Afternoon all, and welcome to this week’s update from Lendingblock.

Business Development

Our co-founders Steve and Linda along with Risk and Reg guy Charlie Beach spent most of this week in Gibraltar, interviewing candidates for a couple of important meeting roles, looking for (and finding!) a great office space, talking with our lawyers and accountants about our regulatory approval process, and meeting with some of our fellow crypto business including Gibraltar Block Exchange. In between we also managed a couple of dawn hikes to the top of the rock to see the sunrise and the apes — be sure to check out our Instagram feed for pics.

Upcoming events

Steve and Charlie will be attending Consensus 2018 in NYC later this month. Consensus is arguably the global flagship event for blockchain businesses and people, and the team will be there flying the flag for Lendingblock. Our particular focus will be on meeting with our initial institutional users, and we hope to be able to make some partnership announcements in our next community update after the conference.

Steve will be part of a breakfast briefing panel on Crypto and Compliance on May 23rd, along with the CEO’s of Digax, Chainstarter, Coinsilium, Coinschedule, and BlockEx.

Team Update

Over the last two weeks, we have welcomed Gareth Lloyd as head of HR, and compliance expert Marc Plessier. We have continued to grow our development team which will be up to nine by the end of this month, and have three talented analysts from Goldman Sachs, EY and HSBC joining our product team over the next six weeks.

We also said a sad goodbye to JJ Frizell, who has been interning with us for the last three months. JJ has been offered a job with KPMG and is going to travel between now and his start date in September. Good luck JJ!

We are continuing to recruit for a number of permanent roles, and are close to finalising our General Counsel and Chief Marketing Officer positions.

Development Update

This sprint we are focused on the trading portal, order matching engine and the Rest API that will expose the services of the exchange. Included in this is support for market orders as well the limit orders that were previously developed.

We are also trialling several implementations for the oracles which allow us to operate across blockchains, and are a critical part of the post-exchange architecture to support loan initiation, margin calls, and loan settlement processes. We will release more details on this later.

We are also working on bringing our website in-house, which will make it easier for us to update, and as part of this will be refreshing some of the content (including the roadmap) now that the ICO is behind us.

Community

We have seen steady growth across our social media channels — we now have over 8000 members in the main Telegram group, over 200 followers on Reddit and close to 2800 followers on Twitter.

Following feedback from the exchanges, we will be focusing our efforts on growing the Asian community. We have already launched our WeChat group and begun to recruit community managers in Korea and Japan.

Our goal is to rapidly and universally grow our English speaking community as well as supporters in China, Japan and Korea by the end of the month.

We have launched the Telegram sticker contest and already had more than a few ideas submitted! The winners get $200 worth of LND and our hats in prizes. Check out more details here. The contest finishes on Sunday.

We also had the pleasure of hosting Ian Balina today, as part of his European tour. Ian is now the proud owner of a stylish Lendingblock hat.

Exchange Listings

Lendingblock (LND) has been successfully listed on Idex and HitBTC and you can trade it there using Ethereum.

We are in talks with a range of exchanges at the moment — we were provided some feedback in terms of community development that we will be acting on in the coming weeks.

LND has also been listed on CoinMarketCap (subsequently Etherscan reflects LND price), Blockfolio and Delta apps.

Links

Website: https://lendingblock.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/lendingblock

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lendingblock/

Telegram: https://t.me/Lendingblock