In the past 2 weeks, most of the development works on the technical side revolved around bug fixes and site improvement based on the comments by team members from the first testing round. On the other hand, there were a lot of activities on the business development front, due to the aggregation of blockchain teams in Singapore for the second edition Singapore Fintech Festival and Inclusive Blockchain Conference. We will share some of our involvements in these events in the subsequent segment of the post.

Technical development

Reserve

The reserve is now integrated with the wallet, and there is an ongoing debugging of the reserve manager system. The reserve team has also started experimenting with Binance API using actual money, and installed supports for multiple exchanges for the testing environment.

What was done in the last two weeks:

completed first step in making fast simulation environment. We can now simulate 10 hours of user transactions and reserve rebalancing in several minutes run

Automated deployment of testing environment with docker, so reserve managers can easily deploy on their machines

Integration and debugging of non-zero time delay for testing environment

Wallet

The wallet is already completed, and has been circulated internally for testing. Comments about the UI/UX based on the preliminary design were given by team members, and worked on by the development team.

What was done in the last two weeks:

2 rounds of bugs fixes following comments by team members.

Improvement in the utility and elimination of unnecessary steps throughout the interaction between

Allowed the support for different Ethereum blockchain modes — different testnets and development nets

Commenced on revamp work for the landing page of our website

Smart Contracts

What was done in the last two weeks:

Developed support for our simulation environment

Contract deployment script for development chain

Transaction viewer for development chain

Community and partnership

UOB Technology Forum

UOB, one of the largest banks in the region hosted an internal technology forum as an engagement with its staff, and to introduce the corporate’s development and future plans to the company. Kyber Network’s CEO, Loi and our advisor, Vitalik Buterin, were present at the forum to deliver blockchain ideas to the crowd.

Loi and Vitalik at UOB Technology Forum

Inclusive Blockchain Conference

Organized by Singapore University of Social Sciences and hosted by Professor David Lee, in conjunction with the Singapore Fintech Festival, the conference was an ideal event to gather heavyweights in the region. There were participation from Qtum, Consensys, Fenbushi Capital, Delphy, Etherscan and many others. Loi was also featured in the panel for “Young Founders below 30”.

Please visit https://www.rings.tv/share/event/ue45358 for the replay of the session.

Loi, among the Young Founders below 30 crowd.

Forbes

As one of the thought leaders in the field, Loi was asked by Forbes to share his view on the business environment for blockchain companies in Singapore. In general, Singapore is largely a good place for blockchain projects to set up an entity due to stable politics, established infrastructure, and its business friendly policies. That being said, there are still challenges revolving talents and interactions with banks that need to be addressed sooner than later.

Partnership

Over the last 2 weeks, we have announced 3 partnerships with top quality projects. Gifto, powered by Uplive, is an innovative gifting protocol that allows content consumers to interact with and reward content creators directly, as it envisions itself to be a self-governing and self-sustaining ecosystem for virtual gifts to be created, curated, tracked, bought, sent and exchanged across any content platforms.

In the same week, we also had a joint announcement with Aditus, a luxury access platform that bridges luxury merchants and crypto-affluents using blockchain. Run by a team of seasoned entrepreneurs in the luxury tech sector, one of Aditus’ main propositions to consumers is reward schemes with top luxury merchants globally. Through this partnership, Kyber Network Genesis Token (KGT) holders are made eligible for Aditus VIP membership and automatically qualify for exclusive privileges at the highest tier.

Following that, we also announced a research collaboration with Blockchain at Berkeley, a world-class academic institution to enhance our exchange implementation and business model. Blockchain at Berkeley is composed of intelligent postdocs, PhDs, Masters and Undergrads. The team has consulted for Airbus, BMW, and Qualcomm, conducted and published research on zkSnarks and Cosmos. Through the research partnership, Blockchain at Berkeley will offer fresh and novel perspectives to our team in this highly dynamic and fast-changing environment.

Hiring

We have a new addition to the team, and he will be working on our smart contracts. Ilan Doron is married with 2 kids. With over 7 years of software engineering experience, including VoIP and RTP protocols, Ilan is equipped with deep knowledge of technicalities that makes him an excellent candidate for the smart contract engineering role. In his free time, Ilan develops crypto trading bots and practice Vipassana and Wing Chun.

Also, we have received many applications for the Communications Manager role, and have interviewed a number of candidates with relevant experiences. We should round up the hiring for this role later this week, and will introduce the new hire in the subsequent post. Thank you all for the support.