This week, we’re excited to release a demo of our crowdfunding smart contract as well as a video demo! Before the demos, we’d like to give some general information about our goals and vision for Boost.

Background

Boost is our crowdfunding platform hosted on the ELIX mobile app. A creator is someone on Boost who wants to fund an idea for a project. A host is anyone promoting or enabling that creator to reach a broader audience. On our platform ELIX, LLC is the host.

Projects will undergo an approval process before appearing on our platform to prevent scammers from taking advantage of our users. We’d also like to give creators with great projects a chance to interact with our community beforehand — perhaps in the form of an AMA, demo or livestream. This would allow our users to ask specific questions about the goals or technicalities of each project. Rather than trusting someone else’s judgement, we want each of our users to understand what they’re getting in return.

Demo

As we promised last week, we’ve provided a video to demonstrate how easy and simple it is to choose a particular proposal. Additionally, users will be able to see a list of all their selected projects in the “Favorites” section of the Boost platform. When projects are successfully funded, users will also be informed of each project’s success, and what the project’s creator’s next steps will be.

Smart Contract Demo

Our crowdfunding testnet demo is out! You can try out the smart contract via our testnet scenarios here. There are five scenarios already included:

Successful maximum funding campaign (multiple users). Minimum goal reached and funding distributed (multiple users). Insufficient funding (single user). Minimum goal = maximum goal (single user). Insufficient funding (multiple users).

You can run as many scenarios in combination as desired. The smart contract will keep track of all relevant funding information. Use the documentation to understand how to interact with the contracts and create your own scenarios. You can view sample results of each scenario here. With our crowdfunding smart contract completed, we’re moving quickly toward Alpha stage.

Silicon Valley Ethereum Meetup

Last Sunday, Stanford hosted a talk on Ethereum smart contract security. David had the chance to attend this presentation. The talk was given by security researcher Yan Michalevsky and titled “Ethereum Bugs Through the Lens of Formal Verification.” The presentation focused on implementing mechanisms to catch smart contract vulnerabilities before contracts are deployed to the blockchain. The proposal in the talk was to incorporate formal verification in the deployment process to ensure that all contracts passed certain security tests. If contracts incorrectly implemented callbacks, for example, miners could reject the bytecode from such contracts. This might seem financially disadvantageous — but there is an argument to be made that miners might choose to reject such bytecode to increase the security of the network as a whole and prevent bugs similar to that in the infamous DAO contract. If miners decided not to adopt such tools, these security checks could also be done by each developer before attempting contract deployment. This is an evolving area, but there is general consensus that additional tools for verifying the security of smart contracts would help ensure stability of the Ethereum network.

App Design

For the app, we’ve decided to work with the same designer who designed our website. We’ve been impressed with their clean and concise work, and look forward to sharing their progress throughout the design process. We had them create a simple prototype of the app user interface, and were pleased with the results. Here’s one example of their recent work:

The user interface focuses on a clean and minimalist look.

Development Team Expansion

We’ve hired another developer to speed up the app development process. Contracting another developer will allow us to move faster. We’ll also be meeting with AE.studio in the next few days, and will likely be working with them as well. This means there will be around four engineers working on the app over the next month. In combination with the design work underway, this should help bring our product to market much faster.