The past month has resulted in many improvements to the ACES Marketplace, including service search and filters, automatic capacity updates, a full security audit on the marketplace software, and increased networking and interest in using the platform for assisting launching and distributing ARK based tokens. As always, feel free to experiment with our beta software at https://marketplace.arkaces.com/

Service Search

With the addition of the search filter, you may now dynamically filter down to your desired services based on your given specification. This includes the Service Category, or utility type, which includes categories such as computing, identity, IOT, storage, transfer channels and smart contracts. The categories give some hints at the potential of the platform and what types of utility services we expect to see in the future. As you know, we already have transfer channels and smart contracts available for several coins. Using transfer channels as an example, you can now use the marketplace to quickly drill down to display only the services that meet your requirements.

In the example below, you can see how you might drill down to show only services that have at least 50 available capacity in either DARK or BTC, which also have a maximum flat fee of 1 and no percentage fee. Doing this displays the only two services that meet these criteria.

Automatic Capacity Updates

In combination with our security audit, we made several key improvements that are vital to the success of the platform. Automatic Capacity Updates means that the marketplace now regularly grabs a services actual available capacity to display on the site. As a service gets consumed, this available capacity will deplete. If a service provider adds capacity to their service, it will increase. This gives a better user experience for those who stay solely on a marketplace rather than visiting the service itself for more information. Dynamic service capacity is provided by the relevant blockchains, which means the ACES marketplace will provide a smooth user experience for blockchain utility services.

Increased Interest in Using ARK and ACES to Assist in Project Launches

We have been approached by several parties inquiring about using ARK’s push-button-blockchains in combination with ACES to assist projects with the launch and distribution models for their token. We believe this is a leading use case for ACES. As a result, we are working with several teams to learn more about their needs and how the ACES platform in combination with ARK can make this process extremely easy. Over the next several months, we hope to enhance ACES with an eye towards how to help independent projects with coin launching and the distribution process. As a result, we will be spending an increasing amount of time on deployment services and automation and then hope to assist teams to get up and running with their own marketplace and services for coin distribution.

What’s next

Our next few releases will include the creation of a marketplace admin panel, where marketplace owners can manage service registrations, listings, track statistics, and more. Soon afterwards, we will work on a marketplace launcher tool, which will provide users of a marketplace an easy interface for deploying new services with a few clicks.

If you are interested in launching an ARK blockchain and see the value in using ACES for your distribution model, or if you have an idea for a blockchain-utility-service and would like to add the service to a public suite of available tools, feel free to reach out and see how we may help you to achieve your goals on Slack arkecosystem.slack.com in the #ACES channel or reach out on reddit at /r/ArkEcosystem.