Earlier this year, we were very excited to become the first project to submit a Melon funding proposal and see it accepted by the Melon Council DAO. Shortly afterwards, we published our 1 year roadmap. We feel that now is a good time to publish our first milestone report and share with the broader community what we’ve achieved in the last couple of months as well as some insight into what comes next. The milestone plan is divided into three phases and this blog will summarise the progress made during the first phase. Towards the end, we’ll give a brief overview about what we are working towards in phase II.

Before we begin, here’s a reminder of what we promised to achieve in Phase I:

Phase I as published in the 2019/20 roadmap blog:

Hopefully that serves as a reminder and gives some background context for those of you who are newer to Ash! Let’s tackle the development side of things first…

Main Milestone: Public Beta on Kovan

Conduct Alpha user interviews

23 User surveys were conducted during the alpha

Feedback regarding functionality, gameplay, ease of use and trading experience was analysed and discussed internally.

An action plan was devised and put into action

What did we learn from the surveys?

There were three main take-aways we got from the user feedback and surveys:

Users complained about difficult on-boarding process; Users found the trading interface design confusing; Users felt there was insufficient data provided on trading charts; Usage data: asset list view got significantly more usage than asset circles

Action! A list of complete Beta backlog tasks

Based on the above feedback, our action plan was clear. Here is a list of tasks we completed before launching the beta:

Sign-up process (include mnemonic, terms & conditions etc.)

Sign-in process

Forgotten password flow

Simplified UI design with better explanations, simplified design and navigation

Improved filter options & charting

Switch of all Melon calls from our back-end on Elastic Beanstalk, to direct app-to-blockchain calls

Switch from mobile OS alert notifications to our own notification style

Preparations for new settings menu

Release Ash Beta in App Store & Google Play Store

Once these improvements were implemented, Ash Beta was released in the Apple Testflight store and Google Play Store and is open to external testers. We’re excited to hear your feedback and continue iterating on it. If you want to get started, here’s how:

Get it on Android: Google Play Store

Get it on iOS: Apple Testflight

We received 900 beta-signups pre-launch

Update on current development work

Before we begin, some exciting news on our side — our 8th team member, Willie (Twitter: @IEM_WLL ) has been added to the team. Willie has a special focus on blockchain and protocol layer and we’re excited to welcome him to the Ash team! Now let’s start with the dev-update:

Melon/Giveth Module R&D

This module allows users to make donations to DACs (Decentralized Altruistic Communities) on Giveth from their Melon fund

Giveth module test contract was deployed on Ropsten

Sending test transactions/donations to Giveth bridge on Ropsten was successful ( GivethBridge contract is deployed on the home chain. When donate functions are called, the sent value is locked in the bridge and an event is emitted. A node app will be watching for events and relay to the foreignChain, calling the deposit function. This will mint tokens and forward the donation to the liquidPledging contract)

The network graph of our fork from the melonproject/protocol. It reflects the different ways of integrating the module into the protocol.

One of our Ropsten deployments

One version of the test contract. The three transactions are donations which will be automatically forwarded to the giveth bridge.

The official Giveth test bridge on Ropsten Network. Three incoming donations from the test contract on Melon

The donations via giveth-dApp to the DAC “Just for Test” on develop.giveth.io (the two donations dated 07/08/2019. The third one was listed too far below).

Legal groundwork in preparation for main-net launch: fiat payment integration & KYC/AML

Initial discussions around the Ash concept has taken place with Swiss and Lichtenstein based law firms in order to analyse legal requirements for gaming/in app purchases and KYC/AML requirements under different legal jurisdictions.

We also conducted initial research on policies and classifications of Apple App Store / Google PlayStore.

Financials

The funds granted by the Melon Technical Council for this phase were fully used to cover development costs and enable the development and release of Ash Beta in the planned time frame. The remaining MLN grants for phase II and III have been/may be sold on an OTC basis to cover development costs. However, we’re aiming to be able to hold on to as many MLN as possible longer-term as the release of Ash on the Ethereum main-net comes up.

Update on Ash Beta

At the time of writing this blog, a total of 955 users have signed up for our Ash Beta and the Beta Tournament (info on the Beta Tournament here). Currently 128 active users are registered and have created a mix (Melon fund) on Ash. You can track the activity on Melon and Ash with this monitoring tool which leverages the Graph protocol. All funds with names containing “Ash” are mixes that were created through the Ash mobile app and that currently run on Kovan.

Despite a rather low liquidity on decentralised exchanges, users can trade MLN, BAT, DGX, REP, ZRX, MKR, DAI and KNC (mainly against our trading bot). With increased activity and user numbers we see an average of three challenges played per person per day and we are still receiving signups daily.

By end of November a feedback survey will be distributed to all beta testers to complete this phase of Ash Beta. During the winter months we will constantly work towards making improvements, bug-fixing and adding new features in order to get ready for the Beta Tournament.

Outward looking… what can you expect next?

Development & open sourcing of mobile & desktop interface

remodel Ash interface as generic version for mobile

develop generic Ash interface version for desktop

set up a design system

documentation

Open up on Github

Development & open sourcing of Giveth module

module to invest in the Giveth DAC

documentation

Open up on Github

Please note that most parts of our development are not publicly visible on our Github at this time. This will change with the completion of the open source interfaces and Giveth module by end of December.

Ash Hackathon

The Ash hackathon will start this December and will last throughout Q1 2020. Signups will be available through our homepage. We will make sure to let you know before it starts.

General Development:

Copy-trading module R&D

Multi-Manager Funds module R&D

Challenge module & XP token R&D

Development of fiat payment integration

Legal groundwork in preparation for main-net launch: social trading license Lichtenstein/United Kingdom

Beta maintenance

Questions or Feedback?

Telegram

Twitter

Email

The next milestone report will be due by end of December 2019/early January 2020 . Stay tuned!