Dear XY Shareholders, XYO Token HODL’ers & COIN Geohackers,

Today I’m excited to announce a few updates on XYO!

But before I get into them, it’s important for you to know a few things about the nature of blockchain projects.

Blockchain projects have timelines and roadmaps that span years. Not weeks or days.

In the world of software applications, there’s a concept of “sprints”. Sprints are usually weekly, or semimonthly. A sprint is a defined period of time during which specific features must be completed. If you’re a software developer, you’re likely familiar with this concept.

Yet the ecosystems of the blockchain and cryptocurrency projects are very different. Blockchain projects have release schedules that stretch as far out as 3 years in advance. Sometimes even more! The primary reason being, blockchain projects are community-run, peer-to-peer systems. When decisions are made, usually the miners and supporters need to be well-prepared. Further, the software needs to be well-tested. It needs to work reliably (hence the concept of releasing first to test networks, aka “test nets”). Basically, you need to realize this: Blockchain projects operate more like a marathon, and less like a sprint.

At XYO, we ascribe to this as well. XYO is an ambitious project with a very long-term outlook. We’ve focused on the design of the infrastructure, and less on fast, iterative releases. We’ve focused on building out a system of something called “primitives”. You’ll learn more about this in a little bit. This is why you’ve been hearing a lot more news out of COIN land lately.

COIN is a more traditional application, with fast-releases and consumer-facing features. It’s been built quite well by the entire COIN team. There are so many things you don’t see that go into making COIN run smoothly. We have two wizards running COIN in Joe and John. But, they like to be mysterious, so I’m going to keep it that way!

Anyway, back to XYO!

Today, I’m thrilled to provide some updates on the XYO technology front.

But first, I need to jump back into the nature of blockchain projects. It’s important you understand what we’re building with XYO. It’s also important to know how we’ve been going about building it.

To best illustrate the philosophy in how we’re developing XYO, I’m going to turn to the true story of how Amazon Web Services (“AWS”) was built. After reading it you’ll find that it’s very similar to the architecture and story of XYO.

Most people think of Amazon as the world’s largest e-commerce shopping site. But they also own something that many argue is even more valuable, a cloud computing empire. Amazon’s AWS owns nearly half of the public-cloud infrastructure market. AWS is a completely different business than the retail business. It also took a very, very long time to get right (think marathon, not sprint).

Yet, the concept that inspired AWS came about in an odd way. It came from a technological, bottom-up approach. It came from focusing on developing very basic “building blocks”. Very basic “components”. They’re called “primitives”.

In the bestselling book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, the author covered what happened. Amazon was struggling to provide its internal teams with tools. They needed to innovate fast. They needed to create, experiment and then scale various software products. Bezos would blow up in meetings over this. One team member recounts, “Jeff finally just exploded at me,” Dalzell says. “I always handled Jeff’s outbursts pretty well, but to be honest about it, he had a right to be angry.”

At the same time, Bezos became enamored with a book called Creation, by Steve Grand, the developer of a 1990s video game called Creatures that allowed players to guide and nurture a seemingly intelligent organism on their computer screens. Grand wrote that his approach to creating intelligent life was to focus on designing simple computational building blocks, called primitives, and then sit back and watch surprising behaviors emerge. Just as electronics are built from basic components like resistors and capacitors, and as living beings spring from genetic building blocks, Grand wrote that sophisticated AI can emerge from cybernetic primitives, and then it’s up to the “ratchet of evolution to change the design.”

He further expanded on this concept, and how it centers around giving developers these primitive tools:

In other words, [Amazon] needed to break its infrastructure down into the smallest, simplest atomic components and allow developers to freely access them with as much flexibility as possible. As Bezos proclaimed at the time, according to numerous employees: “Developers are alchemists and our job is to do everything we can to get them to do their alchemy.”

Now look, I’m a crazy nut who pays attention to every single thing Jeff Bezos does. If Bezos mentions a book that inspired him, I go out and buy it. And I read the living hell out of it. I ended up picking up the book Creations. And I will say this… It’s a decent book, and goes into a ton of detail. Much of it unnecessary. Basically, you don’t need to pick it up and read it to get “the big idea.” The passages above will do you all the justice needed.

The big idea is this: you should stay laser-focused on building a reliable set of building blocks. Abstract them. Make them functional. And then provide them to developers so that they can innovate, create apps and create use cases.

For the past six months XYO has been focused on exactly this. We’ve been building out the most reliable, well-documented and beautiful set of “primitives” out there.

In the world of XYO, our “primitives” are the four components powering our network: Sentinels (collecting data), Bridges (Transporting them), Archivists (storing them), and Diviners (Querying the data).

At its core, XYO is a peer-to-peer data sharing protocol linked together by cryptography. The data we believe to have a very strong application and use-case is geospatial data. This can be either enabling a way to secure and “future-proof” GPS data from spoofing. Or providing an interesting protocol for viewing a historic audit trail of geospatial location data. Or perhaps even something else.

Like AWS, XYO has been laser-focused on building out its core tech stack. Its set of primitives. The next phase involves attracting developers (or, whom Bezos refers to as “Alchemists”) to start experimenting with the building blocks.

And this brings us to what we’re up to this week.

This week, XYO is sending nine of our team members to the World Crypto Con in Las Vegas. XYO is going to be well represented. It’s one of the biggest cryptocurrency conferences of the year.

The biggest names in cryptocurrency are speaking. This includes the founders and executives of EOS, Cardano, Brave, ConsenSys, Calibra, Bakkt, Samsung, and more. Each of them has an average of one presentation. In each one, they get to present to a chunk of the 2,500+ expected attendees.

But guess what?

XYO has not one, but four different events being held this week!

To kick things off, Arie will be participating in a panel on Wednesday October 30th on the future of dApps (decentralized applications).

After that, Arie has a 30 Minute keynote presentation about the dApps revolution that has not happened (yet).

And then on Thursday, October 31st, we’ll be demonstrating our technology, and also COIN!

But what I’m most excited about is this: During the week we’ll be hosting a hackathon. The goal is to begin enabling developers to innovate and experiment with XYO’s technology. Our primitives. Like AWS, we’ll be providing developers with our set of “primitives” to innovate with. And who knows what’s to come from there.

Here’s the XYO Hackathon Challenges we’ll be conducting:

Challenge #1: Build an “unlock on bound witness” app for software and/or hardware. Developers will be challenged to build an app that decrypts a file or open a locked box upon bound witness with a whitelisted address. (There’s a lot of enterprise use cases that could surface from this).

Challenge #2: Payment on delivery wallet: Install sentinel SDKs in a new mobile wallet app that transfers a predetermined amount of the XYO Token upon first bound witness from a sender to recipient address. (Bringing crypto wallets to the real world).

Challenge #3: Build a temperature Oracle: Install the sentinel SDK on Raspberry Pi or any IoT device with a temperature sensor. Bridge and display temperature data on a new temperature XYO diviner.

Challenge #4: Create a Bound Witness Notification Plugin: Create a plugin for any diviner that enables sending a message or email upon bound witness with interested parties.

Challenge #5: Build an EOS diviner: clone XYO’s Ethereum diviner to work on the EOS blockchain.

Challenge #6: Build a “supply chain diviner” that visualizes the bound witnesses of a sentinel along a route from source to destination sentinels.

These challenges are meant to test our new simplified SDK suite, while getting valuable feedback from the developer community and continue development of use cases for XYO.

In summary, there’s a lot of exciting happenings going on in the world of XYO. And we look forward to even more in the future.

To our XYO HODL’ers and believers, just know we’re pushing forward, excited about the marathon we’re on, and we’re looking forward to new things to come.

Warm regards,

And press on!

Scott Scheper, Co-founder, XYO

P.S.

We’re grinding over here. Our heads are down, and we’re excited to reveal all the XYO Core Technology we’ve been working hard on for the past few months.

If you believe in persistence, startups, and small teams taking on the world, then please please please, head over to KuCoin now and purchase XYO to support our project (Here’s a video guide walkthrough on how to purchase XYO https://medium.com/xyonetwork/kucoin-update-buying-xyo-on-kucoin-2-0-926788833508). We’re excited about things to come!