Company Update: December/January 2018/2019

Software Development Services

During the December — January period, we continued to operate with a high level of development capability and efficiency, successfully implementing the Festive Freya Hardfork. While some bugs were discovered after the release, they were minor in nature and were rapidly patched as soon as they were identified. We have improved the staking process for Service Nodes and implemented Bulletproofs, resulting in a reduction of the average transaction size by approximately 90%. Loki Messenger is taking shape while being integrated on the test Service Node swarm functionality. We have been completing milestones on time and are expecting the different Service Node based functions to come together by the end of Q1 or start of Q2. We have made some advancements on returning the Loki Web Wallet to an operating state, which we will aim to release publicly in the coming months. As expected, there were merges from Monero’s code which resulted in Loki core improvements as well as merges from Signal for Loki Messenger. The Gui and Mobile wallet have each received user improvements and have become much more stable in the latest release. For further information on the development of Loki during this period, please refer to the weekly dev updates or view our progress on the Loki Github repository.

Networking Infrastructure & Performance Testing Services.

We have run and maintained critical network infrastructure during this period without any major downtime, other than the short upgrade periods. Testnet Nodes have been running continuously, although we have discovered a number of anomalies while running our tests which we plan to iron out before the next release. We have successfully run services on Lokinet alpha, and were happy to discover third parties integrating their own services on the platform as well. We have released some of the Loki testing tools, such as a dashboard to monitor the overall network and Service Nodes. Since enabling Cloudflare, we have not had any further issues with Loki websites being disrupted or going down.

Marketing Services

During the month of December, we ran an ‘advent calendar’ competition which delivered one of our highest community engagement to date for Loki, coinciding with the Festive Freya hard fork release. During the months of December — January we’ve seen sustained organic growth through most of our social media channels. Reddit has produced the highest increase in organic user interaction, thanks to our constant stream of updates and consistently high quality content. During the Festive Freya competition, the Loki website, Twitter engagement and Reddit received the highest user traffic out of all of the social media platforms we interact with. We have also begun planning for marketing strategies for the year ahead, which will coincide with the next major hard fork and major conferences. We have planned out a possible path to introduce Loki into more Asian markets later in the year.

Media Services

We are now in the later stages of completing a new animation for Lokinet. We are pleased with the progress of the animation and are expecting it to be completed shortly. We overhauled the Loki.network website completely making it easier to use, and we have introduced new features. We have released two blog posts related to SNApps and a blog related the the new encryption laws recently brought out in Australia during this period. There was further publicity and pieces written and published regarding our position on the new bill. We also released content on Youtube related to Service Nodes in the form of a Q & A, and some edited versions of Jeff working on Lokinet. Simon and Kee partook in a number of podcasts and interviews related to Loki; these were well received. We continued to reward community members with personalised community awards.

Documentation Services

Loki Docs have been proactively updated to reflect changes and additions made to Loki services. Loki Docs have now become an essential reference tool for new and current users of all Loki related services. We documented development changes on Github, as well as published weekly development summaries and updates for public perusal. We assisted the LAG with document management and integration procedures. We have also completed multiple exchange application forms, some with over 100 questions related to Loki. In addition, we released a Chinese version of the Loki whitepaper.

PR Services

We have continued to work closely with Wachmans to promote Loki on the global stage. We undertook a number of media opportunities to promote Loki in relation to the controversial Access Bill, recently released in Australia. Wachmans has arranged a speaker role for Loki at Token 2049 conference in Hong Kong during Asia Crypto Week, in March 2019. Loki’s co-founder and project lead, Simon Harman, will present at this conference. We anticipate that we will see more tangible results from the services provided by Wachmans over the next 3–6 months with the launch of our products.

Conference Attendance and Promotional Services

Members of the team attended multiple conferences during the December — January period. Kee and Ryan attended Stanford Blockchain conference in San Francisco to promote Loki and conduct research at the Stanford Centre for Blockchain Research. Multiple members of the team presented a live Alpha demo at RMIT University, Melbourne showing off some of the features of Lokinet, Loki messenger and Snapps. We have booked and paid for a booth at Consensus, in May 2019. Following the conference, we will bring members from the public and key Loki developers from around the world together in New York for a Loki SNAppathon.

Research and Theoretical Development Services

We have continued to stay on the front foot during this period, researching other projects such as Tor, Monero and Signal to be sure we are staying up to date with their development movements and continue to integrate some of the best features from each project into Loki. We have conducted research through Q & A sessions with the community to maintain a transparent and informative position on our development. We have continued to research and build Infinite Staking for Service Nodes to improve the usability for the community members who are running Service Nodes. We have increasingly noticed other projects with lower hashrates being hash attacked, so we conducted further research into Checkpointing and have published a proposal for the improvement on Github.

Data Analytics and Market Research Services

We have collected and monitored data on engagement with Loki’s social media platforms and website since January 2018. In regards to our overall social media growth and presence, we have noticed a consistent increase of interactions and members across the the majority of our social media platforms. With noticeable spikes correlating to major marketing campaigns and developmental implementations. An improved Dashboard was released during this time, which accurately shows the strength of the network. We have begun researching our targeted audiences and possible market share and plan to release the findings of this research in the coming weeks.

Administration and Bookkeeping Services

We completed documentation and negotiated on behalf of LAG to improve liquidity of Loki through exchanges, payment gateways such as Coinpayments and other third party trading gateways. We have safely conducted competitions and safely completed prize payments to puzzle winners from the Festive Freya Advent calendar. Due to the recent loss of Cryptopia, we have increased our efforts in regards to communications during this period with exchanges across the globe, providing them with relevant information. We have also worked with MasterNode websites to correctly share Loki relevant information. The Loki Improvement Proposal related to Checkpointing was also conducted during this period. We have assisted LAG in regards to bookkeeping, storing documentation, organising meetings and communications directly related to the LAG’s operational requirements.

Originally published at loki.network on March 5, 2019.