We’ve been hard at work getting ready for the ELIX mobile Beta. If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for the Beta on our homepage.

Creator Signup

Sign up to become an early creator here. Alternatively, you can also support ELIX by reaching out to creators and helping them sign up. These could be entrepreneurs and creators from many different areas outside of crypto. For example, we’re also interested in supporting gamers and gaming accessories. Gamers tend to have an intuitive understanding of crypto since many tradable items and tokens already exist in games.

After reaching out to many creators, we’ve found that there is strong demand for a cryptocurrency crowdfunding platform, for three reasons:

We have the potential to offer a much more crypto-focused audience, meaning our community is more engaged and interested in crypto related projects than on crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter or Indiegogo. Cryptocurrency holders want to use coins and tokens to crowdfund products and ideas. There’s also the added benefit that people can fully control their own funds through smart contracts. We don’t need to charge a 3–5% payment fee like Stripe (reducing cost tends to get people interested fast).

Reaching out to entrepreneurs and other creators is a great way to spread the word about ELIX!

Design

In order to increase the user acquisition rate upon launch, we’ve made one small change when users first open the app. First, the app will now go to Boost content on launch. When taking an action in the app like pledging tokens, users will be prompted to create a wallet. This means that fewer users will become lost in the wallet flow early on — and users understand why they want to create a wallet: to interact with in-app content they already see and enjoy.

Here’s a preview of the landing screen with the wallet prompt (there will also be some additional header graphics coming soon):

And here is a preview of the creator prompt, shown once a wallet is created:

Support for Creator Videos

We plan to integrate video into our platform. Early on, we expect to integrate Youtube videos. Videos allow creators to tell their story and provide insight into their idea or product. Here’s what that integration will look like:

Meet The Creator

We also plan to set up a “Meet The Creator” section where backers can see information about creators on Linkedin, Facebook or Twitter. This will help people gather information about the quality and authenticity of each creator, as well as help build up a strong community of reputable creators. Here’s one proposed implementation by our designer, showing detailed information about a hypothetical creator named Dario:

Development

This week we’ve made lots of improvements to the mobile app! We’ve replaced the old side menu with a tab bar for easier navigation and redesigned the boost and contacts tabs. The new Boost tab gives users the ability to easily filter through projects and save their favorites. Later on we’ll also be adding full-text search to the explore tab. In the contacts tab, users can easily add new contacts or search through their existing ones. After choosing a contact from the list, a newly designed modal pops up displaying the contact’s info and the send/request tokens floating action button. Both users’ favorites and contacts are saved on their device, so users can manage them without fear of this info being public. Check out our recent progress in the demo video below!

Support for Ether Crowdfunding: Expanding Our Platform’s Utility

We’re excited to announce that we also now have a crowdfunding smart contract for Ether. This should expand the utility of our platform by allowing people to crowdfund with a cryptocurrency already held by many crypto enthusiasts. In order to preserve the utility of ELIX, we can offer lower host cuts for ELIX than with ETH. We already have Ether based crowdfunding test scenarios running as expected, since support for ETH requires minimal changes from an engineering standpoint. Much of the automated testing of code logic and work done previously by AE.studio means that the logic of this new ETH based contract is already robust.

We look forward to sharing our progress as we move quickly toward out Beta period and beyond! Stay tuned and be sure to sign up for the Beta if you haven’t already!