AppCoins News Update, or ANU for short, is a regular bi-weekly update by the AppCoins team. As usual, we are going to cover dev updates, market reports, team members and upcoming events. This week’s focus is on the Ritchie Release, and on the product developments of the protocol that has taken place since the ICO finished.You may expect the next ANU on the 29th August.

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Product Development Review

As disclosed in the last two ANUs (#14 & #15), we’ve been pushing to have everything ready for the Ritchie release, which will be launched on the 2nd of September.

The team has been:

Working to have a new billing system ready for developers to integrate

ready for developers to integrate Developing the Unity plugin that integrates the billing system for Unity app developers

that integrates the billing system for Unity app developers Enabling credit card payments with notarisation of payments in the Blockchain for posterior validation (if needed)

of payments in the Blockchain for posterior validation (if needed) Upgrading our Smart Contracts to improve efficiency and costs

From our perspective, there are two main drivers for developers and user adoption of the AppCoins Protocol. For the former, having a working billing system very similar to the one they use the most — Google Play Billing System — is key because it enables us to say that building a new version of an already existing app is as easy as changing a few variable names. For the latter, being able to use existing and already known payment methods is crucial to shatter the friction that exists in having to create an Ethereum wallet, buying ETH with fiat currency, and converting the ETH to APPC. If a user can pay for in-app items with a credit card, as many already do now, the adoption friction almost disappears.

Usually, if a disrupting technology works the same way for the end user as existing, competing technologies do, the adoption rate is greatly increased.

As an AppCoins integrator, Aptoide is developing BDS, the Blockchain Distribution Services (BDS) portal, that eases the life of developers, app stores, and OEMs. You can already access it here. Developers can already create accounts, upload their apps with the billing system integrated, create and edit in-app items details, and have access to a vast array of dashboards.

The team working on BDS portal just released the beta version of the BDS Billing System with the AppCoins Wallet last Friday. This means that developers can start integrating it now and build their apps on top of the AppCoins Protocol. The Unity plugin will be released together with the Ritchie release, which will open the BDS Billing System to Unity app developers.

In addition, the credit card payments in the AppCoins Wallet is currently under development. The idea is to have users paying with their credit cards and have the amount paid converted into APPC, to then pay developers and app stores with it. Moreover, since credit card payments are done off-chain, i.e. they aren’t stored in the Blockchain and the AppCoins Protocol isn’t automatically aware of them, the AppCoins team is developing what we call Off-chain Payments Notarisation. This means that we are periodically aggregating off-chain payments, building a Merkle Tree out of them, and publishing its root hash, together with a few other parameters, to the Blockchain. We’ll expose an authenticated API to those outputs from transactions done for a given wallet. This API can be used by developers to validate that the Merkle Tree’s root hash sent to the Blockchain is indeed computed from those transactions that they are entitled to. If they also want to save the transactions done from their apps, they can even compare if the output of our API yields the same results.

Following last month’s performance table with the KPIs of the protocol performance, on this ANU we have collected the values from July, regarding both flows using AppCoins, IAP and User Acquisition, the number of apps downloaded with the integration of AppCoins as well as indicators from the SDK, as the table below shows.

Stay tuned for news in the next few weeks. Great things will happen!