Beta

Get early access to the ELIX app by signing up here. We’ve received over 1,150 Beta signups, and are rolling the Beta out to about 30 new people each build.

Creator Portal

We’re working on adding new creators to Boost, our crowdfunding platform. You can become an early creator by signing up here. If you need ideas for Boost, think about projects for crypto podcasts, wallets, games, smart contract development, crypto summaries, customized accessories — the sky (or moon) is the limit.

Upcoming AMA

As requested by our community, we’ll be having a Reddit AMA on Wednesday, May 30th. In the AMA,you can ask any burning questions about ELIX. We’ll put the thread up ahead of time, and then will answer questions starting on May 30th at 1PM PDT.

Web Interface Design

Jane & Rosello have been working hard on the website interface for browsing projects. Here’s a preview of what that will look like:

Web interface for perusing Boost projects.

After clicking on a project, a detail view will show additional information about each project. Here’s what to expect:

Sample detail view for the web UI.

They also decided to include a call to action on the details page, aimed at driving traffic to the app. This web interface will function as a bridge until we build functional web interaction with the crowdfunding smart contracts. Jane & Rosello have also redesigned some aspects of the website so that when the app comes out, calls to action and sample screenshots are included on the home page. Finally, they are creating a custom infographic for the ELIX creator ecosystem — needless to say, they’ve been busy.

Media

This week, ELIX was featured on the homepage of Coin Central, a popular cryptocurrency news site. You can read and share the article here.

Development

This week we’ve updated the way we store contacts, favorites, etc. in the device storage to make them more scalable as there are more projects and users accumulate more contacts. We’ve also updated the modal for adding and viewing contacts and added in a section where you can view the contact’s recent transactions. We’ve created a brand new modal for viewing the details of the transactions in your wallet. Now from the wallet page you can click on a transaction to either view or save the contact or view more information about that specific transaction. There are also a bunch of ui changes and improvements like infinite scroll in the projects page and better validations for requesting tokens.

We’re also working on a new “More” tab. This upcoming page will allow users to provide feedback and suggestions as well as report issues or submit support tickets. Users will also be able to access the My Projects and Contacts page from the More Page. This will help make room for the upcoming Activity page, which will take its own tab.

If you’re waiting to test, our latest build is still “Waiting For Review” in iTunes Connect. While we’re waiting for approval, we’re continuing to make many other improvements like the ones above, and will be submitting another new build in the next couple days so the good news is that once the review waiting period is over there will be many new things to test! We are preparing to add around six new projects to Boost and will be adding another 30 Beta testers in the next build.

We’ve also prepared our Android build for beta testing and have registered on the google play store so we’ll be starting to add Android users to the closed testing once we’re approved to roll out the release!

In case you missed last week’s update, be sure to head over to our website and check out the updated team page to read more about our expanded team.

Check out our updated team page at elixirtoken.io

Our new Android developer Fernando has experience working at Samsung, Nokia, and number of other large companies. In addition, we’ve also added AE.studio CTO Devin Smith as an advisor.

Experimental Work

What else have we been up to? We spend a bit of our time thinking about experimental features for more complex token ecosystems. This week, we’d like to share one example.

We’ve received quite a few suggestions and questions about the utility of Token P on our platform. In this post, we’d like to go into detail and describe one possible use case for Token P. This section will be relatively detailed — but we want to give a thorough overview of our ideas. At this stage all proposals are experimental and we welcome community feedback.

For those of you who are new to ELIX, Token P is an experimental rewards token.

To mine Token P, formulas determine the issuance rate (based upon ELIX staked) and the change in issuance rate over time. We’ve previously described some proposed mathematical models for issuance here. But this post seeks to answer the question: what can people use the rewards token for?

There’s been some discussion of crowdlending on our subreddits and community channels. Crowdlending is related to crowdfunding in that it links many sources of tokens or ETH to one recipient, but it’s quite different in the sense that lending can include collateral.

Imagine a system where there are many lenders trying to give out loans. Also imagine that there are many borrowers who want to receive loans. How would a borrower go about getting the funds they want from a combination of people? Imagine the borrower decided to include a notion of ‘tolerances’ in their request for a loan. That borrower might announce: “I’m looking for a loan for between 1000 and 1200 tokens with an interest rate of between 14–16% over a time period of 18–20 days, and would like to post at most 1 Ether of collateral.” Borrowers will likely use decentralized collateral to attempt to take advantage of predicted crypto price changes, while lenders will join to charge interest rates. This previous statement could also be worded using exact amounts with tolerances for each variable. Interestingly this becomes a computational problem where someone can match up many lenders (who have also made requests) to a single borrower within a smart contract. Here’s how that would work:

A borrower issues a call for a loan where all loan parameters are specified in tolerances.

2. That borrower, in addition to a transaction fee, posts an amount of Token P to motivate third parties to match them up with an arbitrary number of lenders.

When an address posts a successful solution where all tolerances between all parties are matched (for all loan parameters, including collateral), a smart contracts checks the proposed solutions and moves the Token P as a reward to the party that posted the solution. For example, the sum of all principals loaned needs to be within the tolerances specified by the borrower. This way, there would be third parties who work to match up borrowers and lenders. These “parties” would probably be computer programs. Note that holding Token P allows people to participate in crowdlending, and motivates people to buy and most importantly hold ELIX. We’ll continue to look into proposed models like this as we dive farther into lending. Features like this are highly experimental but help us create a product with unique, useful additions.

That’s all for this week! Be sure to sign up to get early access to the Beta on our homepage as well as connect via social media on Reddit, Twitter, Discord, and Telegram. We also have new Facebook and Instagram pages, and a newsletter you can sign up for at the bottom of our website. If you’re looking to create your own project, sign up to be an Early Creator here. Stay tuned and follow us here on Medium for exciting updates!