Finally, almost one year after we started serious development on Indorse, and now that our product is in a good enough shape, our team has started going out in the mainstream market with confidence. We have started getting a few SMEs from Singapore to use the platform and send their candidates to us for validations!

Last week, when we were presenting about Indorse to investors/technologists in London, one of the people from the audience actually gave a good feedback after hearing all our progress in the last year or so —

What we have achieved to build in such a short time frame is not just an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), but rather an MVE (Minimum Viable Ecosystem).

That is certainly true in our case because we have a functioning product, a dedicated, though small, group of users who almost use it on a daily basis, and also an internal economy and ecosystem which is already utilizing the platform.

While we haven’t yet completely finished all the features outlined in the whitepaper while doing the ICO last year, we know that the idea works! We have almost 20–30 new “claims” coming in every day, and we have a bunch of validators (currently 43 of them), who vote on these claims on almost a daily basis. In fact, the highest “rewarded” validators both in September and October consistently received crypto worth more than US$ 500 each. This goes on to prove the utility of our product, at least on one side of the market.

Next step for us, which we are already working on is getting customers for the product - the recruiters, employers who want to start using the system. Our team has already started approaching them in Singapore, and we are definitely getting good feedback in the market. We are onto something here, and we are trying to solve a real problem that exists in the world…

Technology

On the tech side, we are working on putting all the claim and vote transactions in a Merkle tree. In this approach, we will create a 2-level Merkle tree. In the first step, every claim and its corresponding votes (1 + 10 TXNs) will be bundled together in a Merkle tree, which will give us a corresponding RootHash (RH1, RH2 … RHn) for every claim. At a specific interval (maybe every 15 claims, or every hour or every day), we will create a Level 0 Merkle tree, where the leaf nodes will be the RootHash (RH1, RH2 … RHn) of the corresponding Level 1 claim Merkle trees. Thus at every specific interval, we will get a Merkle tree with one RootHash (RH0) which we will propagate on the Ethereum mainnet. All these Merkle trees (JSON objects) can be stored on one of the decentralized file storage mechanisms like IPFS or Swarm or even in a public Amazon S3 bucket. We are also building an explorer which will help anyone with a claim ID or a transaction hash to verify the integrity of any claim or vote transaction.

This will help us scale up the platform by at least 11x and maybe much more if we time the intervals of blockchain proofs properly. It will also enable the validators to sign the TXNs directly through Metamask, but not spend any gas on propagating those. This approach is also scalable architecturally; once a second layer solution (one of the Plasma implementations or a State Channel implementation) is ready, we can migrate this entire process to that chain, and put the proofs on the mainnet at certain intervals.

Here are some stats on our current traction —

Claims created=693

Claims “approved” (with legit proof links and non-empty Git repos)=367

Claims “indorsed”=61

There are some interesting insights here…

The number of claims created has almost doubled since the last dev update, in a span of one month. This means our message is reaching the right audience and they are interested in it The percentage of claims indorsed stands at 16%, up from 10% to 12% earlier. This shows that the quality of claims has also improved

On a daily basis, we are also working heavily on the user experience for validators, who are our most valued bunch of users, and also making sure that as we go out in the mainstream market and sell this to the recruiters, they can easily use the system. For the last month or two, we have been heavily working on the product side, making sure that the UX is smooth and easily understandable by all the stakeholders of the platform.

As we approach the end of 2018, we are focusing on making the product mature for the mainstream market. For us, 2019 will be all about scaling — both on the tech side and also on the business side!