Our CEO, Antti Saarnio, speaking at TechCrunch Sessions: Blockchain

Despite the sunny weather, July has been a super busy month here at Zippie. Consequently, we’ve got lots to report on all fronts. So, let’s jump right in.

Product update summary

Alpha 2 version released

Though many of our R&D personnel were on holiday in July, we still achieved a lot. We’ll go into greater detail in our next product update post, which will be published this week. In the meantime, here’s a quick summary. Firstly, we released our Alpha 2 version, which comes with quicker onboarding, an updated UI and a personal multisig wallet. So far, the feedback has been very positive. We’re now aiming to release Alpha 3, which focuses on fixes and small improvements, in the next week or so.

Zippie card, security audit and Ethereum mainnet news

We decided to postpone enhancing Zippie card features for now, because bug fixing is taking longer than expected. The new features will be in the Beta 1 release and will include security tab changes. Happily, the security audit is proceeding as planned, and no major security flaws have been discovered as yet. Regarding our move to the Ethereum mainnet, we need to await the completion of the audit and ensure that the Zippie ID recovery works flawlessly first.

Marketing update

Rebranding going strong

The marketing month of July kicked off with the start of Zippie’s rebranding work with our branding partner, design studio Entrecasa. The Argentinians who, in addition to Zippie’s new brand, have previously worked on the brands of blockchain projects such as Decentraland and Zeppelin Solutions, were quick to catch on to the Zippie identity and started providing drafts to be reviewed by us in no time. Entrecasa’s designers provided such great design visions to our team, that at the end of the day it was truly a head scratcher to pick the winning look from all the wonderful choices. Nonetheless, one visual identity finally rose above the rest, and we’re happy to say that the base of our new brand is now ready to be implemented onto all layers of the Zippie project; from how our marketing looks all the way to the visual identity of the Zippie Card and the OS itself.

It should be noted, however, that as the rebranding effort is fairly holistic and includes everything from the logo to the UI of our platform, we will need to keep you waiting a little longer in order to roll out a complete project-wide new look. Currently we are estimating the launch of the new brand will happen sometime in October. Still, we can comfort those anxious to see the new look by saying that the community members who were asking for a bit more colour for Zippie will be in for a nice surprise. As noted in the previous monthly update, the rebranding only concerns the visual identity of our brand and product — our name will remain Zippie.

Honing our market entry strategy

Besides branding, we are of course also honing our market entry strategies from the marketing point of view. Not to go too deep into specifics, but what is exciting is that as far as virality enablers go, Zippie is truly up there with the best. For example, how does the ability to send tokens through any instant messenger or SMS, without knowing the recipient’s ethereum address, sound like as a tool to spread our solution? How about a 10 second, no downloads, no extensions onboarding for any decentralized application? Needless to say, the gunpowder for an explosive market entry is there, and we are getting the matches as we speak.

Partnerships update

July was a super busy month on the partnership side and we attended lots of events to help get the word out about Zippie. These were:

Token Market Summit in Gibraltar

Dappcon in Berlin

NIFTY in Hong Kong

Antti as panelist at TechCrunch in Zug

A meeting in Switzerland with other top projects to plan collaboration on mobile blockchain solutions.

Dapp feedback about Zippie

This month, when demoing Zippie to potential partners, we’ve had really great feedback. Everyone is super excited that we’re solving a crucial industry problem: How to make blockchain easier to use and how to get non-crypto users using blockchain based solutions and dapps. This is a real pain point for many dapps as current solutions do not offer easy onboarding or good user experience, especially for users outside of the crypto circles.

Currently, dapps are waiting for our documentation on how to start integrating. With this in mind, we’ve recruited Lewis Rockliffe to focus on creating this documentation. You can read more about Lewis in the Team Update section below.

On the hardware partnership front, both Blacture and Borqs are moving forward well. We’ve also been filming a lot more interviews on the road, so stay tuned to our YouTube channel, where we’ll be publishing these soon.

Team news update

This month, we’re very excited to have made four new appointments. Mikko Pyykkö and Niilo Ristmeri are working on recruiting new b2b customers and partners to the Zippie OS, while Lewis Rockliffe and Mio Quispe are helping with product development and documentation. Here’s a little more about their background and areas of expertise.

Mikko Pyykkö

Mikko will lead Zippie’s industry partner and operator sales. Mikko has more than 20 years of sales experience from Nokia and other high-tech companies as well as an extensive network across the mobile industry.

Niilo Ristmeri

Niilo will take care of business development and partnerships. His background as an entrepreneur and go-to-market professional in various tech projects make him the ideal choice

Lewis Rockliffe

Lewis is a well-established Zippie community member with a flair for coding. He’ll use his intimate knowledge of Zippie to focus on documentation, which will help industrial partners and apps/dapps use our APIs to join the Zippie OS.

Mio Quispe

Mio is another dedicated Zippie community member. An experienced frontend developer, he’ll be building the UI for the Zippie home dapp.

That’s a wrap for July activities. But, remember if you’ve got any questions, be sure to ask on our Telegram channel. You can also follow our progress and join our community on Twitter, Reddit and YouTube.