(1) How have things have been going at OST?

JASON: We have been very much focused on building real solutions. Our number one KPI at OST is not how many people bought a token this week, it’s not the price of the token. Our number one KPI is 50 solid customer success stories, meaning really functional token economies. We say if we can get 50 highly functioning token economies, that’s a proof point for us to build on for a long, long time.

Basically the last six months we’ve been focused on four things.

Number one is team. When we ended our ICO (in December 2017), we had a software development team who had a lot of experience in web development, in application development, and we had a burgeoning blockchain technology science team that Ben was leading. We were about 24 or 25 people, and mostly on the engineering side. Since the ICO, we’ve now grown the team to over 50 people covering all facets of the business, including commercial aspects of the business. So we have teams in Hong Kong, New York, Berlin, and India, and we’re focused not just on building the solutions but also in signing up partners, companies to work with us on those solutions. Number one has been the team, so getting the team in place.

Number two has been the technology. Ben will walk through what we’ve been working on on the technology, and the very big vision that we have regarding technology.

Number three has been on the partner side. One of the things that we’re really proud of when it comes to OST is that we’ve been building with our partners, and announcing real partnerships and working with partners to build on the technology. This is a critical component of our solution set, blockchain technology is in the very early days today, and it’s going to take a very long time for some of it to emerge. Even the things that our customers start to use in the next few months will still be many, many years in development as they get more and more perfected and add more and more features and capabilities. I’ll talk through the longer-term roadmap in a bit as well. Building with partners has been an essential part of our strategy from the very beginning, so that we’re not building in a vacuum. You may have seen that we have announced about 30 partners. There’s others that we haven’t announced yet.

Some of the larger partners that we’ve announced are companies like Unsplash, which has over five billion photo views per month. We announced last week a partnership with FinComEco to do some amazing work on a token in Africa. We’ve got some other great partnerships lined up as well. With each of these partners that we have announced, the first step is working with them on technology, working with them on integration, working on planning a token economy, and that’s the same thing that we’re doing publicly right now in our alpha phase two, where we’ve had 250 development teams apply to be part of Alpha Phase II. 142 teams were selected, and 85 of them have basically met the first hurdle and it looks like they’re also meeting the second hurdle to submit a POC integration with Alpha II of the OST solution.

Number four is community. The fourth leg of our stool in building out our strategy is to build with the community. We’re very thankful for community support and for pushing us and to continue to ask great questions. We can’t do this alone. We need your help. We need the community support, and it is an area that we are pledging to do much more of in the future is to come back to the community and involve the community more, and have a much more larger presence in the role of the community. We’re going to be doing more blockchain and Ethereum meetups and meetings. We’re doing this AMA today. We’re doing one next week in New York with Betaworks, which we just announced. You can expect a lot more of seeing OST out there with the community as we move more and more towards customers and companies using our solutions.