This past year passed incredibly quickly! It started out strong, with 2017’s year end ICO excitement trailing into the year. It gave us great momentum and energy going into 2018, and our team is incredible proud of the technological advancements, partnerships and overall progress we’ve made over the past year.

Technological Developments

Over the period of 12 months, we’ve made incredibly large strides in the technological backbone of what we built.

On the smart contract side, we developed multitoken payment channels, allowing the contracts to dynamically support ERC20 tokens. This functionality allowed all tokens to be sent to the same address, as well as significant gas reduction in new token functionality. A month later, we added WETH into these set of contracts, which allowed the UI to be identical from ETH to tokens. These same contracts underwent security audits soon afterwards.

On the crypto app side, all the screens were redesigned, with the ability to add return tokens, transaction history, and DAI. As part of our feedback from the crypto beta, we designed our cryptocurrency conversion screens to make it significantly more intuitive.

Our team also explored Bitcoin Lightning Network and its associated payment channels. This experience has been informative to say the least. We came to a new understanding of how the Lightning Network function in theory and in practice. It was fun, interesting and explorative, but as of right now the technology isn’t ready for a production level scalable solution.

Partnerships

We announced a variety of partnerships this year, including a partnership with MakerDAO. As such, we added support for their DAI token, a stable coin pegged to the US dollar.

Soon afterwards, STK partnered with OneLedger, a new generation of public chain protocol that provides highly efficient cross-chain engine. The combination of STK and OneLedger’s technologies will support instant cryptocurrency payments while enabling cross-chain transactions, allowing the system to reach a broader audience.

Followed by a partnership with ChainLink, the leading provider of secure oracles, to bridge the gap in bringing real life data into blockchain. Chainlink’s decentralized oracle will allow STK smart contracts to easily and securely connect to APIs, and send payments from our smart contracts to bank accounts.

Conferences and Workshops

STK attended numerous local and international conferences where our executive team attended and spoke on panels at the conferences, touching on subjects ranging from the future of banking to roadblocks the industry faces. We also demonstrated our payment channel at workshops and conferences, and connected with the community.

While we had Deconomy Distributed Economy in South Korea, and Consensus 2018 in New York, we also had a few local blockchain conferences in Toronto like EDCON. It was a fantastic place to meet developers and firms in the blockchain space.

Soon afterwards, STK was at the Blockchain Festival in Vietnam and Futurist Conference, where we demoed the app to the audience.

The months following were completely packed with more events, including the Global Digital Banking Conference, where our CEO, Miro Pavletic, was a closing speaker. Miro spoke on a panel discussing ‘Roadblocks in Blockchain’ at ELEVATE, Canada’s Tech Week which was held in Toronto. Within a few weeks, the team was invited to the MasterCard SMART Summit in Texas, where Miro discussed the ‘Future of Banking’. STK also attended Money 20/20 in Las Vegas where the team connected with other disruptors in the industry. Our blockchain developer Thomas Lui demoed the new conversion flow at CryptoCamp this past month, where he completed an STK to CAD conversion followed by a transaction in real-time.

Community Events

This year, our team attended many community-focused events allowing us to connect with blockchain developers in the city. In May, Thomas Lui demonstrated our payment channel in front of the Toronto Blockchain Community.

In October, Nat Chin and Thomas Lui participated in ETH San Francisco, building an end-to-end solution for cryptocurrency-based loans. At the hackathon, they ended up sweeping 3 sponsor prizes and connecting with a variety of different companies in the Bay Area; some of which include Chainlink and Wyre.

A week after ETH San Francisco, our blockchain developers mentored at U of T Blockfest, teaching participants about blockchain development.

After attending many different hackathons, we were inspired to run our own, STACKATHON, which was held at the STACK office in Distillery District, Toronto. We invited members of the community to participate, to create blockchain prototypes for 24 hours, whether they were new or experienced in blockchain. STACKATHON was intended to be a learning experience for the participants, with workshops to ramp the developers up to build a Dapp Prototype by the end. Overall, it was a wonderful experience for us to host our own hackathon and to connect with the talented blockchain community.

STK, STACK team and participants of STACKATHON.

In November, we introduced a new series called ‘Women in Fintech’, to spotlight each woman’s story, celebrate their accomplishments and open up the conversation about the challenges they’ve faced. Women are still underrepresented in Fintech, especially in leadership roles, despite pushes for diversity. The series, which will be released monthly, aims to inspire readers through each woman’s story as well as open up conversation and crucial topics.

We’d like to thank our community for the support throughout the year. We will continue to work on our vision in the New Year; to bridge between the two different and seemingly incompatible financial systems, Fiat and Cryptocurrency through our payment solution and strategic partnerships. As always, join the conversation anytime on Telegram, Twitter, Discord and Reddit. We wish you an incredible year ahead for 2019.