25 September 2017

Following a jolting set-back at the beginning of July, Community patience while we re-constituted and re-built momentum has been much appreciated. Central to this effort has been forcing ourselves to re-validate our mission and re-imagine our stack from first principles. Not only is this work complete but with a month of development effort under our belt, we’re ready to update you on where we are at and where we are heading.

The first thing to confirm that since our mission is for Incent to become the global rewards programme, we still need to build a fully ‘hosted’ solution that will allow e-commerce and bricks‘n’mortar merchants, and third party developers, to rapidly integrate our rewards solution into their existing operation, and trade in and out of Incent (INCNT) seamlessly thereafter.

…think, Stripe but for loyalty rewards

The aspiration is that our partners and their consumers enjoy a seamless gateway between fiat and crypto that allows them to benefit from the value without having to endure the friction that has, in our opinion, attenuated mainstream adoption of crypto thus far.

Meeting this demands that we take responsibility for the security of account holders’ value and its movement across our ledger and this, in turn, requires a cloud-based Payments Card Industry (PCI) compliant platform, even if we are not actually handling credit cards ourselves. A PCI-compliant architecture will also enable higher security for the storage of all sensitive data.

After researching potential solutions, we have commissioned Round Table to build this architecture. Co-location in Sydney has allowed us get to know the Round Table team well; they have a deep reservoir of expertise and horsepower on which to draw and this arrangement allows Jins, our COO and head of product, to oversee their efforts while our in-house team focus on development of the Incent Exchange engine, which we consider our core IP.

Once this core architecture is complete, Round-Table’s focus will shift to the front-end components as our team completes work on the API and client integrations.

With respect to client integrations, our first priority will be an e-commerce snippet or ‘droplet’ that can be ‘dropped’ into any existing codebase to allow the award and redemption of Incent against total basket value. Focus will then switch back to completion of a mobile app that can be profiled for the requirements of either a merchant or a consumer, to transact Incent at the Point-of-Sale.

As you can appreciate, there’s a bit to get through but while I remain as cautious as any tech startup CEO with respect to the forecasting of delivery milestones, this is what we are currently thinking…

In the meantime, the rest of us are finally able to turn our attention back to marketing and business development. More about this in a later update.

Best,

Rob W.