The IOST team has been hard at work this week with the leadership in San Francisco attending several industry events, forming partnerships and growing our development team. We have a couple big announcements today and will be using this opportunity to shift the timing of our weekly updates from Friday to Wednesday. We believe this change better suits the pace of the work week and will allow more of our audience the ability to see the updates going forwards.

We are happy to announce that IOST will be partnering with Dora, a hardware company that is focused on self-serve kiosks (documents & photo printing, vending machines, etc.). Dora is partnered with 500 universities and multiple major convenience store chains in China. It owns and operates approximately 10,000 kiosks in universities, communities, residential buildings, convenience stores and cafes. Moving forwards, Dora will be adopting the Internet of Services technology and helping IOST with its testnet building/testing and marketing with its intelligent kiosks.

Dora was originally founded by some of the IOST team members. It is currently run by a dedicated professional management team and all of the founders of IOST are working full time on building the Internet of Services. Although Dora and IOST share some common investors, IOST has also raised from 30+ new institutional investors including INBlockchain, FBG, DFund, Node Cap, Link VC, Nirvana Cap, Huobi, Metropolis, etc., during our private sale (we did not hold a public sale). All the funds raised for IOST will be used strictly for the development of IOST. Please note that IOST is a foundation based in Singapore, which is different from the corporation entity that represents Dora.

We are excited to be partnering with Dora as we believe it will allow us to demonstrate the real world advantages the Internet of Services makes possible. We have been in discussions with several companies, including Dora, that plan to build DAapps and gradually become important components of the IOST ecosystem. We will announce more of these partnerships in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, we welcome more companies and projects to join the IOST ecosystem. If you are interested, please shoot us an email at team@iost.io — we would love to hear your feedback about our technology and your application realm, in order to make IOST a better platform for more DApps.

Airdrop Update: We have now closed our second Twitter Referral Program and are in the process of validating all of the accounts that participated. Due to a truly staggering amount of supporters, we will be rolling out the airdrop over the next 3 weeks. We ask for your patience and are excited by the passion we have seen these past weeks.

Exchange Update: IOST is currently listed on Binance, Huobi.pro, OKEX, Bigone, CEX, CEO, DDEX, OTCBTC. Huobi.pro is opening up IOST/USDT and margin trading for IOST (a privilege that places us together with other major currencies like ETH, BCH, XRP, LTC, DASH, EOS, ETC, OMG, ZEC, QTUM, HSR). In the meantime, Huobi.pro is offering free transaction fees for IOST trading (by giving out free HTs to be used as transaction fees) for new users that register by Jan 31st. You can sign up here at: https://t.co/zB41frESAq. We are also in discussions with several other exchanges — stay tuned for more updates.

Social Media Update: Telegram has lifted the 50K member limit on our first telegram group https://t.me/officialios. If you are still in our 2nd telegram group, we now invite you to join our first group. In the meantime, this week over 100K new accounts people joined us on Twitter and we are thrilled to have a 200K+ twitter community!

Team Update: After visiting Stanford, Google and multiple DevCons in SF this week, we’ve made a handful of new recruitments! We also added a new advisor — Wei Guo from UpHonest Cap. Guo has invested in over 200 startups in Silicon Valley and was recognized in the Venture Capital & Big Money Startups categories of the Forbes 30 under 30. We will be updating our website later this week to include Guo and our new team additions.

Unfortunately, with success comes scams attempting to trick the unwary. This is a reminder that we will NEVER ask for your private keys or ask you to send money to us. Please report anything that you see doing this, as it is a scam. Additionally, all the Github repos currently posted are from third parties and are fake. We have not made our Github repo open source yet. We are going to gradually release more code on Github (starting from our work on PoB) and invite more developers from the community to review our code and give suggestions. Please understand that scalability is, in general, not an easy problem to solve. We are still in the process of coding, testing and rewriting our theories. We will be making sure our core development team gets things right before we get community devs involved — otherwise it could get very messy. We will be making more announcement about this and also the launch date of our testnet in the near future, please bear with us!