This is our regular weekly update on the tech advancement on the alpha marketplace.

The LockChain Marketplace is growing with every week according to plan

The reason why we are making the announcement today is because there were some post-deployment bugs that we had to take care of.

This sprint was extremely important because we did a massive performance optimization on the platform. The upgrade was made through code restructuring and through a hardware migration. As a result, our marketplace is now lightning fast.

Here is the list of the features/fixes that were applied:

Massive performance optimization. Homepage and search results now load for approximately 0.57 seconds. Listings pages also load instantly, with the reason why there is slight delay is because we do a real-time double check in order to see if the property is available

- Fixed front-end bugs with the interface for listing new property

- Fixed the slow load speed of Create & Edit Listing, Edit user profile.

- Fixed bug with display of listings descriptions

- Improved the Calendar selection click/style

- Resolved loading issues with Error 403 from Cloudflare DDOS proteciton layer

- Improve Homepage load speed

- Fixed bugs with dots being shown on pagination buttons on search results fron-end

- Fixed the image upload size

- Added the possibility to modify default daily price from within the calendar page. Changing the price resets all custom prices

- Fixed chage of currency bug

- Many additional backend issues that were cluttering the platform

We are also happy to announce that we have already began preparation on the hotels integration.

The first step that we plan to make is to upgrade the overall GEO-location intelligence of our platform. Travel is geo-location sensitive, which is why it is extremely important to make the process of listing a property, and searching for properties in cities from around the world a smooth experience. We will solve that through smart integration with Google Maps. Whenever someone types their address when listing a property, it will be cross checked with the dynamic database of Google maps API and a suggestion will be shown that shows the specific match.

This also ensures that all properties will have a properly placed pin on their interactive map.

In addition to the above, we are planning the following:

Integration with the 100,000 hotels with global booking coverage

Integration of built-in private wallet management — this means that we are going to be aiming for a release that will bundle the hotels service and the possibility to manage your own LOC wallet / and initiate payments directly from within the marketplace. Wallet creation will be mandatory upon registration and everyone will be able to add LOC to their wallet on the alpha marketplace. This will also provide us with the possibility to offer a full check-out experience.

Change to cities based type-in search with autocomplete functionality

The above features are planned over the course of the next 3–4 sprints and it is likely that we won’t be making a deployment every week because this is going to be a major release.

Stay close for more updates and thank you for your continuous support!