Federate This — July Update

Crossing the Chasm

Hello from London/Dubai!

This month we’ve also been to Bangkok, Singapore, Melbourne, Johannesburg, Mauritius, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Lisbon, Milan, St.Petersburg, Seattle, Moscow, and Tehran.

Progress

The last month has been about setting up for a high-growth business. There’s so much to do!

‘Off-Blocks’ is our Mobile App for Digital Identity.

Pleased to report the Website is basically finished — i’m now writing 6–8 content articles before the launch. There is a lot of scepticism around Blockchain technology, especially post bubble, so the plan is to spend some time reassuring potential customers through semi-educational blog posts.

In keeping with the App design, we’ve tried to hide away all the complexities of Blockchain to look as clean as possible. Really happy with the results.

Our ‘Explainer Video’ is finished too, although i’ve had to ask for the voiceover to be re-read as it was a bit bland. Will need to tweak the animation slightly to match minor differences in timings.

Explainer Video

This was a ‘complex’ Explainer Video, and i’ll be commissioning two more ‘simple’ ones regarding app features.

I’m sure many have seen the glazed eyes of a man nodding along to a description of a hash function! I believe the best way to explain the benefits over existing tech is to show it in action, rather than talk about how it works.

We’ve also finished a comprehensive Market Research project. A 76 page presentation that helped us understand our competitors, how to target customers and pitch to investors. This is largely specific to our own Mobile App, but has some general market insight too.

Market Research Report

Off-Blocks

Back in June we completed the PoC of our application. This showed off the working technology, including functioning API’s etc. Since then, we’ve been completing the UX/UI phase using InVision — a tool for displaying app prototypes. You can click through each button and navigation just like the real thing, but it’s via a succession of wireframes.

Again, we’re pleased to report that all the screens have now been finished. We’re moving onto the development phase of our MVP, initially on iOS.

Although we’ve designed the entire app, we’ll select only the MVP features to develop further at first, to focus expenditure during these times. This will simply link the screens/buttons on the frontend, alongside the API’s on the backend.

Bringing it to life!

When ready, we’ll be hooking it up to our testnet servers — converting testoids into test credits initially, for a QA period.

We were hoping by now to have built enough resources to pay for this development phase, but with the FCT price being so low — we’re forced to give away equity in the project.

So our next step is to raise funds. There’s a number of ways to do that, we’ll have to pick the most suitable option. It also gives the protocol time to stabilise and work out a few kinks that we’d want to see anyway before launching a commercial product.

We are “Crossing the Chasm” as they say.

Vultures

The Blockchain Industry really is plagued by a lot of vultures. People that prey on misinformation and lack of understanding to scam others out of their money.

The amount of ‘Blockchain/ICO Advisor’ types on LinkedIn is astounding. I’ve had so much unsolicited spam from randoms about a great opportunity they have for me.

The problem is, unless you know a lot about the technology, it’s very hard to sort out the genuine ones from the vultures.

It makes reaching out to market much harder — as everyone is already rolling their eyes when you say “Blockchain”.

For example: There is actually a Blockchain geared towards Commercial Aviation, with it’s own token. As i’m in the Aviation Industry, I could of told you within 1 minute of reading their site/whitepaper that they have absolutely no idea what they’re doing.

But to people outside the Aviation Industry it probably sounded great…. They reached over $100m Cap before Christmas.

Unbelievable.

Exchange Committee

Stimulating more liquidity is important to the protocol. One way we can do that is through adding FCT listings to Exchanges.

As a decentralised protocol, we have committees representing us now, and they need a formal endorsement to be empowered in their roles and gain recognition from Exchanges. This can be achieved in a number, or combination of ways, the easiest being a public statement.

If you’re an ANO who hasn’t publicly endorsed the Exchange Committee yet, please do so here — https://factomize.com/forums/threads/endorsement-of-exchange-committee.614/#post-3440

Lastly, as a heads up — we possibly won’t be able to attend the August ANO meeting due to scheduling conflicts out of our control. Apologies in advance, if this is the case.

Until next time

Bobby — Federate This