In the past two weeks, we have gotten many exciting tasks on multiple fronts done. We have made significant progresses in regards to technical development, community outreach, partnership and hiring.

Technical development

Reserve Platform

Reserves in Kyber Network is key to ensure liquidity within the network. Towards the mainnet launch, the main challenge is to optimize our re-balancing (trading) strategies. So on that front, we will start testing several strategies with real money to determine the efficiencies and effectiveness of each strategy. This evaluation/testing process is an ongoing process, even after the mainnet launch.

One other challenge is to make the trading system more robust and secure. We will enhance security features as we increase the amount of funds the system holds, and increase its robustness to ensure maximal up time, both for the trading performance and for auditing and accounting purposes (all operations must be logged).

What was done in the last 2 weeks. We started to factor the original reserve implementation and are working on 4 main layers:

Primitive layer: the primitive layer handles all the low level communication with other exchanges and the blockchain network. It will hold all the centralized exchanges API keys and reserve managers’ Ethereum private key. In the last two weeks we implemented the blockchain communication and started to implement an interface with Liqui exchange.

Data layer: the data layer will fetch relevant data from the market in order to facilitate price discovery and re-balancing strategy. In the last two weeks we implemented data fetching module from 5 centralized exchanges.

Analytic layer: the analytic layer instructs the primitive layer with sell/buy instructions, based on the data it gets from the data layer. In the last two weeks, we implemented a basic price discovery module and started to implement very naive re-balancing strategy.

Centralized exchange simulator: in order to test our system we must simulate the behavior of centralized exchanges. In the last two weeks we started to implement the simulator and we plan to first simulate Liqui exchange.

Wallet

Kyber wallet will provide an easy interface for exchange and payment services. As a strategic decision, we have decided that the first mainnet launch will only include the exchange function, and payment services will be added subsequently when the use case becomes more valid (e.g., when more dApps require native token usage fees).

What was done in the last 2 weeks.

Redesign of the new exchange website to make it more user friendly and easier to use. The website will allow users to see more information like updated rates of popular token pairs, make it easier to configure gas limit/ gas price for the transaction.

The main page of our new exchange website. We will modify morebefore the mainnet release

Our exchange website will support hardware wallets like Trezor and Ledger Nano. You will be able to trade with Kyber Network from your own hardware wallets.

You can either import your private key, or work directly with your hardware wallets.

What we plan to do:

Have a fully functional token exchange website and deploy/ test it with a small group of users.

Support third-party wallets’ integration with our wallet so users can do exchange directly from their favourite wallets.

Smart contracts

The smart contracts provides the gateway to Kyber Exchange and a place for the Reserve to store its tokens. In addition, we use a smart contract wallet to facilitate advanced payment services.

What was done in the last two weeks:

For now we only add minor features to support the integration of the reserve and wallet (it should be noted that a functional smart contract system was already deployed on testnet).

Community and Partnership

Loi Luu and TN Lee had had a good trip to Korea to meet several companies and projects there. Both also attended and presented at two meet-ups organized by Coinnest (Coinnest Cam up) and our partner Blockchain Partners Korea (the Hashed Lounge event). We are happy to experience the exciting crypto scene in Korea for the first time and the strong support Kyber Network receives from the community in Seoul.

Loi Luu presented KyberNetwork at #HashedLounge event

Kyber Network will spend more efforts and do more activities to improve our brand in Korea. The most immediate action will be establishing more long-term partnerships with companies, projects there so that we can easily penetrate the market.

Last week we also hosted Pantera Capital in Singapore. A small private meetup was organized with attendees from all major projects in Singapore, Polkadot, and Smart Contract Japan.

TN hosted Paul Veradittakit from Pantera Capital

Partnership. We recently announced our first post-token sale partnerships with two promising and reputable projects, namely WAX token and Enigma. Our goal is to establish more relationships to key players in the ecosystem to drive more traffic to Kyber Network in our mainnet launch.

Hiring

As mentioned in our last update, we have just hired five more people. One of them is the talented trading analyst- Spyros Vrettos, who goes by the handle of Southerner on our Slack channel. Four other hires are developers including Gia Nguyen, Tuan Nguyen, Duc Tran, and Huy Tran. You can see all of our team of 12 people (excluding advisors) on our website now. We are still hiring more developers, business and marketing people to speed up the development and establish more key partnerships.

We also recruited a new intern, Alex Xiong who just finished his internship at Consensys this summer. Alex is working independently on a side project that builds off-chain trading channels. We will update everyone more about the project and Alex’s findings in the future.