Welcome to Seattle! — A Modern Tech City

Long flights are never easy; but after traveling across the country to visit a new location, our team was extremely excited and ready to make a statement. Upon arriving to the modern and newly built Hyatt Regency in downtown Seattle, we felt welcomed immediately. The atmosphere was blaring with tech development as hordes of Microsoft individuals were everywhere due to another ongoing conference.

Entering the nighttime hours, we found ourselves encountering other groups attending the highly anticipated conference ahead of us. The team of professionals from NeoNewsToday accompanied us for a few drinks and memories at the hotel lounge. Across from us was Ted Neward, Pablo Junco and others foreshadowing the knowledge on deck for the weekend.

(Top Left) Neo Main Hall (Top Right) DevCon Entrance Set Up (Bottom) Early Flight across the United States

DAY 1 — Meet & Greet

Excitement, anticipation and curiosity loomed throughout the brand-new venue location chosen by NEO. In the morning hours of Day 1, the great supporting projects in the NEO ecosystem all introduced and engaged each other as we established our booth and demo areas. Bridge was on display, right in between NASH and Rubix Exchange. We observed some team members from Bittrex Exchange, Alchemint and our new friends at O3 Labs.

The Bridge booth display drew in an impressive amount of attention since the need of our service is now more prevalent than ever. Da Hongfei launched the morning with a visionary speech of NEO and its future as NEO 3.0 continues development. We found it interesting to see a different vibe at this year’s NeoDevCon compared to last year. Despite the bear market, this event had a very enjoyable maturity attribute and focus on development versus the traditional blockchain/cryptocurrency events we have observed in the past.

A break which included snacks, featured the famous Seattle Hotdog that Stephen had joked about at the beginning of the keynote presentation. The majority of us are east coast guys, so that was definitely a first time in our lives having a hotdog with onions and cream cheese on it… strange combination we must say!

But all kidding aside, the refreshments were divine and venue choice was excellent.

Towards the end of the day we were able to go on an interview blitz. The first interview started with the awesome guys of Crypto Beadles and Ready Set Crypto, which was then followed by the lovely Christina Comben of CCN/Bitcoinist. Right after the team spoke with Manual Medel of AMB Crypto and Carelin Garcia from CryptoNocias, who by the way traveled 16 hours to attend this event! The interviews were informative for all parties and our CEO, Stephen Hyduchak and CTO, Alex Guba were completely in sync with one another as we prepared for the heavily anticipated keynote presentation on Day 2.

After a successful first day at the conference, we were invited to join an exclusive dinner with the NEO team. During the dinner we were able to enjoy discussions with Dr. Chris Berg and Mitchell Moos. Proceeding dinner was the cocktail hour, in which we found ourselves sharing jokes and conversation with other developers. Da Hongfei delivered a brief speech of praise and encouragement for of all Devs to continue the immense work that brings the real value to the NEO ecosystem.

(Left Top) Stephen & Alex with Fabio Canesin of Nash (Left Middle) Andrew, Matthew, and Jesse discussing Bridge with event participants (Left Bottom) Crypto Beadles Interview with Stephen and Alex (Right) CTO and CEO walking to a 4th interview

DAY 2 — Announcements and Keynote!

The day began with tons of Seattle’s most infamous coffee-maker, Starbucks. Many visitors to the booth display expressed their viewpoints in how we differ, operate and sell identity services. Most importantly we had a keynote presentation which unveiled something truly special to our team that we have had to keep secret; Project Aver! The media team on site was outstanding with assisting our team with the presentation launch; which we do greatly appreciate. We also received a nice visit from Neo’s newest asset, John deVadoss, who will be leading NGD’s brand new Seattle office. Good luck John! Before entering the stage, our newest video was broadcasted for the community to absorb which drew massive excitement. Real life, real issues and Bridge being the real solution; the future of digital identity. Stephen and Alex entered the stage and delivered a strong keynote presentation explaining our market changing cost reductions for businesses, the ever disrupting regulatory landscape, and more.

Exciting information was explained by Alex announcing that Bridge will be publicly launching in March of 2019!

The open launch includes updates which now allow extension usage of the Bridge Passport in Brave, Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome and any other Chromium-based web browsers available.

Included with this update is the new network explorer and available integration samples and documentation. More excitingly, the announcement followed that Bridge Protocol will now become available for Open Source use. The Bridge SDK, browser extension, partner integration modules and containers will be available for the community to use for any need of a verification claim service. Whether this service is our specialty, Know-Your-Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money-Laundering (AML), or for example the need to simply verify the authenticity of a high school diploma, the tool will be available for those developers to cater to their project’s needs. This will now allow more uses of the Bridge utility token to be facilitated as the method of payment to process all claims types via the Bridge extension.

(Top Left) Alex & Nick Fujita of O3 Labs (Middle Left) Andrew, Matthew, Jesse & Alex at the Bridge booth (Bottom Left) Justin fielding questions about Bridge (Right) Stephen and John deVadoss discussing Bridge and project AVER

After explaining the public availability of Bridge Protocol, our newest development Project Aver was revealed on the big screens. Aver is the highest level of fidelity in digital verification. The technology features realtime identity verification which offers a cutting edge KYC/AML service for businesses of all levels whether federal, state or a private business. Aver has the capability of video and image analysis using assisted artificial intelligence for real time facial recognition, ethnicity, age, gender and native language detection. The system will also be able to identify geographic location!

Aver comes complete with the largest dataset on the market and most comprehensive watchlists for healthcare, finance and medical fields. Compliance checks also include terrorism, sex offender registries and sanctions lists just to name a few. Aver will substantially lower costs and increase its accuracy as it learns overtime. With this capability, Aver develops a faster response time for these checks to be verified, offering customers a premier KYC/AML verification service available on the market for 2019!

Ultimately this project is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to compliment the Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) we provide to the blockchain community. Aver will fundamentally give an excellent utility to bridge offering the full service of KYC and transitioning of businesses to use the tool (Bridge Passport) for their needs therefore encouraging the use of enterprise solutions on the blockchain. Aver will compliment the Bridge Protocol Network. It will encourage enterprise adoption through lower cost identity services and value-added with a blockchain compliment extension.

Last but definitely not least, was the token burn announcement during the NeoNewsToday interview that followed the keynote presentation. Our team will be distributing a new token in March 2019 when the Bridge Passport extension V1.1 is released to the public. We will be deploying a new smart contract, which means a new token will be replacing TOLL. This allows our new token (BRDG) to be fully compliant and functional for use on the NASH exchange, when applicable. A 1:1 airdrop will be executed by our blockchain engineers requiring no action from TOLL holders.

In the aim of offering a truly decentralized service on the blockchain, we will launch the new smart contract with 60% less team tokens than the current supply which is now 500m TOLL. Bridge will possess roughly ~220m tokens and the community will have ~240m tokens, the majority, which gives that stake of decentralization.

The transition to a new NEP8 token is beneficial for various reasons, such as the necessity of increased security and the dynamic invoke function of the token. Keeping BRDG in accordance with the newest approved standards on the NEO blockchain. As we get closer to the action of this event, our team will distribute a dedicated article informing the community of the exact transition, timeframe of the snapshot, trading halt on exchanges and other pertinent information.

Bridge Team Members Left to Right: Justin, Jesse, Alex, Stephen, Andrew, Matthew

The Future of Digital Identity

We thank the community for your overwhelming support throughout this past year of development. Updates about Project Aver will be provided along the journey. Our team is looking forward to having technical discussions on the Bridge GitHub once the open launch begins by the end of Q1 2019. Bridge is the future of digital identity with a team that is capable to become the premier identity service provider on the blockchain!