Development

Since Valdas (our lead developer) has started to dedicate his full time towards Mysterium network, together with Robertas he started to lead the development process, which is currently in the “setting up and proof of concept” stages.

We are implementing an Agile development process, starting with 1 week sprints, this will change into two week sprints as work load increases.

Meeting with Ričardas

After initial research — development team decided to steer towards creating proof of concept of Payment system. The team had multiple meetings with Ričardas (our protocol designer on the right) deciding on best course of action towards making Payments work.

While you may not see any actual GitHub activity yet — that is because our team is working on the R&D, researching and setting up frameworks, researching and testing required libraries, etc... The result of current stage will provide us with a clear knowledge which technologies to use and how to use them in order to create functioning payments and to prepare frameworks on top of all the work that is being done.

As we mentioned in our Slack channel, at some point we are thinking of making sprint meetups available via Google Hangout (or some other form) so that everyone could see our discussions and possibly interact with the team.

Paying Bounties and setting up initial structure

As you may know — we have already paid out larger part of bounties. What you may not know is that we might be one of the first projects placing immense effort into making it in a secure way. There were over 300 separate people who participated in our bounty program before the token sale and in order to pay earned bounties we decided to collect signed agreements from each one. All assets in any form: ETH, MYST or as Fiat currency — are accounted for via a legal entity and we decided to treat them with proper care. Setting up this process took quite some time, as we needed to form legal ground for it. Just to show the amount of effort that went into it — we worked with three different legal firms on that.

Aside from Bounty — we have worked extensively on setting up initial structure during this period. As you may know — we have not performed KYC, which represent significant challenges in legal world. We didn’t perform KYC not because we were lazy to go along with all the needed procedures — but because in our core belief is that it simply doesn’t make sense in crypto space. Imagine if we would have performed KYC for every token sale participant and the moment MYST tokens hit exchanges, everyone could sell it to someone anonymous, or could simply sell tokens “on the street”. Once that happens — all the work done performing a proper KYC instantly loses it’s value. It’s just not designed for crypto space.

This process slowed us a bit more than we initially expected. We admit out guilt, but we see a light — in about a month we will be able to significantly speed things up, as setting up structures is in it’s final phase. Again three lawyer consultancy firms help us with this process.

Roadmap

There are three stages that we plan to build Mysterium in:

Stage 1 (estimated for late 2017 or early 2018):

Protocol: it will include all the necessary elements Payments & Accounting, Identity Management and Discovery.

Applications: There will be an initial version of Node, Client .

Business benefit: First external nodes, accompanied by early stage users of Mysterium Client.

Legal: Aim is to create solid protection of node operators in at least 1 country.

Stage 2 (estimated for late 2018 or early 2019):

Protocol: will see major improvements followed by opening it up for external use.

Apps: continuous improvements of both Node and Client applications, finding target user for such app and designing UX for this user.

Business benefit: real usage of Mysterium applications starts in this phase, goal is to understand the cases and grow marketshare. In this phase we plan to start activelly working with other projects integrating Mysterium protocol. This cooperation will provide us with essential information/feedback translating into improvement of the protocol.

Legal: We expect to have legal protection for at least 3 more countries. This will provide us with legal framework, in depth knowledge and future roadmap.

Stage 3 (estimated for late 2019 or 2020)

Protocol: all elements — completely Decentralized and open for external use. Continuous improvements.

Apps: Continuous improvement and adaptation — matching our target group needs.

Business benefit:

By now we will understand Mysterium users, their problems and will have a product solving these problems. In this phase — we will start global scaling of Mysterium app usage.

Protocol will start bringing first fruits — as more projects start using it underneath their applications, as we improve the protocol based on identified needs.

Legal: in our Stage 3 our goal is to expand Node operation protection in at least 15 new countries.

Communication

While you may not know this, I am tracking our means of communication (Telegram, Slack, Twitter) every day or two, and I am briefing rest of the team internally, raising team awareness with most important and frequent questions coming from the community. This helps the whole team stay informed about what’s important to the community.