Giving users the power to access the decentralized web through the palm of their hand, Status is a socio-economic platform that truly put users in control of their data. I talked to Status chief operating officer Nabil Naghdy and the head of research and development Jacek Sieka as we discussed the challenges they are facing, how things are at Status Nimbus after grant from the Ethereum foundation and what to expect from Status in the near future.

Please provide us an overview of Status.

Nabil: Status is essentially a mobile gateway to decentralized web and we provide a bunch of functionalities some of it is first party and a lot of it is accessing the decentralized world through browser. One is Status chat that is peer to peer, meaning there is no centralized servers involved and users interact directly with each other. There is a wallet which supports Ethereum and all ERC-20 tokens and there is a dApp browser that allows user to access any site that is a part of the decentralized web.

Please tell us about background of Status founders.

Nabil: Well it’s close to 3 years now they are in business since Jarrad and Carl founded Status. Both of them are very passionate about this space. Specially Jarrad is in this space with Ethereum ecosystem before the Ethereum crowd sale about 4 years ago and they both share same ideals with very high principles along with deep blockchain knowledge.

Toshi, that later became the Coinbase wallet did the same thing. How is Status different from it?

Nabil: There are a couple of elements that are quite different. Firstly, Status has a peer-to-peer chat and the other thing is we’re very much focused on the decentralized elements. A lot of other applications similar to our chat fall back on centralized servers and that is why have a research team trying to solve a technical problem that hasn’t been solved before. There are a lot of apps on the market like Whatsapp and Telegram but status is striving to be the first ever complete dApp.

What are the problems Status is facing in developing an ecosystem?

Nabil: Our one big problem right now is scalability, like many other projects on Mainnet. For example to bring a node on a mobile phone is data and bandwidth intense. What this means is there are a lot of technical improvements and scalability solutions that we need. So what Jacek and the team is focused on is how can we build what’s going to be on the phone in 12-24 months. I will let Jacek take from here on.

Jacek: Yeah what I’ve to say to that is that we have the core application. Status is also an organization that is doing a lot of work to support the community, the Ethereum ecosystem. For us taking on projects like Nimbus together with the Ethereum foundation, we are trying to imagine what next iteration of Ethereum would look like and there are a lot of talented teams working on this problem currently. Ours is the angle of a common man perhaps which is also why we have a very strong UX team on board.

What’s the ‘bottle-neck’ Status is having currently?

Nabil: Well the bottle-neck is in the technology itself since we’re developing a technology that has never been developed before. So you know we are in very early stages from mass adoption and there are a lot of teams working to develop this new technology. But I wouldn’t say there’s one specific bottle-neck right now since a lot of talented people are working on something that’s never been done before.

What shall we expect from Status in Q4 2018?

Jacek: It’s important to put in to perspective that we recently started cooperating with the Ethereum foundation as we received the grant for the Nimbus development. Which to us is a shared commitment towards the same goal and looking to the horizons at this kind of work is often measured not in 2-3 months but it also be 1-2 years. All of the blockchain spaces extend to some extent. Getting it to scale and bringing more users by making it user friendly and maybe looking at other consensus mechanism systems like POW. All of these are problems that are fundamentally unsolved and are being actively researched. It’s important to know that we are cooperating with a lot of talented teams and that aspect of building a community project is very important to Status.

How the platform is handling the number of users issue?

Nabil: We’re definitely thinking about users considering the Status is huge. Proposition to the fact that we want users to be able to use Status and want people to endow to the Ethereum network as all of these things are very important to us. At the same time from the technology perspective if we get 100,000 users tomorrow, Status won’t be able to handle that many users.

Talking about users, how many active users Status have as we speak?

Nabil: We two don’t know the exact numbers as we don’t have the analytics right now but we are probably in mid hundreds per day that use the application. So its still very very small as compare to where we want to be.

How a user can benefit from the platform?

Nabil: The main thing we are focused on is allowing the next generation of people to use internet differently in a very effective way. Where a user is in control of their own data, who has access to it, where it resides and completely owned by the user instead by an application.