A second month after our token sale has passed by, and it has been quite a ride. Let us tell you, the important news we have from July!

Hiring

We’ve officially started to look out for new team members: Robertas and Valdas have attended a hackercamp in Lithuania called “NoTrollsAllowed”, where they’ve made a presentation about blockchain technology and Mysterium. After talking about our presentation, they met few developers, and we’re currently discussing with them about their potential future with us.

Robertas

Valdas

Valdas

First we wanted to setup at home, and as we are in the midst of it by now, we are getting ready to scale up the hiring process — preparing to reach an international audience. As soon as we get ready, we will start reaching out on a wider scale, which should happen this month. To help us with that, we’ve started to work with local agency in Berlin, as well.

An office in Vilnius

As you may know from the last update, we’ve decided to form first development team in Lithuania, and one of the first tasks for this team will be delivering a v1 product. This created new tasks for us, one of them is finding an office space in capital city of Lithuania — Vilnius. After viewing more than 30 options, we’ve filtered it down to 5 spaces. Our criteria include price, parking availability, convenient commute and access to various necessities and overall it must be an inspiring place to be for our Lithuanian team and for anyone visiting us from our international pool of contributors. We plan to have it open to you, if you ever decide to visit us.

With this, we’re happy to say that we have found some nice places, and we just need to decide on the best option to start moving in. We’re expecting this to happen within next couple of weeks.

Bounty

By the time you’re reading this post, all emails for bounty participants have been sent out. The actual transfer should be done on 08.04 (Friday), as there are still people who would like their ETH address to be changed.

We’ve experienced a delay with sending emails since we received more requests than expected to change some payment related information.

After our experience with bounty, here’s what we’ve learned and what could be improved if we did it again:

MVP bounty was a huge success, and we should have probably allocated more rewards for people who ran a node.

PR and BTT bounties didn’t have as much participants as we expected, resulting in higher rewards. Compared to translation bounties, this meant that someone who posted an article in a blogpost could get near what another person got for translating a whole post.

We’ve received a lot of incorrect entries on PR bounty — some people entered “facebook” as a source, without any additional information, while others put in links that didn’t work. This was the most common reason we have declined the bounty reward.

P.S. If you haven’t received an email from us and you participated in bounty program, that can only mean that there was something wrong with your entry, so please contact us at: team@mysterium.network

Security

Since we are building a decentralized VPN, it puts us in a very sensitive area, with risks related to the organization, to funds, node operators, users and the list goes on.

Part of an ongoing effort will be finding solutions to make it safe for all the parties involved. It will be similar to a complementary “product” on our side, which will see a continuous development as if it’s a software.

Currently one of the areas we are exploring is creating a much safer wallet mechanism designed for teams like us, it’s goal is to make sure that funds are safe no matter what. It’s going to be a long term project and fruits will be shared with the rest of the community so that whole cryptospace can benefit.

Technical group

Another new update you probably haven’t heard of is our new technical group. We’ve created a group on slack, where community members can discuss about our future from the technical perspective. It always helps us to have a second opinion on things, and with the help of that group, we’ve heard great suggestions and feedback about our v1 product.

This group is currently invite only, and we’re always looking to invite new members that may be interested to work with the team in the long term and give us constructive feedback!

A dilemma

We are currently discussing internally whether we want to put out a VPN app first, and test out with actual uses or if we should put our energy on developing a protocol, so that anyone could integrate to their app a way to connect to the Mysterium network.

We are rather divided on this question, because there are pros and cons for both approaches. Releasing a protocol that contains weaknesses and has bad incentive alignment is dangerous, but at the same time we all agree that the protocol is the most important piece to create in the long term.

We might opt for a very basic first APP and using it — build a network of nodes, stress testing it and only then we can derive a protocol, making it open to other application developers.