It’s been another super busy month here at Zippie. For starters, we pushed the Alpha 3 release out earlier in August which introduced many improvements. These included better iOS support and more wallet features. At the time of writing, our R&D team is working on another set of new features to make our alpha testers even happier. So, let’s see what’s coming next.

Zippie card features

Before sending the first Zippie cards out, we want make sure that all card related bits and pieces are in place and work flawlessly together. The card functionality is challenging beast to implement because it requires changes in areas such as a smart contract, vault, Zippie home application and it also involves hardware ie. NFC reader.

Card functionality includes add and remove the Zippie card and payment confirmation with the card. Recovering your Zippie ID using the card will not be part of the next release. It requires external helper application to initiate the recovery and we also need to ensure it can be easily distributed to card holders. In the future, the same helper application can be used for updating the card software.

Receive functionality

Zippie wallet will also have receive functionality in the next release. Basically, it means that users can receive ERC20 tokens from other wallets, other than Zippie wallets. We plan to start with small steps and add WETH support first. In later releases, we’ll support all ERC20 tokens as well as ERC721. Receiving works in the same way as in other wallets, tap the receive icon, you’ll be warned about sending wrong assets to the wallet, then either scan the address or share it and that’s it. When assets are received, Zippie will inform the user.

And as a reminder, please don’t try to send real tokens to your Zippie wallet. Zippie still runs on the Kovan testnet!

Security Audit

As mentioned above, Zippie Alpha runs on the Kovan testnet at the moment. We didn’t receive any major issues in the first security audit run but we need to finalise card functionality and improve documentation before jumping to phase 2 of the audit. After phase 2, we can move to the main net and start working on Beta releases.

New Zippie brand look and theming support

We’re very happy to report that Zippie’s branding work has now moved to the UI design level. Consequently, we’ve started to update our UI mockups based on the new brand look. The new look will bring in more colours and a fresher visual style compared to the previous one. See the featured image for a sneak peek.

Zippie is a product which can be customised for different partners such as Blacture. Therefore, we have built a theming support which makes our life easier when we need to build variants. We’re already able to create variant builds, now we can even enable or disable certain variant specific features if needed. All this can be done without changing Zippie baseline functionality meaning that variants will get all the basic functionality and delta functionality such as visual style and custom tabs. What’s more, Delta functionality can be built on top of the basic functionality.

The next step regarding theming is to start building a new Zippie theme to adapt to the new Zippie look and feel. That way we can also test our theming system to see if we can eat our own dog food.

Next Alpha 4 release

The Alpha 4 release was originally planned for earlier this month but due the card related functionality, it’s taking longer than anticipated. Needless to say, we don’t want to rush with the card features because we want to make the right design decisions and test them properly. Hopefully, we can let the world see the Alpha 4 release within the next few weeks.

That’s all for now. But remember, if you’ve got any questions, be sure to get in touch via our Telegram channel. You can also follow our progress and join our community on Twitter, Reddit and YouTube.