Hey there! It’s Khalid, Product and Project Manager in EthicHub. And I’m here to let you know what we’ve been doing the last weeks.

As you might have already seen, we launched the Alpha Version of our platform a month ago! And we’ve been constantly improving it since then.

UX/UI :

Our goal is to make EthicHub platform easy to use by everyone, and not only by people accustomed to new technologies and to cryptocurrencies.

However, we know that UX/UI is something we need to improve a lot in our process! Knowing your weakness is good… But fixing them is much better! We are pleased to announce that Carlos Cifuentes, a very experienced UX designer with extensive experience, has joined our team as of this week to help us define the crowdlending platform of the future!

This being said, we didn’t stand idly waiting for our savior and in this week’s release we implemented the following UX/UI changes:

Add currency selection in project cards and project pages

Menu items to contact us: Feel free to do it if you have any suggestion, bug reports…

Simpler/clearer project cards

Easier to track the transaction after investing in a loan

Tutorial about how to fill your Metamask wallet

Backend :

We are constantly improving our platform’s backend to:

Add/prepare new features for our users

Make projects, users, local nodes and community management simpler.

In the last sprint we improved the following points:

Improve the robustness and the easiness of the project deployment process

The possibility to have variable lending amounts per community member

Improve the mailing processes of the platform events (mails received when projects are uploaded, filled…)

Smart Contracts

The smart contracts are where the blockchain magic happens! Every project and all the events (investing, reimbursing, default…) are managed in smart contracts.

We use a network of contracts that is allowing us to have:

Reasonable contract upgradeability

Persistent data storage between contract updates

Flexible role-based access control

K.I.S.S

I will not go into details about what we did during this sprint as it was mainly about security hardening and exchange rate automation.

But we will probably write a more detailed article soon talking about the whole architecture and our development process. So stay tuned! 😊

If you are interested you can already have a look at our code in Gitlab :)

Bug fixes

Saying we hate bugs is like saying we like tapas and good beer: It’s obvious.

But bugs are something you can’t avoid in any product development. The main point is then to define efficient processes to avoid the critical ones and, in case you detect one to deal with it quickly.

In Ethichub, we have 3 levels of testing:

During the sprint: Each developer has to test the use cases defined for his tasks and present a test result report

In the end of the sprint, a non-regression test phase is done during the sprint review

After the deployment of the release, more non-regression tests are done by the team

Of course some issues might still occur and we also count on you to report them (using the contact menu in the platform :) )