done, so we’re counting on your help to identify challenges in our closed beta.
We finished these cycles with a improved confidence over our Bitcoin and Ethereum integration. This is huge for our upcoming cryptocurrency additions. We’ve also made great strides in our ERC20 integration which is now being tested with UTK. As you know from previous announcements, we’re working to bring DigiByte and ETC into our ecosystem as well, so stay tuned.
Widget
Back in April, we launched our payment widget and started getting live feedback for the first time. We were thrilled with the support from the community and the amount of orders that we received. Even though we don’t have the traffic of a large e-commerce platform, our merchandise store still gave us plenty of information to enhance our user experience.
It became clear there were a few challenges that we needed to work through. By moving the currency picker into the widget, we are now able to show relevant information that will help you decide what currency to pay with, adding transparency to the payment process. We also tweaked the UI to add merchant and order information. This changed the widget considerably so we are happy to introduce it as: version 2!
We’re about to bring this new and improved widget online so that you can experience it for yourself, but before we do, we’re evaluating our performance across multiple devices and browsers and polishing our animations so we can have the best possible experience for everyone in the next cycle.
Mobile UTRUST Wallet
Each crypto wallet operates a little bit differently. For instance, some wallets allow you to specify how much you spend on mining fees in order to increase the priority of your transaction. In order for us to achieve the best possible payment experience we knew we had to allow as much of the process to happen within UTRUST. That’s why we decided to build our own wallet which allows our users to avoid mining fees by topping up for multiple payments. It also instantly detects transactions and removes the risk of paying too much or too little.
On top of that, we cranked out a new version of our onboarding and sign-up process to make it more intuitive and of course, safe. One of the features we looked at was our ability to share top up addresses. We thought it was a bit limited so we added more options and streamlined the whole process.
Our Wallet is the best way to pay with UTRUST. It’s simple, fast and reduces fees. We can’t wait to get it on the hands of everyone 🙂.
Merchants
While we’re working hard to make using crypto the best possible experience for our users we’re doing the same for our merchants. We’ve been closing partnerships with some of the largest e-commerce merchants in the world, Gambio and the largest mobile payments technology enabler in Europe, UMT. It’s our belief that our users will follow our merchants into adopting and using crypto in their online purchases.
We invested a considerable amount of time in the last months talking, listening and testing with our merchants. Those who joined us on The Voyage saga know that we’re striving to provide an amazing experience for our early adopters.
Dashboard
From manual to automatic settlements and dispute resolution. From several stores per organisation to providing merchants with KPIs across multiple metrics and refunds. All of these are features we are working to bring into our platform. With all of this in mind, people on the Merchant Squad have been going to e-commerce organisations to document their flow and understand their pains. Based on this we were able to simplify the actions our merchants are required to take, turning the dashboard into a smart and efficient tool to manage your business. In the long term we’re aiming to boost functionalities while keeping everything as minimal as possible to ensure the best flow for all of our partners.
Disputes
One key feature that has been missing from the crypto market is buyer protection. So, these past cycles we’ve been prototyping how the dispute and claim experience can be integrated into our platform. We’ve witnessed our partners handling disputes in their current workflow and interviewed merchants to design the best system for everyone involved. We believe our sensible approach will be the solution the market has been asking for.
Claims
In an ideal world, disputes are solved through direct communication. However, we know that’s a lot to ask for, so UTRUST is prepared to jump in as a mediator when buyers and merchants can’t come to an agreement. We envision UTRUST as a global platform for online payments. That means we have to be ready to scale in order to solve several claims at the same time. At the moment we’re researching and documenting on how to achieve fair solutions by studying the major players in the e-commerce market.
Testing Platform
We’ve looked at several e-commerce use-cases. From selling tickets for a yearly conference to managing hundreds of employees and stores across the globe, we’ve got it all covered. After talking with key merchants across many industries we’ve come to understand some of their most significant challenges, and we know that first and foremost they need to understand how UTRUST integrates with their system. As such, we’ve developed an onboarding experience where they can test our platform in a sandbox environment which works for all merchants regardless of their size and purpose. This will ultimately attract more merchants to our network, meaning more places where you can pay with UTRUST.
“UTRUST will enable all Jumpseller merchants and their customers with a payment solution, which is faster, cheaper and chargeback-free. We are very interested in working together and playing a part on this currency revolution.” — Tiago Matos, Jumpseller co-founder.
Integrations & Plugins
Finally, after showing all of our capabilities we need to get UTRUST integrated into our merchants’ platform. We’ve been working hard to ensure our integrations are top-notch. Perhaps you knew that our MVP used a WooCommerce plugin, but we’re now bringing version 2 online.
However, what you probably don’t know, is that our latest plugin has been with JumpSeller. It’s still a prototype but we’ll talk about in a bit (spoiler alert: it’s about dogfooding)!
Product Process
As we’re getting closer to launch, our development is becoming more and more public. Furthermore the UTRUST team is now more distributed and so our communication is evolving. Thus our process has had to adapt in order to funnel more feedback into quicker results. Product updates are just a small part of what’s been changing this quarter as we prepare to reach out to more users. We’ve been experimenting with new ways to gather feedback and brainstorming along the way to adapt in a flash to unpredictable situations.
Infrastructure
The placement of UTRUST as a payment gateway comes with the enormous responsibility of delivering a safe private service. As we are required to manage sensitive data, our infrastructure must be fully covered. Throughout this quarter as we prepared for release we worked on permission management as well as the preparing stability and safety for production servers.
On top of that we made a lot of improvements in tools for the development team to ensure maximum consistency and productivity throughout.
Compliance
Compliance is always a hot topic in crypto. While there’s no one source of truth around this issue we have taken our time to understand every angle in order for us to evolve on a regular basis. Refunds, withdrawals, KYC, KYB and every important feature is affected by compliance and so we have adapted our assumptions every step of the way. In order to make sure that we are in complete compliance our wallet’s beta will not be available in every country right away. But have no fear as we have a strong legal team in house.
Testing
We’ve aimed to bring testing into the core of our culture. Obviously developers are used to testing, but we have colleagues in sales, compliance, marketing, finance, support and community. All of these groups are also key testers and they help make our gaps in product knowledge as small as possible. To this end, we’ve started implementing regular Demo Days to present new features, doing internal User Tests, making documentation more transparent and improving QA. All in all this makes UTRUST a more powerful and stable platform.
We’re also looking to you, our community, to test our product in our upcoming public beta.
Dogfooding
To understand out product better we’ve started using it ourselves! Here at UTRUST we started using our product internally through a e-commerce website that runs in staging and from which we order our Friday lunch. That means that we process dozens of payments every week. This is a free communal meal that brings us all together. Since it’s free, we run it on a testnet and some people use the UTRUST Wallet after a top-up whilst others send funds through other wallets. This “Friday Team Lunch” website was developed on JumpSeller by using our latest plugin.
Deliverance
Alright! Here comes the Deliverance Cycle. Our official song for this cycle is by Opeth. (Remember to let us know what you think the song for the next cycle should be) Anyway, in this cycle we are getting everything ready for beta delivery. We’re tightening the screws on our whole platform and that means more action feedback for our wallet and prepping the dispute system as well as more integrations. By the end of this cycle we will have more people testing, and it will already be an improved version!
The Merchant squad is focused on buyer protection, namely disputes, so they are bringing what we learnt from the prototype into production. Meanwhile they are also looking into merchant integrations and implementing settlements.
We’re releasing a new log-in protocol which is based on a pin code/biometric challenge as well as after device validation using a phone number. So in general we are dedicated to making a smooth stable product for both iOS and Android. Additionally, we are also discovering push notifications and planning an automated process for withdraw.
Finally for the Widget we are near completion of UTK integration. We’re also brainstorming about new features such as recognition of wallet account by adding log-in to the widget and we intend to upgrade the version available in the showcase store.
We’re also working on many other things across other teams, however the focus this time is on recapping this quarter!
Product Roadmap 3rd Quarter 🎺
As the first product cycle update also marks the transition into Q4’18, we want to quickly look into the status of each of the goals presented months ago. We’ve explained some of those already in detail throughout this article, so here goes a quick update:
- Mobile Wallet Beta Android & iOS
Keep an eye out in the next couple of weeks as we’ll be launching a waiting list for our the UTRUST Wallet’s Beta. We’ve made this list into a game so that our biggest fans can get their hands on our wallet as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, we’ve got a few selected users experiencing the wallet right now in order to generate even more feedback. If that isn’t enough testing, we’re also using our apps in the office. Needless to say, we’re excited to share it with as many people as possible.
- Wallet API beta & Partnerships API beta
Both APIs are up and running, after all they are needed for our products to work. However, they are meant for internal use only, at least at this stage. Even so, we’ve an API which will go public and wasn’t on the roadmap, which is the Merchants API!
- Merchants API beta
We haven’t mentioned it before, but our merchant API is currently being tested by a network of early adopters. Their first impressions have been invaluable for our development process. This is especially important because the merchant API will form the corner stone of our market. Documentation will be made available in Q4.
- KYC flow implementation for wallet users
We are trying out a few providers in order to find the best deal that does not compromise your experience. Not to mention, we’re double checking our safety and compliance at every turn. We have to make sure we’re safe and simple after all, that’s kind of our thing. We’re looking forward to closing these deals in the short-term.
- ICO Escrow system beta
This is an initiative that we have started back in April. We have two ICOs that are integrating this system to raise their funds, however, both sales were halted until the market shifts for a more positive tone. Back then it was a different time in the crypto world and to be honest, right now, we don’t love the market conditions. So we’re holding off progress until ICOs gain a more positive tone.
- ERC20 token implementation system wide
In spite of quite a few challenges we have managed to implement ERC20! We can’t wait for the opportunities this will bring as integration of several new cryptocurrencies is now possible.
- UTK integration as a mean of payment on the platform
We rolled out our first UTK for internal payments. While it’s just being used within the team at the moment, we’ll be rolling out more testers soon. Be on the look out for UTK in the showcase store soon.
We’ve also updated the public roadmap to more closely match our current focus. Trust is all about transparency and accountability so you can check out our live roadmap right here at any time.
Let’s talk
We also hosted an AMA with our Co-Founder and CPO Roberto Machado and our PM Martinho Aragão where our Community posed their questions regarding this update.
You can find it here: http://bit.ly/2yfxMcA
Stay tuned for the next update within a month or so! 👋
