ELIX as a company and an idea has grown quickly over the past few months. What started as a short smart contract with a simple idea has developed into a startup requiring work in product design, consumer research, and smart contract and app development. We want to thank our community for supporting us throughout these early stages.

The Next Stage

It’s important that as a company progresses, the team is able to focus full time while they iterate on an idea. Especially in early stages, being able to develop in house around the clock helps increase a company’s chance of success. This also allows founders to attend tech meetups, travel to events, or attend any other company related meetings.

At this time ELIX is welcoming a new tech lead: Melanie Plaza. Plaza is a graduate of Yale University and a full stack developer with experience in consulting, Solidity, early stage startups and (believe it or not!) she understands how self driving cars work. She’s been a CTO at To The Tens, cofounder at Crunchbutton, full stack developer at Vyu, Inc. and has done research at Mt. Sinai and Yale Univeristy. The Crunchbutton team later became the basis for the development and data science team at AE.studio.

This position for tech lead was originally offered to Safi, but due to other aspects of his life outside of ELIX, he needed to decline the offer. In an amicable parting, the company has worked out an agreement with Safi that recognizes his outstanding contributions to ELIX at an early stage.

Plaza’s Previous Work On ELIX

Prior to focusing on ELIX, Plaza worked at AE.studio, where she developed automated tests for the ELIX smart contracts. This means she already has in depth knowledge of how our contracts function and even helped design and implement several of their features. Additional experience with mobile development makes her an ideal candidate to move ELIX quickly into the Beta stage. We’ve updated our website with information about Plaza’s background — be sure to clear the cache for the latest version of the website. Also be sure to check out her LinkedIn as well for her past experience with startups. She has a lengthy list of endorsements, a strong network of startup connections, and experience using growth hacking techniques to grow initial user bases.

With two cofounders able to work together full time on ELIX, progress on all aspects of the company should increase significantly. We are also now working in a dedicated space reserved exclusively for ELIX, LLC, allowing us to test and iterate on ideas in house and make any improvements and changes immediately. We hope our community is as excited about taking this project to the next stage as we are!

Design

Wireframes and prototype designs are completed! Now, it’s time to add color. Below, we show a few previews of the upcoming designs.

When scrolling down, the user sees a single floating transaction button:

When tapped, that floating transact button shows the following send, receive and cancel options:

Sign Up For The Beta!

Sign up for ELIX mobile Beta at the top of our homepage! Enter your preferred email and select either iPhone or Android — then click submit. We’ll send an invite when the Beta is ready! Be sure to clear your cache to get the latest version of the website.

Development Demo

Numerous improvements have been made on the app recently. In particular, we’ve added additional functionality to our crowdfunding platform. Users are now able to filter and sort through projects easily to discover ones aligned with their interests. We have some ambitious plans for Boost so stay tuned over the next few weeks to hear more! Check out our demo video below showing the new sorting and filtering features in Boost:

Collateralized Smart Contracts

Borrowers can now make generic loan requests that can be accepted by any lender. We’ve also just completed the first version of our upcoming collateral smart contracts. These contracts allow borrowers to post collateral in a smart contract when requesting a loan. This collateral contract interfaces with our lending token manager, allowing decentralized lending. We view this as a useful bridge until accountability and identity solutions are developed. The collateral smart contract can handle any Ethereum token as collateral, and will adjust collateral claims for defaults to reflect the percentage paid of each loan — distributing the correct proportions to both borrower and lender. For example, if a borrower only pays back 25% of a loan, that borrower can only reclaim 25% of their posted collateral. Borrowers can post an arbitrary number of different Ethereum tokens and amounts as collateral for any one loan.

We’re focused on implementing new designs and features in our app over the next few weeks! Stay tuned via our social channels below for frequent updates.