📝 A special note on marketing: Now that Tabby Pay has been released, we will continue our marketing efforts as a way to continuously improve awareness and gain a userbase for our product. Ultimately, our goal is to get more people using our products on a regular basis.

Dev Updates

You might assume that since we shipped Tabby Pay, our team might take a few days to sit back, relax and catch our breaths… but as anyone who’s ever shipped a pice of software can tell you, that’s not how development works. 😅

This last week has been 100% focused on squashing some tricky bugs and improving certain user facing elements in the app.

DEV NOTES: Bugs Fixed

+ Rejected MetaMask transactions caused incorrect error messages.

+ "To Address" field displayed lower case when using checksum addresses.

+ Payment query would sometimes timeout.

+ "Send" payment modal would flash upon closing.

+ Videos on Tabby homepage wouldn't display correctly on some mobile devices.

+ Failed transactions would cause the UI to continuously display payment as "pending".

+ Transactions made during a node failure would cause UI errors.

+ Address field wasn't large enough to contain some addresses.

+ Numbers with many decimals places would cause failed transactions. Updates

+ Improved the UI layout by moving some elements into more appropriate locations.

+ Vastly changed the experience for users without web3 wallets or with locked wallets. Instead of seeing error messages, they are guided on how to proceed.

+ Improved the gas limits recommended in web3 clients to more accurately display estimated total gas cost.

+ Added support for smart contract versioning. Allowing us to deploy new versions of the smart contract in parallel with old versions, all within the same UI.

+ Added copy to clipboard button for wallet addresses.

+ Added banner to demo contract to indicate which testnet the contract runs on.

+ Added additional metrics tracking.

+ Added favicons and touch icons to Tabby website.

+ Cleaned up markup on Tabby homepage.

+ Updated various error messages to provide clearer and more consistent text.

+ Improved error logging

Note: These changes aren’t live in the app just yet, as they’ll be shipped during our next release cycle 🚀

CAT as Payment

One of the main points of feedback that we received with Tabby Pay is in regards to how we structured CAT to provide discount for owning, instead of a method of payment.

While this decision was made as a way to decrease the friction to use the app and increase adoption, while still providing incentive for CAT owners, it’s become clear that our community wishes for CAT to be a direct method of payment.

Although we’ve always planned on the staking model being the core use for the CAT token, we’re listening to your feedback and have decided to make all future smart contracts accept CAT as a payment method, in addition to giving up to 50% in discount for paying with the token. Best of both worlds!

Next Steps (aka, when core release?)

This question has come up quite a bit over the last few weeks so we wanted to provide some clarity in this week’s update.

Our goal with building the infrastructure and back-end of our platform has been to support the idea of continuous smart contract release cycles. We wanted to build a platform that is scaleable, so we can add to it over time.

In our whitepaper, we listed our core platform release (aka, a public, functional product that is live on the mainnet) as the end of Q1, 2018.

While Tabby Pay is only a single smart contract, it is built upon the functional platform that interacts with the mainnet through the Tabby interface.

Tabby Pay is built on our core platform; Tabby Pay is the first step towards the launch of our core platform.

“But what about the rest of the smart contracts?!?!”

Don’t worry, they’re still coming. While we’ve had the idea for a product like Tabby Pay for quite some time, we hadn’t actually figured out a solution to actually make it work until fairly recently. When we finally did solve that puzzle, we realized just how big of an impact this could have on the industry, as we were the first ones to solve it.

To ensure this smart contract could be as successful as possible, we made the decision to treat it as a full, functional product release; one that we could clearly convey the benefit of and support with proper marketing. In short, we needed to fully shift our efforts towards the release of this first smart contract in order to achieve proper adoption.

So while we technically have released our core platform already, we are going to be a bit behind on shipping the remaining contracts.

To be clear — the rest of the contracts will still be released, but we’re currently validating exactly how much more focus we’ll put towards improving Tabby Pay before we shift towards the other contracts.

We appreciate the continued excitement from the community and we’ll be sure to keep you all updated as things progress in the future. 🙏

Have questions or comments for our team? Join our Discord channel, tweet to us on Twitter or chime in on the /r/BlockCAT subreddit!