I’m happy to share with everyone our first development update.

We’ve been busy these past few months on a number of different projects:

Biddable, an embeddable widget that enables registration & payment for items at auction with cryptocurrency. Currently live on LiveAuctioneers.com.

Live auction at Ethereal Summit, where our team partnered with Rare Art Labs & CryptoKitties to auction off crypto-themed art & collectibles. Of which, the exclusive CryptoKitty ended up going for $140k USD.

Codex Viewer, collection management software that allows users to interact with Codex Records for assets registered using Codex Protocol.

Codex Viewer officially launches into beta!

I’m proud to announce we are officially entered the public beta of Codex Viewer, happening on the Rinkeby testnet. This is the culmination of hard work of various parts of our engineering team: the smart contracts that run the protocol, the back-end application layer that sits on top of the protocol, and the front-end UI layer that allows users to interact with it all.

The beta is available immediately at http://beta.codex-viewer.com. All you need is MetaMask to begin, and a little bit of test ether from the faucet at https://faucet.rinkeby.io/.

The first 1000 users that login to the site will receive an exclusive digital piece created by our very own Sebastian Tory-Pratt.

Digital Assembly by Sebastian Tory-Pratt

Codex Viewer is designed to enable users to register and manage assets using the Codex Protocol. For now, all assets in the registered are created manually by collectors but in the future assets flowing through auction will be provisioned automatically at the time of sale. Assets registered in the registry are called Codex Records. Each one is a unique ERC-721 token that can be created, traded, and curated all in a decentralized manner.

By default, metadata about assets registered on the protocol are private, but collectors have full control over the permissions. If the user is managing assets on behalf of a museum or gallery they may want to make everything public and available to others. The user instead could be a collector that wants to consign permissions to an auction house for a piece they are looking to sell.

Over the next few weeks of the beta, we’ll have themed days to get feedback on specific features of the application as we continue to iterate on the functionality.

Development roadmap

The launch of the beta coincides the start of the audit of our smart contracts by the security firm Hosho. After we receive an initial summary report of their findings, we’ll be launching a public bug bounty for any issues found in our smart contracts by our community. While the exact amounts have yet to be defined, all issues will be rewarded in ETH and critical issues found will be rewarded with the equivalent of thousands of USD.

Here’s what our engineering team has our eyes on next:

API surface for Codex Viewer that allows external services to provision Codex Records without having to write blockchain code themselves

Mobile-friendly UI for Codex Viewer, compatible with Toshi

Deep integration of announced partnerships like Maecenas and Value My Stuff to provide more utility to collections on the protocol

Simplified UI that allows users to interact with the protocol without installing MetaMask and being proficient in blockchain technology

We’ve got a ways to go before reaching our goal of becoming the ubiquitous way that provenance is stored for physical art and collectibles, but we’ve made a lot of progress in the past few months and I’m proud at what the team has accomplished thus far.

Please do check out Codex Viewer today! Stop by our Telegram channel to provide feedback or reach out directly to the team on Twitter. Follow me at @johnhforrest for Codex Viewer updates.