Breaking News: Release Date

There’s been a long running problem crypto users experience that we’ve been trying to solve ever since the early days of BlockCAT. Our team has now developed a Smart Contract solution to this problem we’re all really excited about.

In our roadmap, we discussed releasing our Beta in stages, adding live blockchain functionality over time. As promised, we’re releasing this contract with live blockchain code as part of our ongoing Beta.

Our first completed Smart Contract will be released March 14, 2018.

It’s fully functional. It runs on the live Blockchain. It solves a real problem.

This week we’ve been conducting user testing in private, to understand how people navigate through the interface and where questions come up. We’ve collected all that data and are making the final changes to the visual experience to make each step even easier to understand.

The full details of exactly what this contract does, will also be released when it goes live.

Product Development

Here are some updates directly from our dev team.

Dev NotesThis week we continued focusing on polishing our upcoming contract, as well as hardening our build & delivery pipeline. Changes include:+ standardizing how and when we show errors
+ standardizing how and when we retry transient network issues
+ hooking up an error monitoring system, for unexpected failures
+ adding dozens more tests for all of the various edge cases
+ fixing discrepancies between our dev environments & test builds
+ hooked up automated deployments so we can test our changes fasterThis work ultimately allows us to deliver a more reliable experience, and continue to improve our processes so we can safely ship faster.

Glass Tigers

This week one of our all-star community members, Caosmen, introduced us to a phenomenal artist named Kirk Dunkley from BitcoinGallery.Art.

Kirk is an artist who loves to explore the use of light as a sculptural medium, as is evident in his newest ‘Coin Sculpture’ series which highlights a number of exciting tokens in the crypto space.

The project is super cool — especially his beautiful rendition of BlockCAT.

We caught up with Kirk to learn a bit more about the project and the motivations behind it. Here’s what he had to say:

“Light is a very relevant way to allude to a cryptocurrency: like light, cryptocurrency can define and delineate a space, is completely intangible, but it’s presence and value are confirmed in many ways.

The coin sculpture series goes beyond the formal translation of a two-dimensional brand identity to three dimensions. For many of the collectors, the coins hold great meaning and represent their faith in the future of a project… The coin sculpture gives them something that they can connect with in a tangible way.”

Very deep — and very cool. Kirk has a number of crypto designs to choose from, but if you’re looking to spruce up your home or office, nothing beats the fearless BlockCAT Glass Tiger. 😼

Special Guests

You might recall a story we shared about Louis, an 11 year old whiz kid who just happened to be a huge BlockCAT fan.

In February, Louis caught our attention by uploading a BlockCAT explainer video to his YouTube channel. Our CEO, Eric Huang, was so impressed that he ended up inviting Louis and his family to BlockCAT HQ to meet the team.

Today Louis and his family took us up on that offer and stopped by the BlockCAT office to hang out with the crew. As well as getting the office tour, we also hooked Louis up with an exclusive behind the scenes preview of our upcoming product release.

That’s all for this week! Be sure to join the conversation in our Discord channel, follow us on Twitter or subscribe to the /r/BlockCAT subreddit.