There has been interesting occurrences in the blockchain ecosystem lately. Most notably, Bitcoin price attained new record high, peaked at over $17,000 at the time of writing. And then, Kitties got so big it took up a significant portion of the Ethereum network. As of Wednesday, CryptoKitties have taken up more than 13% of the power on Ethereum network. Players have also spent approximately $6 million and counting buying Kitties, with the highest fetching over $100,000.

Of course, those are not the only interesting things that have happened, because we’ve made pretty good progress at Kyber Network.

Technical development

Reserve

Simulation environment

We completed our simulation environment implementation and it is now fully capable of performing quick simulations trades that span across several days in minutes. The simulation environment allows us to quickly test trading strategies without putting our funds at risk.

Mainnet experiment

We conducted the first experiment of our system on Ethereum mainnet with real Ether and OMG tokens. For the semi-automated experiment, Binance was deployed as the source of inventory for rebalancing and price discovery. To minimize risk of loss of funds, we only used 5 ETH and performed operations manually.

The exchanges between tokens were executed with a private version of our wallet website. While all reserve decisions were done by our system, some steps were interjected manually so our engineers could closely monitor it. In subsequent weeks, as we gain better understanding of each step, we will gradually automate our experiments on mainnet.

Here are some Etherscan snippets from the mainnet experiment. Unfortunately, at this point we cannot reveal the contract addresses as they are intended for internal use only.

A user exchange of 0.1 ETH in return of 5 OMG

A user exchange of 17 OMG in return of 0.36 ETH

Reserve Manager Dashboard UI

As our goal is to have an open-source reserve management system that can be used by many liquidity providers. As such, we have engaged an experienced system designer to help us attain the objective of providing a convenient GUI to enable the control of different parameters of the system and to monitor the status of the system.

What was done in the last 2 weeks:

Completed non-zero time simulation environment

Mainnet first experiment. The system ran for several minutes on Ethereum mainnet and Binance exchange. User bought and sold (via internal deployment of our wallet website) OMG tokens, which triggered reserve operation on Binance and on the blockchain. Overall 5 ETH were used. There were no losses aside gas expenses. However, there were many more issues discovered and they will be resolved in the coming weeks

Analysis of expected KN volumes, sizing quantities, quoting windows, spread calculation

Wallet

New design

Following initial feedback on our first design, we have engage with a new web designer to improve the look and feel of our website. The new designer introduce a new banner that shows user balances,

and an improved design for the exchange gadget.

MetaMask and raw private key support

Our wallet now supports all 5 standard ways to import private keys.

3rd party wallet integration

We have completed the initial integration with imToken and Trust wallets. For this purpose, we are maintaining a couple of servers to allow the Kovan testnet deployment.

What was done in the last 2 weeks:

Server to cache history and rate

Tests on mainnet

Mainnet internal deployment

Smart contracts

Design discussions

We evaluated requirements from other potential reserve managers, and we are delighted to mention that the requirements are still aligned with what we had intended to implement, namely better on-chain security mechanism and more subtle on-chain pricing options.

Smart contract developer

We introduced Ilan in the last progress update, and he is currently learning our system and started writing contracts that are used for our simulation environment. In the following weeks, Ilan will start working on the production contracts.

What was done in the last 2 weeks:

Learning and implement mock contracts for the simulation environment (Ilan)

Mainnet deployment for the experiment

Community and partnership

Beyond Block Taipei

Loi was invited to speak at a blockchain meetup in Taipei. Using this occasion, Loi showcased the initial concept of Kyber Network wallet through a live demonstration, and it was very well-received. In case you’re wondering how easy it is to use Kyber Network wallet, you may find out about it in the video below.

Post-Blockshow Asia Dinner

November was a busy month in Singapore. In less than 2 weeks after Singapore FinTech Festival, CoinTelegraph’s very own Blockshow Asia drew a nice crowd to the island nation. Many notable projects were in town, and we hosted a dinner at The Naked Finn to welcome some of our friends. Attendees include members from Medibloc, Hyperexchange, Kambria, BPK and FBG.

Asia Pacific Ethereum Meetup (Shenzhen)

Shortly after Blockshow Asia, Loi and TN travelled to Shenzhen to attend the Asia Pacific Ethereum Meetup, organized by our friends at LinkTime. Attended by 300 members, Kyber Network shared the stage with other popular projects such as OmiseGo, Olympus Labs, and Bluzelle and some members from the Ethereum Foundation.

Loi on stage

Loi in backstage with Shuyue (LinkTime), Vitalik (in Kyber Network tee), and Jon (Ethereum Foundation). Everyone looked… interesting.

Token Summit (San Francisco)

As you can tell by now, Loi is omnipresent. So immediately after Shenzhen, Loi headed to San Francisco to participate Token Summit as a speaker. Loi was in the panel with Will from 0x and Thomas of OmiseGo, which discussed about the prospects and challenges of decentralized exchanges.

Image credit to Lendroid

Partnership

Over the past 2 weeks, we were happy to announce our partnerships with major wallet providers. We first announced the imToken partnership on December 3 in Shenzhen, and the news was picked up by major Chinese crypto-media publications including coindaily.io and chainfor.com. In the same event, we displayed a demo of Kyber Network token conversion service that is embedded within imToken in work.

In San Francisco, Loi also unveiled our partnership with Trust wallet. Trust is an Ethereum wallet available worldwide on iOS and Android with a significant user base in the US, UK, and Russia. It fully supports all ERC20 tokens and offers a user-friendly interface with convenient backup.

Engagement

As part of our engagement with our community, we have recently started a Telegram group (@kybernetwork) to allow an outlet for users to discuss anything Kyber Network related. In a little over a week, our group’s membership grew to over 3,000 people and counting.

In the same week, both Loi and TN took part in 2 AMA sessions to answer questions that were posted by members of our community, with the help from Lewis for Reddit AMA and Seokwon for Korean AMA (Telegram ID: @kyberkorea).

Lastly, to celebrate the success of our Telegram group, we organized a sticker contest for members to contribute creative sticker designs so that we can personalize Kyber Network’s group. More information about the sticker contest can be found here, and if you are a good designer and would like to win some KNC, please participate in our sticker contest.

Hiring

We are pleased to announce a new addition to Kyber Network team. Lewis Abela is the new Marketing Communications Manager, and will be responsible for engagement and communication activities for Kyber Network. Formerly a senior moderator of NEO, he was instrumental in growing the membership of the company’s subreddit from 2,000 members to 40,000 members. His first initiative at Kyber Network is the ongoing sticker contest, which has already seen over 100 comments.