With just weeks to go until the official Zinc launch, we certainly haven’t spent August reclined with a beer on a sun lounger 🌞. It’s been all hands to the deck and one of our busiest and most rewarding months yet. Here’s a recap on how things unfolded.

Testnet

At the end of July, we launched the product onto the Ropsten TestNet and at five weeks in, it’s looking very positive. We’ve received some great feedback from both large and small companies as well as our advisors and found no major bugs 🐛. All feedback has been analysed and actioned where appropriate and the aptitude and attitude reports have been redesigned to the new specification. Internal testing has been finalised are we are very close to opening the product up to community testing. A new video will be uploaded shortly.

Feedback

As many of you know, we have had potential customers testing the product and this month received some great feedback from Kieran Dodd, Global Leadership Recruitment Manager, Booking.com. As one of the largest travel e-commerce companies in the world, that prides itself on being technology led, we were very keen to hear what Kieran had to say:

“I tested out Zinc and it’s really user-friendly, good looking software. I’m looking forward to seeing how this product develops.”

We’ve also had a few in-depth discussions with one of our advisors, Alexandra Kelly (The Ex-MD of the biggest referencing company in the world) who said of the platform:

“I have been working with the Zinc team on the development of the automated referencing form and I am confident that they are on the right track and that the form will elicit useful information to managers and recruiters. The development of the form is streamlined, clear and concise and there are innovations incorporated in the form that I have not seen previously in the industry.”

We continue to work with Fabian Vogelsteller another one of our advisors, to whom we spoke about the launch of the Zinc’s new proposed identity protocol and plans for the next few weeks. We’re very lucky to have such a wealth of knowledge at our disposal and look forward to working with Fabian as we progress further.

Website

Alongside the launch of the product we have been making some significant changes to the website.

We’ve consolidated important information regarding the ZINC Token, the Crowdsale and the utility of the token into a new page on the website. Our designer Josh has been hard at work masterminding a very impressive homepage redesign and we are hoping to publish a comprehensive new support page to sit alongside the product. This will help answer any user questions and provide a smooth journey for all website visitors. We are also working on a ‘stories’ section to the website in time for the launch. Final changes to the design will be revealed this month.

Zinc in the news 🗞

As news of Zinc spreads, we are thrilled to have appeared in a number of news outlets over the past few months and we are seeing Luke called upon more frequently for his take on all things crypto. A couple of recent examples below.

Here’s one that was published last week in The Express.

We also achieved two by-line articles with Comparethecloud and Hackernoon:

Technical update

A lot has been achieved in August particularly from a technical standpoint. The team have worked on the decentralised login, the changes to the aptitude and attitude reports as well as the event proofs. They have also worked on other aspects within the product including implementing various helper functions including an example reference and profile page to make it easier to navigate the platform. Blockchain transaction links have been embedded into the platform as well as LinkedIn links on verified profiles. Here’s a bit more detail:

Decentralised login

The team have spent timedesigning the architecture and implementing the decentralised login. This involved designing a bespoke identity contract for Zinc users which will interface with the Zinc identity platform, implementing decentralised PKI authentication logic and extending the front-end dApp to handle web3 enabled sign-up and login.

The decentralised login has now been deployed and it’s been successfully tested. The team have worked very hard to get it finished, you can view the article with more information here:

Event proof

The ‘work proof’ functionality has been deployed and the changes are ready for ETH Berlin on the 7th September. Own previously inaccessible work proof information. Zinc’s progressive platform allows you to hold proof of any hackathons, courses, bounties, open-source or assessments collected whilst interviewing as interview proofs.

Zinc architecture

Over the past month, we have been busy designing and implementing trustless smart contracts written in Solidity. Ali Azam from the core team wrote an article explaining the architectural decisions made and lessons learnt along the way. Read it here.

2 x hackathons in 2 x weeks

Ali Azam from the core Zinc team mentored at Looms Blockchain Game Hackathon and the ENS Hackathon in August. Ali Azam mentored alongside some big names including Will Harborne from Bitfinex and Nick Johnson from ENS. The Zinc team were also in attendance at the ENS event, discussing technical improvements for ENS which ties in nicely with the ground-breaking work the team are currently doing.

ETH Berlin

Zinc has been selected to be an official dApp used at ETH Berlin. Zinc will be used over the weekend alongside, Golem, Status, Aragon, Peepeth, ENS, Gitcoin and Livepeer. The objective of Zinc being used as an official dApp at ETH Berlin is for attendees to take proofs of what they’ve learnt and achieved over the weekend home with them. Zinc will be deploying mainnet ERC725 identities & ENS subdomains to the ETH Berlin participants.

A date for your diary…

We’ve set a public launch date again to work towards of the 17th of September. This will enable us to push through the changes in the technical sprint that we wanted to achieve.