The FLASH Roadmap: Here is what’s on the horizon

Hi there! Welcome to our first blog post. We hope you are as excited and optimistic about the future of FLASH as we are. Our core team of very capable and experienced developers are hard at work to not only maintain and polish the existing features, but also to give life to a bunch of new applications and features.

You see, we are optimizing FLASH for the $1 Trillion global remittance market and are also making steady progress to introduce FLASH in the merchant payments space. So, without further ado, let’s look at our release pipeline in a chronological order.

Starting from November 2017, we ramped up our efforts to make several stability and feature improvement releases. Moreover, as part of our transition to an open source community-based project, we released the source code for our web wallet and Flashcoin.io website on our Github page. We also completed a much-needed redesign of our website in January 2018 and are committed to make continual improvements by involving our community in the design process.

During the remaining time in the first quarter of 2018, we have several major releases on the cards. In the next few weeks, the FLASH web wallet will start supporting multi-cryptocurrencies like BTC, BCH, and LTC. But we won’t stop there. To make the process of acquiring and exchanging FLASH easier for our users, we will introduce support for Mammoth.li exchange. We love our web wallet and so do our users, but we realize that mobile apps are much more accessible and convenient for many of us. So, we plan to launch our Android wallet app by the end of Q1 2018.

Another major release this quarter would be the launch of FLASH merchant services. This would allow any of our web wallet users to become a merchant and accept consumer payments at the fast speed and low transaction fee provided by FLASH. Exciting, isn’t it?

Amid such cool and exciting launches, we are also working to upgrade our underlying blockchain source code to not only utilize the new improvements but also to make our system more robust and scalable. Moreover, we expect to conclude our research and have a Whitepaper ready on the DPOW and governance model.

In the second quarter of 2018, we plan to keep the pace and transition to a decentralized model using DPOW and governance nodes. Apart from this major change in the underlying technology of FLASH, we will also have various other releases which will serve to make FLASH even easier to adopt and transact. Early in the quarter, we plan to launch Testnet for FLASH DPOW and governance model. In parallel, we expect to improve our wallet by introducing support for multi-addresses, import/export of private keys, and addition of other cryptocurrencies like ETH and ERC20 tokens.

While making these enhancements, we will also add several new features to our merchant services for consumer payments. Then we expect to launch purchase of FLASH via credit cards and allow FIAT deposits and withdrawals via our regional exchange partnerships. Continuing the work from the previous quarter, we also hope to develop and get our iOS wallet app listed on the Apple app store. By the end of the Q2 2018, we plan to launch the Mainnet for FLASH DPOW and governance model.

Phew! Hope you are keeping pace with us because we don’t plan on slowing down on our efforts to make FLASH the best cryptocurrency.

In fact, starting from the third quarter of 2018, we plan to double down on our efforts to make our web wallet and mobile apps even more graceful and effective at making the lives of our users easier. We will evaluate and implement a whole bunch of features under a release bucket aptly named Flash Wallet v.2.0. By this point, we also expect to add support for hardware wallets like Trezor and Nano S. Another exciting feature launch in our wallet would be the introduction of FLASH Swap using which our wallet users can exchange other cryptocurrencies like BTC while paying the substantially low transaction fees of FLASH.

In the third quarter, we also plan to launch our in-house remittance services to target the trillion-dollar global remittance market! This will be a major release and we will continue to add new features and enhancements to our remittance services. By the end of Q3 2018, we expect to launch the Human Teller Machine (HTM) service using which a wallet user can locate the closest FLASH trading partner and arrange a time and place to meet up and make the trade.

In the fourth quarter of 2018, we plan to add more cryptocurrencies to the FLASH wallet and make considerable strides by launching cold storage as a service and launching FLASH proprietary USB container for cold storage.

By the end of the year, we plan to focus on long-term goals for FLASH like the launch of a decentralized FLASH wallet v.3.0, introduction of FLASH decentralized chat service, and launch of decentralized FLASH mobile app wallets v.2.0.

We hope that reading through our vision and the steps we plan to make our goals a reality has reinforced your commitment to the FLASH community. On the other hand, if you haven’t joined our community yet, we hope this article has satisfied the skeptic in you and you are now ready to contribute in the open source FLASH project or to simply participate in the community via our social platforms.