Our CTO Chris Dangerfield provides an update to address the delayed launch.
The rewards platform will be our first major release and the project will be judged on its appearance, security, performance, and general usability. If you care about the long-term prospects of our project then it is in everyone’s interest that rewards platform goes live when it is ready, not to meet an arbitrary roadmap date.
The truth is that during the life cycle of the development phase, the goal posts changed, partly due to a change by Apple around their NFT policy and the delay to the launch of XLS-20 plus a project decision to build even more utility into our token. The change by Apple has meant that our rewards platform is just phase one for this piece of the project; it is going to evolve into something much bigger and much more important and more details will be released at the appropriate time. The upshot of that means that more effort went into the fundamentals, given its future role. The delay to XLS-20 meant that our Revellers launch was delayed 4 weeks which had a knock-on effect because as you will know Revellers play a big role in the rewards platform. On top of that, with the increased importance of the rewards platform came the opportunity to give even more utility to the token, via this platform, so again that added extra development work.
Finally on the point of the delay, software development is often subject to delays; its more common than not and those delays are not down to poor developers or lack of effort or other negative things, they are generally down to unforeseen circumstances, like those we have experienced and explained above. Dates given on roads maps are indicative but in an ever-changing industry the project must remain adaptable and releasing software before it is ready just to meet an arbitrary deadline would be irresponsible.
In term of progress. The first alpha version was ready in mid-December and testing started, but we were hampered by the reality of Christmas, which in the UK is a big deal, everyone in the team took well-deserved time off with their families and this essentially created a 3-week delay. In early January the team continued testing and we rolled into Beta 2nd week of Jan. A small group of the community helped us with user testing and their feedback was helpful and taken on board. The group was then expanded to just over 100, who have all had access for over a week now. Today we have moved to a candidate release which means that all major bugs are resolved, and we are dealing with minor or edge case issues.
We plan to launch into full production sometime in the next few days but that of course could and WILL slip if I feel we are not ready OR if some other issue is discovered in our final rounds of testing.
The bottom line is… we are nearly there and we thank you for your patience and continued support, we will not launch until we are ready and that should be seen as a positive, not a negative. Soon we will be live; then judge us on what we have delivered.
This update is meant to be frank and honest and to give confidence to anyone with concerns over the delayed launch. We are moving forward and to build software right which is key to our long term success, tight controls around development, testing and release must be adhered to.
To end on a positive note, don’t forget we won the maximum grant amount from RippleX, one of only a handful of other projects to EVER get such a high reward, across the entire 4 waves and I do believe that part of the reason we got this recognition is down the quality of the code we submitted in our application along with the manner in which we prepared and handled the technical interview. To me this speaks volumes about our dev team and the high regard in which we are clearly held. Work has already started on our MVP which the grant is going to help fund and more details will be released in due course.
