Updates from the Qchain Dev Team: 7/31/18
Our small team has been especially hard at work this month. The last few weeks presented an array of struggles for our fledgling business — but we emerged intact and with a clear focus on what’s ahead of us. Of primary import, we presented an updated front end GUI for our marketplace. With the added back-end database development that has occurred, the marketplace now has the bulk of the features we will debut with in our blockchain-linked MVP, which we plan to launch next month. For more details on our progress, scroll down to read our July dev update.
Biz Dev
Those who are members of our Telegram groups have noticed that we are rolling out a new logo as part of a branding revamp. The bird represented in the new logo is a simplified caricature of a quetzal bird (Pharomachrus mocinno). The resplendent quetzal is the national bird of Guatemala, and its habitat ranges from Mexico to Panama. We chose the quetzal after scouring through an array of animals and mythological creatures whose names begin with the letter Q. Other contenders included the Qilin and the quagga, but ultimately, we agreed that the quetzal embodied our values the most. (We also liked their fuzzy heads.)
As the World Cup came to a close mid-month, so too did our bracket contest, with three winners taking home prizes including Qchain shirts, tokens, and a Trezor hardware wallet for first place. 48 participants joined for the festivities in total. Congratulations to contest winners, and congratulations to Les Bleus!
On the event side, our CEO, Wally, will officially be speaking and sitting as a panelist at September’s Blocfest in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The conference will last from September 24th to 28th. In preparation, he did an interview with blockchain writer Sean Fitzjohn. Read it in its entirety here.
And last but not least: Two decentralized exchanges — TokenJar and Loopring — opted to list our Ethereum-based ERC-20 token, EQC. The latter is still working on rolling out their platform, so keep your eyes peeled for its launch. As a reminder, XQC is available for purchase on NEMchange. In lieu of NEM’s previous plans for an official exchange, NEM is now looking for community-based support to bolster NEMchange.
Tech Dev
On the front end of our marketplace, we implemented detailed view for listings and updated our layout for creating listing components for improved readability. In addition, we refactored several custom components into High-Order Components.
Our back end marketplace database is up and running and now integrated into the marketplace front end. Users, both advertisers, and publishers, can log into the marketplace, view listings created by other users, filter by listings by various criteria, and create listings of their own for others to see. New users will initially see placeholder statistics and analytics in their dashboard, which will be replaced by real-time data for their own contracts once they start making deals with other advertisers and publishers.
One of the new additions to the marketplace is the offers section, where advertisers can make offers on publisher content listings.
We are also working on setting up our messaging system between users, so they can contact each other about their listings and directly negotiate contracts. Once that is finalized and implemented in the marketplace front end, we will work on connecting the marketplace contracts to users’ NEM and Ethereum accounts to begin transactions of XQC and EQC, initially on the testnets.
We end with some exciting dev news: To better match advertisers with publishers based on their content, Qchain is working on developing a machine learning algorithm. In upcoming weeks, we will publish a detailed blog post about our plans with natural language processing (NLP).
