The Zippie Monthly Update — February 2018
As you can probably imagine, we’ve been incredibly busy here at Zippie HQ. So, to keep the Zippie community on top of everything that’s been happening, we’ve decided to launch a monthly update. Our aim is simple: To summarise all the latest developments, showcase our most important news and to share our future plans. There’s tons to talk about so let’s jump right in.
Product news
We now have a functional prototype
Our main developers Carsten and Tom have been busy building the core parts of Zippie. After months of hard work, we now have a functional prototype. When the Sony Xperia X Android smartphone is turned on it launches Zippie, along with Brave browser pre-installed. After boot-up, users can create their Zippie identity and wallet with a straightforward sign-up process.
We’re also making good progress with containerisation. The aim of this is for the user’s identity and wallet data to be stored in an isolated container which Android can’t access.
We’ll demonstrate the prototype next week at Mobile World Congress (more on that below), and continue the work around our Alpha/minimum viable product offering in March. This involves working on signup flow, identity creation and recovery, wallet, home view, containers, and key split function.
We’re trialling a web-based solution
One of our key goals is to make Zippie as easily scalable as possible, meaning that device manufacturers, operators and users can easily start using and distributing Zippie. With this in mind, we’ve been trialling a fully web-based Zippie solution. This means that the more than 2 billion Android and iOS users who have a modern web browser in their phones could access and use Zippie anytime, without needing to use a specific device or install any app or plugin.
Moreover, this would make it extremely easy for device manufacturers to offer Zippie out-of-the-box to their users.
Going forward, we continue developing and testing both the web-based and container-based Zippie solution (container is rooted deeper in the user’s smartphone for added security). In the near future, we’ll publish a blog post describing the web and container based solutions in more detail.
A UX upgrade is on the way
Since early February, we’ve had two design experts onboard to refine the overall Zippie experience and user interface. The team has years of experience in designing mobile products for some of the world’s most successful technology companies. We’ve had the pleasure of working with these guys before and we’re confident that they’re the ideal choice for making Zippie and crypto easy to use, even for non-technical people. Expect to see the first Alpha UI teasers in the coming weeks.
Exploring the future
In addition to many other things, the Zippie skunkworks lab, aka Carsten, has been busy exploring possible future product directions.This includes such things as a personal multisig. This is a simplification that allows us to do multisigs containing personally owned ERC20 tokens at scale on the Ethereum blockchain. This means that we can essentially provide ‘vaults’ for every Zippie user, where a Zippie user could access her funds with the combination of several authentication methods such as pin code, facial recognition, fingerprint, etc. There are very few similar commercial-ready solutions already existing, so we’re excited to dig deeper. We’ll be sure to write more about this in the coming weeks.
New partnerships
Uppsala / Sentinel Protocol
We’re happy to announce a partnership with Uppsala, who are developing the Sentinel Protocol. Uppsala provides collective security intelligence solutions based on blockchain to prevent hacks, scams, and frauds against crypto assets. Uppsala also won the recent developer competition organized by Kyber Network and Hashed, one of our early backers. Needless to say, we’re very excited to have security experts of Uppsala’s caliber as partners.
We’re going to Mobile World Congress
Our CEO Antti will attend Mobile World Congress next week in Barcelona. MWC is the world’s largest gathering for the mobile industry, and the place to meet old and new device manufacturer partners, operators, internet companies and more. Expect more eyes in the mobile industry to be opened when Antti gets to pitch the next generation of mobile, the internet of value, powered by Zippie.
That’s it for our first update, folks. We’re sure you have a ton of questions and comments, so why not head on over to our Telegram o chat some more. You’re guaranteed a very warm welcome.
