We are excited to announce that we will start our first pilot with our partner STEM/MARK in the week of August 12. It will last for 6 weeks and our partner will invite between 2500 and 3000 of their panelists to download VETRI, respond to surveys and share their data.

In this context, the VETRI app will be made publicly available on the App and Google Play Store and anyone will be able to download the it. For the time being, only users with an invitation code that identifies them as part of the STEM/MARK panel will be able to respond to surveys, however. The VETRI team is looking forward to on-board the first “non-crypto users” on the app and to get feedback from our data consumer partner. At the same time, we are meeting with a variety of other potential partners in Switzerland who are interested in using VETRI to engage with their customers. The range of business interested in VETRI covers everything from other market researchers to IT infrastructure and security providers to high end fashion labels.

Conclusion of community testing

The launch of the pilot also marks the conclusion of the community testing phase. The testing was a great success.

Some statistics:

643 sign-ups for testing

438 app installs

3900 total sessions

212 bugs and suggestions for improvement reported

Amongst the helpful feedback on bugs, we received great suggestions for improvement such as “While waiting for the data transfer maybe some useful information could be displayed, like infos about VETRI, what exactly is happening on the blockchain at the moment of transfer, jokes, tips for blockchainers, etc.”. We are very grateful to all the community members who took the time to provide us with feedback and help us to improve VETRI! Next to the UX testing through the community, we also successfully conducted an external security audit of our platform. Having successfully passed this phase of intense testing, we are looking forward to seeing VETRI work in a real-world setting.

New features

For the pilot, we have been working on a set of new features to be introduced. Amongst them, the import of anonymized Facebook data into the data vault, different types of push notifications to increase the user’s engagement with the app as well as an improved reward mechanism for non-crypto users.

Next to improving the app, we intensively worked on the “data consumer interface”, meaning the web application through which our partners interact with the VETRI marketplace. We now have a full survey builder integrated into our interface, which lets our partners build and preview their surveys. In the background, the platform creates a smart contract based on the input parameters (i.e. audience size, reward payment, audience attributes, etc.). The data consumer can then deploy the smart contract to the blockchain with the click of a button. They are able to follow the progress of the survey via the interface and finally, access the collected data. With the completion of the data consumer interface, we were able to close the cycle of the data transaction, allowing for the marketplace to function without an intermediary.