A cherished goal of ours is to be one of the best communicating crypto projects. A particularly interesting challenge is how to relay information about development progress in an understandable way while still maintaining a reasonable amount of depth. Technical updates can easily end up too broad, too detailed, or simply too technical. We’ve decided to have multiple approaches, each one catering to different tastes. Recently I promised three things on this front:

Regular software development updates An up-to-date view on Milestone 1 progress as a Trello board To open source our code on Github

All three forms of communication deliver their own kind of insight and level of detail. Last week we published our inaugural dev update blog. Over the coming months, these regular blogs will help to show the progress each individual developer has made to our overall goals, as well as track the growing throughput of the growing team.

Today we’re fulfilling our second promise: I’m launching the Streamr Milestone 1 Trello board. Unlike the dev updates, our Trello board will give our community a holistic overview of the steps we need to complete to reach Milestone 1.

As originally laid out in our whitepaper, Milestone 1 consists of four work packages (WPs) relating to different components of the overall Streamr system. In 2017 the dev team focused mostly on WP3 and WP4, or the Engine and Editor respectively. Why did we choose to do this? Well, the Engine and Editor are very visible and tangible parts of Streamr. Focusing on them allowed us to build interesting demos, crowdfund the project, and attract a user base currently over 8,500 strong! As you can see, much of both WP3 and WP4 have been completed already.

We’re now focusing on WP2, the first edition of the Marketplace. It will be up and running and in active use this year. The technical architecture is already planned out and our designers Matt and Saori are currently making good progress on the UI/UX of the Marketplace. We hope to share some teaser images soon. The dev team is working on the smart contracts and other backend components. Frontend work will commence once the first designs are ready.

After the Marketplace is out, we plan to shift development focus on WP1, the first version of the Streamr infrastructure based on P2P networking. As you know, currently Streamr runs on cloud (centralised) infrastructure, which we will aim to replace with a decentralised one. The idea of the decentralised P2P Network is quite clear, and most of it is well laid out in the Whitepaper, but there are many tricky implementation details to solve along the way. At the end of WP1, we’ll be able to swap out the current Network with the new version.

Each WP is a major months-long effort, but slowly and surely you’ll see the steps get checked in green as we are progressing towards completion of M1.

For the most detailed low-level view to our development, we’ll be open sourcing most of our codebase by the end of February, and you’ll be able to follow our Github. If you are a developer, we welcome contributions to the project, for example, new modules for the Engine.