Updates from the Qchain Dev Team: 2/28/18
Over the past year or so, we’ve heard many blockchain project-backers complain that, all too often, they’re sequestered from that project’s developments. Their teams are hard to reach, their answers are opaque or PR-laden, and their progress is difficult to measure.
At Qchain, we’ve worked hard to provide a better experience for our supporters. (Many of you have commended this effort, and we’re grateful for that.) With lean resources and a small staff, that job isn’t easy — but it’s important for us to ensure that our team is accessible, productive, and accountable to our community and investors. Moving forward, our dev updates will include a Biz Dev section to further open up the doors to our progress. Stay in the loop, and scroll down for our February dev update.
Biz Dev
Team presentations took place on either side of the Pacific in February. In Japan, we met with Finolab, Tech Bureau, Opt, and Transcosmos in pursuit of partnerships and other business opportunities in Japan. Meanwhile, in Southern California, we presented at “An Evening with NEM: Enterprise Solutions with the NEM Blockchain,” alongside Jeff McDonald and other projects.
Also in California — indeed, on a street called California Ave — we secured our first official office space. We are now part of The Cove/UCI Applied Innovation in Irvine.
First appeared on medium
Front End
We’ve been working on improving the front end by making it more dynamic, with the statistics, graphs and other data points reflecting day-to-day changes. This will allow our users, advertisers and publishers to get a clear idea of how their ads and adspaces are performing.
The code for the front end is also being refactored and improved to aid our future developmental efforts. We have made choices on using certain established open source libraries that will ensure that our product does not experience sudden changes due to dependencies on some newer frameworks.
Additionally, we are updating our marketplace to include our broadened focus on Branded Content, Influencer Posts, and Sponsorships. These types of ads will have further subcategories that allow users to specify criteria. For instance, they will be able to choose influencers based on a specific platform that they wish to target, or to specify a desired form of branded content: written post, podcast, video, and more. (The marketplace filters to find ads and adspaces will also reflect this expansion.)
Back End
On the back end, we’ve implemented a high-performance, extendable character array in Cython to simplify serializing NEM transfers. We’ve also created prefixed NEM quantities to allow seamless addition of XEM and microXEM. Currently, we are working on transitioning models from Python to Cython for static type checking and better performance.
We are also in the process of adding Civic, a secure identity platform on the blockchain, as an authentication option for our marketplace. Once this is implemented, users will be able to sign up for a Qchain account and log in to our marketplace using Civic, in addition to our existing email-based account authentication.
Our testnet XQC faucet code has been successfully implemented and tested locally, and we are currently working on connecting it to our front end and cloud services. Once that is complete, users will be able to request testnet XQC from our marketplace front end for use with our upcoming testnet beta release.
