As we announced in yesterday’s post, this Friday, 17th August, we are launching our public beta product. This beta reflects both the smart contract and platform development we have achieved during our recent focused development.

Working with our talented development partners, Pragmatic Coders, we’ve ticked off some of the roadmap’s key technical milestones:

The Smart Contract

Photochain’s trading smart contract is the engine behind every payment for every license, and for keeping track of the history of licenses. These functions are in addition to the first function of our smart contract — to mint and distribute PHT tokens upon completion of the ICO, as discussed in a previous post.

Our latest version of the Photochain smart contract has the capacity to record information about uploaded images, their offers and their pricing. Once images are purchased, the smart contract facilitates the payment — and here’s the best part — actually within the transaction of buying the license. This “dual” aspect to each transaction is important as each image license is therefore linked to a transaction, and each transaction is linked to an address and subsequently a user.

As a result of this, the smart contract records specific information about licensing to the blockchain. Putting all of the above together, the smart contract therefore keeps an entire history of all bought and uploaded images. The advantages of storing licenses decentrally on the blockchain are ideal for our use case:

the information about each license is timestamped and recorded permanently and immutably;

buyers can easily prove ownership of licenses — thus licensing enforcement is much easier;

payments are made via the Ethereum blockchain. PHT tokens are transferable outside of the platform and will be tradable on many exchanges.

These working features of our trading smart contract exemplify the benefits of using blockchain for digital image trading. Overall, the process of image trading and license checking becomes much more automated — thus being cheaper and easier to manage on a large scale.

The Photochain Platform

As for the Photochain platform, the beta presents a deeper product, equipped with much more than ever. You will be able to delve into a range of front end and back end features, as we’ve described in our whitepaper.

One of our most important features is how we’ve implemented image moderation and content filtering. For this we have integrated Clarifai’s API, as their AI solution is the most comprehensive available. With this, images uploaded to the Photochain platform are automatically analysed, tagged and categorised based on the content the AI detects. Thusly, also filtering out unwanted content such as nudity and violence automatically, and keeping users safe from obscene images.

We’ve also implemented a range of other features for this release. Whilst these are equally important, we’ll go into less detail here as they will be discussed as part of the guide to using our beta. However, in the meantime please do feel free to ask us questions via our telegram chat. Other features include:

secure authentication and access control using the well-recognised AWS Cognito;

secure management of users’ PHT token wallets and allowing transactions of adding offers and buying licenses;

each user gets a unique Ethereum address for storing PHT tokens;

users can easily upload their photos and their offers will be recorded on the blockchain;

users can access a dashboard with their statistics and photos;

users can search the catalogue of photos.

Finally to note, alongside the development of the beta, in partnership with the Brand Leadership Circle companies, we have been working on a complete remake of the front end. This is an ongoing process, with further UX improvement workshops to be held after the beta goes live.

Thus, the final design has still yet to be released, with the beta bringing more attention to the Photochain features as described above, rather than the aesthetics.

As a reminder, we are resuming the ICO — and launching the beta — this Friday, 17th August 2018 at 00.00 Central European Time. There are 22 days remaining in the ICO, thus concluding at 23.59 CET on Friday 7th September.

To register your interest in the ICO and to sign up to regular updates, please join here.