Updates from the Tech Team

Testing AML & KYC

This month the team has started work on testing and implementing our KYC (Know your Customer) and AML (Anti Money Laundering) processes. As we mentioned in the blogpost ‘What does Soon™ mean?’ this is essential for us to both sign with and work with the card issuer. For us to put cards in hands, we have to demonstrate we’ve got a rigorous approach in place.

Both our commercial and tech teams have been involved in designing and formulating the processes, which involve working with a number of third parties with expertise in these areas. Over the last month agreements have been signed, and our tech team have been working with partners’ APIs to implement and test the processes.

Alpha Testing: An update on the delay

Last month, we asked you to register interest in alpha testing. We recognise that October has come around and we haven’t yet invited the next batch, and many of you are asking why. Broadly speaking, we’ve encountered 3 challenges and wanted to explain a little about what they are, and what we’ve learnt from this process.

Rocket ship vs webapp development:

It’s commonly accepted in development that you build an MVP and get it into peoples’ hands as quickly as you can. This means you can more effectively user test and also identify bugs rather than it all being done in-house. If problems are identified, they can be fixed as you go along. This (obviously!) can’t apply to smart contract development. It’s more akin to Nasa building and launching a spaceship — they need to have absolute confidence in what they are putting out.

Tools to test

How do we get this confidence? We will rely on external auditors — as others do — and we also lean on our own expertise. We have a great team, who over the last month have got together for a couple of days and worked in sub-teams to interrogate the code and identify bugs. We’ve also (spoiler alert) been working on our own tools for code coverage painting that we plan to open-source for the wider community so that we can all benefit.

Estimating timelines

All of this has meant we’ve got our timelines wrong. It’s hard generally to estimate timelines, and given how new this type of development is, it’s even tougher.

Mischa will be writing in much more detail about this in an upcoming blogpost. The good news is that we’re learning! And we’re much closer to moving to external alpha testing (think weeks not months) so if you are interested — please sign up here.

DevCon Prague

Some of the TokenTeam will be attending DevCon Prague at the end of this month, if you happen to see any of us, please say hi — we would love to meet you!