eWallet: UK Fiat-Dash Exchange - Update Thread

[AshFrancis]

Proposal Link | eWallet Site

Thank you for all the support and valuable feedback we received both in private and on our proposal. We're really looking forward to showing you what we can do and absolutely committed to giving you a fantastic return on budget spend (ROBS?).

As per our proposal we'll be updating you with weekly reports as well as a monthly video update. The flywheel is spinning, the ball is rolling, the train has left the station; whatever cliche you want to use we're already getting dug in and can't wait to show you what we've been up to.

Also feel free to hit us up on our public discord, we're always up for a chat.

- Ash, Rich & Alex

 

[Moquaio]

Hello everyone, Rich here!

So firstly before I get started I wanted to thank everyone who voted on our proposal and commented on our pre-proposal, some great positive comments and some helpful less positive ones! If you do have any questions about any part of our project or would just like to come chat to one of us please come join our Discord.

Now for our week 0 update!

I know technically we haven’t actually been funded yet and I contracts are being drawn up for our escrow currently but I figured I would write an update to fill you all in on what we have been doing this week.

Office

I have been to view a few offices this week and we have decided on one we like, location wise it is between the three of us and, most importantly, very inexpensive! We will be moving in there at the start of March (photos to come then!).

Notice Periods

Ash and Alex have both handed in their notice at their current jobs (hence the office being in March rather than immediate), I work self employed so I have been getting on with writing our compliance documentation, which is about as exciting as it sounds!

Infrastructure

Well we now officially have our domain, Ash bought the domain as soon as we were pretty sure we were getting funded just to avoid a price hike should the owner get wind of our proposal.

E-mails are up and running, feel free to contact us on Ash/Alex/Rich @ewallet.co.uk!

We are setup on Google Suite and have a bunch of spreadsheets and documents filled with ideas and notes!

Our Atlassian accounts are setup and our workflow is beginning to be added to it.

Compliance

As I mentioned earlier I have been writing and further researching the areas of compliance that are relevant to us. As you probably know cryptocurrencies are (currently) largely unregulated, however, I believe that preemptively following relevant legislation is in everyone’s best interest, especially with regards to anti money laundering.

Over the coming weeks I will be writing our compliance literature in particular focusing on:

AML: Anti-Money Laundering
FCA: Financial Conduct Authority
KYC: Know Your Customer
CTF: Counter Terrorist Financing

Development

Development wise we have been having a lot of discussions about what our MVP (minimum viable product) looks like and what additional features we would like to have and how best to achieve them, whilst we have always had a core product in mind there are a lot of questions and different routes we can go about to achieving this.

For example, what do we do if we run out of Dash? There are various options here, are we then “sold out”? Or do we find another source of Dash even if it is at a premium?

In this particular problem the solution we are leaning towards is having essentially two tiers of pricing, our normal pricing and a “premium” pricing in the event that we are sold out where we would be purchasing Dash directly from exchanges. In this second case we are all agreed that this will be made clear to the customer that it is currently at a premium and if they come back later (once we have replenished our supply) they could buy Dash at our “standard” rate.

We have also been in talks with an additional back-end developer who we will be using as a consultant and as someone Alex can bounce ideas off.

Alex and Ash have also been discussing lots of different softwares that we might or might not be using that I mostly haven’t even heard of!

Other bits

Ash has done a lot of work on our website designs and has a few mockups he has done, however, he doesn’t want me to put them in this update until he is happy with them!!

We have also been discussing security a lot and how is best to ensure we do not get hacked. Our intention at this time is to work in a similar way to Coinbase in that a huge percentage of funds are held offline.

That's your lot for this weeks update, see you next time!

As always if you have any questions either post them below or come join us on Discord!

 

[Moquaio]

Hi chaps!

Things are progressing pretty nicely, although to be fair, this update is going to be pretty much a follow on of last weeks! I am still writing compliance literature, Ash is still designing and Alex is coding.

New Stuff

I have been looking at taxation and what guidance we can give our users with regards to UK taxation. In the current regulatory situation we don’t actually have to do anything, however, most banks and financial institutions are compelled to work with taxation authorities to make sure their users pay applicable taxes. We believe it is likely that this regulation will spread to include exchanges like ours so we do want to encourage our users to complete self assessments as required.

The big news this week has been the BitGrail fiasco and we have been working on ensuring that our systems are robust enough to ensure this doesn’t happen to us. Currently we are looking at both the security of our systems but also fall backs so that if an area is compromised the damage inflicted is minimal. We believe that taking a “belt and braces” approach to security is key and whilst in some cases our security systems may make things slower for users we believe that users will be happy to have maybe a slight delay on some transactions or authentications to ensure their funds are secure.

Hope that update is helpful, let me know if you have any questions! Otherwise, see you next week!

 

[Moquaio]

Also here is a quick look of how our site might look (or might not!):

 

[Moquaio]

Hello again!

So this week is much the same as last, we are working towards our first monthly deadline.

We are now setup on Amazon Web Services and our compliance research is up to date and covers our responsibilities, however, this is an ongoing thing and not something we are ever able to say is “complete” as such.

New Stuff

Alex has been able to reduce his notice time so will be joining us a month earlier on a full time basis which is great news. Ash is finishing this week and will be on the project full time after that!

We are sourcing furniture for our “new” office which we are moving in to next week!

 

[Moquaio]

It’s been a busy week and we’ve got some exciting news for you all, we’ve completed our 4 targets for this month:

• Marketing Website Wireframes (Desktop & Mobile)
• Compliancy Research Documentation (AML, KYC, ATF)
• Office Space (Located & Signed Contracted)
• Infrastructure setup (Workflow, Dev Environments, Etc)

Wireframes

These wireframes outline the 2 core layouts we’ll be using throughout the site and our homepage structure:
Homepage - Desktop: https://i.imgur.com/twtxSPZ.png
Homepage - Mobile: https://i.imgur.com/SukZhTE.png
Index Page - Desktop: https://i.imgur.com/9fMh246.png
Index Page - Mobile: https://i.imgur.com/ciGY0NM.png
Content Page - Desktop: https://i.imgur.com/Q8wOCzo.png
Content Page - Mobile: https://i.imgur.com/IO1KESj.jpg

We’ve also put together an initial content structure which will form part of the marketing site hierarchy: https://i.imgur.com/ZotRphX.jpg

It goes without saying (but I’m saying it anyway!) this is just an initial base and as we flesh out the site next month there will be various changes and expansions to this.

Compliancy

We’ve had many discussions regarding compliance and the legislation that applies to us. The bottom line is that whilst crypto is largely unregulated, we’re going to take a pre-emptive approach to legislation and meet regulatory requirements long before they come into law.

We’ve shared a concise document outlining our compliancy stance here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P9YjwGidCDfF6oq6Jd99BgHOQ0_X3XF_2L5Qa8TaFxc/edit?usp=sharing

Office Space

We have now signed all our documents and will be moving in from the 1st of March! We’ll be updating you with pictures next week.

Infrastructure Setup

Infrastructure wise, we’ve set everything up on AWS and atlassian and are migrating all of our existing project management from google sheets to Jira tasks. We’re also waiting to hear back from Amazon regarding EKS which whilst it is a nice-to-have it isn’t an essential part of our stack. Alex & Ash have set up their tech stacks and we’re now working with several repositories in BitBucket.

 

[AshFrancis]

Time for a monthly update everyone! Things get a little more exciting next month, we'll show you some office pics on Monday next week and keep pinging you these updates. Like I say in the video, if anyone wants to poke their head around and have a coffee we're game:

 

[Moquaio]

Hi Chaps

This week we were mostly playing in the snow here in England! Luckily with the nature of our work that doesn’t really affect us (although it did delay us getting our office keys a little).

As promised here are some photos of the new office, a little plain currently but definitely getting there. Ash and I will be working here full time from today and Alex will be joining us at the start of April:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jD8B6kywnVN9V9HtH8VuGewn5oYaPhgD/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ghwhIwRYVsaPHIfFJVPqWoryEX561jBk/view?usp=sharing

In terms of total costs with the drop in the value of Dash since our proposal we have tried our best to reduce costs where possible. For example, in our initial budget the office we were looking at moving in to would have cost £800 a month, however, we have managed to find a much cheaper (albeit not quite as fancy) office for £355 per month (including internet and electricity costs) which does represent a significant saving over the course of our project (£3,115 over 7 months!).

With regards to our furniture the total cost for all of our desks, chairs and our fridge was £250 from a total office budget of £800. Of the remaining £550 we have so far spent approximately £250 on Ash’s desk setup and will probably come in slightly under budget once Alex is fully setup.

In other news we are in the new month and have our new goals to work towards! Ash is getting started on the design for our marketing website and Alex is going to continue working on our back end specification. I will be tailoring the documentation and research that I have done for our business to our site to ensure it is clear to visitors and gives all the relevant information!

As always I hope this update helps and am open to any questions you may have.

 

[Moquaio]

Office is all kitted out now and we are pretty happy with it, we are just kitting out Alex’s desk and getting everything ready for him to be with us full-time at the end of the month.

Sadly this update will be rather boring as we are pretty much just carrying on from next week. Ash is still working on the marketing site and Alex is putting together his specifications.

In other news I have been looking into regulation that we have to follow and whilst a lot of regulation does not apply to us at this time it is likely that it will in future. To this end I believe that this article is very relevant to us both confirming that regulation will be coming and also its quite nice that he is against banning cryptocurrencies and does note that there are benefits to them.

 

[Moquaio]

Hi chaps!

So this week Ash and I have mostly been working on the marketing site and writing content for it, hopefully that should be all finished by the end of this week.

The site structure will be something like this, although we have already made a few changes and more are likely to come:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rQSEb-0B27AgbHsSoVqtIY7PW-IGYhHS/view

And will look like this:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=11TZ4UzevrDUKs4yNa4hSSMPv5LTTqzco

Meanwhile Alex has been working on his system requirements specification still and this looks to be going pretty well!

In other news; one of the biggest concerns we have had and heard from you with regards to this project is the UK banks and how we will get around their distaste for cryptocurrencies. Coinbase, for example, have had to use a bank in Estonia for their UK transactions, however as per this article it looks like Barclays, at least, are easing their stance on cryptos and where one bank offers this service we expect that others will follow to remain competitive!

This will allow us to offer customers faster payments meaning they can transfer funds instantly to us meaning their funds are transferred instantly and for free whilst remaining in the UK.

As always, thanks for reading and feel free to ask if you have any questions!

 

[Moquaio]

Time for another update!

Well last week we were mostly working on our end of month goals and should be finishing these up this week, front page design is pretty much there, although I am sure some changes will be made, feel free to have a look:

http://design.ewallet.co.uk/home.jpg

Other than that it really is mostly the same as last week, Ash has been working on the above, I have been writing about Dash and Cryptocurrency etc and Alex has been finishing his back end specs prior to joining us full-time from next week!

Thanks for reading, will be a bigger update and a video next week!

 

[AshFrancis]

Monthly video update time:

Designs
Homepage: http://design.ewallet.co.uk/home.jpg
Dash Page: http://design.ewallet.co.uk/dash.jpg
Content Example: http://design.ewallet.co.uk/content.jpg

System Requirement Specification
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Xe1QLCgO4zLMYbtBuJJ9fbDLaQNPFnJGwLmJ0KEi18g/edit?usp=sharing

Have a great Easter!

 

[Moquaio]

Hello again!

Hope you all had a great Easter. Most of what I want to cover is outlined in the above video and I would encourage you all to watch it and have a look over our website designs and back end specifications!

Alex is now setup in the office and will be working on back end development full time, although this does mean that coffee expenditure will be increasing significantly.

Over the next few weeks we are going to be getting our marketing site online!

 

[Moquaio]

Again a rather boring update for you all, I have been refining our content and adding new stuff for our marketing site whilst Ash has been coding it and Alex has been working on back end stuff.

I have also gone through most of our company incorporation so hopefully this/next week we should actually officially be a company.

Additionally we now have a twitter and facebook page which might be active in future!

 

[Moquaio]

Hello again!

So another update for you all, things are progressing steadily here and this month we should be comfortably completing all of our deadlines.

We are now a Ltd company in the UK with company number 11311457

If you fancy viewing more info about our company (or if you dont believe me and want to check!!):

https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/11311457

Our marketing website is progressing nicely and should be ready for the end of the month. Alex meanwhile is working on back end functionality for the live site for next month's application mock up.

 

[AshFrancis]

Another Monday, another update! Nothing expansive, but we like to keep you all in the loop.

We're super busy (as always) but we've been making some great progress and it's nice to see how everything is coming together.

Alex has been working on the systems behind the scenes that will enable our service to function, for example he's been working with the Dash node and how it will integrate with the rest of the system as well as creating isolation between various parts for security. The node work he's doing will be essential in initiating and checking the status of transactions. He's also created some data tools for our back-end processes of supply and rates - raising some interesting questions along the way.

For example, we're figuring out how best to communicate rates - we can't rely on the coinmarketcap API as it has a rate limit of 10 requests a minute and the rates only update every 5 minutes so it's not a very granular source. Whilst this is fine for front-end communication we need to ensure we're working with real live rates behind the scenes. To do this he's utilised APIs from some of the major exchanges as well as other data providers (Uphold/CoinGecko/CMC/etc) to provide a whole host of data for us to extrapolate from.

We've also sorted out all the marketing site infrastructure which has been an interesting process, historically for my smaller clients I've utilised one click installs whilst the bigger sites I've worked with managed hosting but for this we're utilising an enterprise grade infrastructure with load balancers, auto scaling, relational database, file stores, security gateways, etc. It's a long way from your traditional LAMP stack! The upside is the performance is fantastic, it can scale rapidly when needed and is inherently more secure from the offset.

I've been busy coding up the designs you've seen before into a responsive wordpress theme, I've also been tweaking the design and adding new bits as we go and I should have this ready for you to look at in the next update.

Rich has been busy on compliance bits and writing and improving content, as per that last update we've now had all of our incorporation docs and are using this to work on relationships with the relevant authorities (FCA / Banks / etc).

Thanks for reading and you can look forward to seeing my face (and our marketing site) in next weeks video update!

P.S: As some of you are aware we've been actively communicating our costs to DashWatch but it also makes sense to put them here too:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XQvoacJyY-JOz7iIs1IbcE74u5hca4eQeGX6Fw2TBME/edit#gid=0

 

[Moquaio]

Hello again chaps!

So our marketing website is pretty much done and should be live from tomorrow at ewallet.co.uk additionally Ash will be posting another update video then. You will even be able to sign up your e-mail so that we can send you loads of spam once the actual full site becomes live.

Alex has been working on his application development and is on track for his May deadlines and hopefully we will have some cool stuff to show you then!

In other news we have a meeting with Barclays for next week regarding our banking, this is one of our biggest hurdles but they have recently accepted doing the banking for coinbase so hopefully this will be productive. Having the ability to offer faster payments to our customers will be of huge benefit to our business. We do have contingency plans in place if they do say no to offering us a bank account, but they do know we are working in Cryptocurrency and are still happy to meet with us which is a definite good sign, more on this next week after our meeting.

Check back tomorrow for the video and stuff (or don't, it's up to you)!

 

[AshFrancis]

Limited Company Info:
https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/11311457

Marketing Site:
https://ewallet.co.uk
Pass: dash123

Let us know any questions/feedback!

Cheers,
Ash

 

[Moquaio]

Hi again chaps

If you haven't already go have a look at our marketing site and let us know what you think!

In the last week we have been writing more marketing content for our site and Alex has been working hard on his back end development, at the moment we are mostly looking at how our ID verification process will actually function, initially we are going to be manually verifying identities but in future will look at using a third party ID verification system if required, as always the trick is balancing cost of the system against the cost of staff doing ID verification!

Over the coming weeks we will be working towards our May deadlines and hopefully will have Articles being added to our website regularly over the month!

 

[dashinstant]

Hi Ash,

Looks like you’re doing some good work here.

You do have some tough competition however, as Uphold allow the purchase of Dash with UK credit / debit cards and bank transfer, and their UX is first class.

I like the fact that you are UK and Dash focused. I think there’s a big market to be tapped here.

I enjoyed the 4 articles on the home page. They are nicely written and will help newbies.

Couple of minor typos:

From “Crypto Privacy”

who you are or were you are from the wallet address. (should be Where)

From “InstantSend”

but it is also technically that the debit card they are using is stolen or the cash they have is a forgery. (The word ‘possible’ is missing.)

Also, the hyperlinks in the articles take ppl away from your site, perhaps you should set it so that a new tab or window is opened, otherwise you may lose visitors?

Keep up the good work.

The site and idea is nice.

All the best,

Dashinstant.

 

[Moquaio]

Cheers for the comments, have fixed those bits on the articles!

 

[Moquaio]

Hello chaps!

Another week and another relatively boring update for you, we are all working hard towards our deadlines fo rthe month and hopefully will be putting a few new articles up on our site today to flesh out our learning centre and about Dash sections.

Alex has been working on our application and has made significant progress with our ID verification side of things and the sending of Dash to customers (via the testnet at the moment of course!).

 

[GrandMasterDash]

Hi Ash,

Looks like you’re doing some good work here.

You do have some tough competition however, as Uphold allow the purchase of Dash with UK credit / debit cards and bank transfer, and their UX is first class.

I like the fact that you are UK and Dash focused. I think there’s a big market to be tapped here.

I enjoyed the 4 articles on the home page. They are nicely written and will help newbies.

Couple of minor typos:

From “Crypto Privacy”

who you are or were you are from the wallet address. (should be Where)

From “InstantSend”

but it is also technically that the debit card they are using is stolen or the cash they have is a forgery. (The word ‘possible’ is missing.)

Also, the hyperlinks in the articles take ppl away from your site, perhaps you should set it so that a new tab or window is opened, otherwise you may lose visitors?

Keep up the good work.

The site and idea is nice.

All the best,

Dashinstant.

I thought Uphold just used exchange APIs in the background.. I could be wrong.

 

[dashinstant]

You may be right.

All I know is that I bought some Dash with a UK credit card, and I sold some Dash for £ Sterling and had it transferred to my UK bank account, just like Coinbase would allow with their cryptos I presume.... (although I'm not certain because Coinbase don't allow Dash of course, so I don't have a Coinbase account!)

The Uphold interface is really nice, and they have a few other interesting features as well.

I like them although the fees are arguably a little high. But, what the heck, they are supporting Dash, so we should support them!

 

[Moquaio]

I do agree, uphold is very good and definitely a strong competitor for us!

 

[Moquaio]

Hello again!

This week has been much the same as the previous, writing content and development, should hopefully see some new content being added on the site in the near future with a larger update covering all of our May milestones soon!

There will hopefully be some new articles going live this week covering why we like Cryptocurrency in general and various other areas!

 

[AshFrancis]

@GrandMasterDash @dashinstant - Thank you both for your enduring support, we're trucking on and really excited about the coming updates and getting our platform live.

You're completely spot on regarding Uphold, we've all used it and like their service, they've solved a lot of the problems we identified in the market place from the offset. When we went live they had frozen all card payment but they've re-enabled this and kept it live which is excellent. When it comes to us and them I'd be quite happy with our service being seen in the same light as theirs and I would be doing them a disservice saying anything different. However there is a lot of room in the market and a multi-pronged approach, especially where one has a UK focus and is closely tied to the DAO. Having both platforms would only be beneficial for Dash, I can't say I particularly see uphold as competition either, yes they are a similar product but our real competition is awareness and adoption. The front lines haven't even been drawn yet and won't be drawn until the audience is established, giving consumers choice, education and adding competition into the marketplace is beneficial for the users and investors at the end of the day.

 

[Moquaio]

Another check in update here chaps! Sorry it isn't more exciting but we are working hard towards our month end goals!

Ash has been putting the final touches on our marketing plan and changing it where needed, taking into account changes in our budget and Google's changes.

Later on this week expect a much more interesting update, Alex will also be providing an update on the progress of Development!

 

[AshFrancis]

Hello, update from Alex - unfortunately the spam prevention measures were blocking him from posting this himself:

Hello all,

With two months of full-time work into the eWallet exchange application, it's time for the first update from the development team. That's just me for now due to budget constraints. Despite that, we've made good progress all round. Here's a rough breakdown of the aspects:

- Application scaffold
- Exchange rate aggregation from numerous sources
- Identity validation document upload with manual verification
- Rough exchange browser application (built with react)
- Bizops browser application
- Integration with a dash node running on the test network
- Partial integration with two credit card processors
- Utilisation of the amazon simple email service

While the actual code isn't production ready at the moment with very few tests, the above provides the full flow of functionality when using the testnet and payment sandboxes.
This means a test user can:
1) Visit our development version of the exchange site.
2) Request a new order for dash.
3) Receive a responsive email with the link for identity validation.
4) Upload KYC docs and wait for confirmation email.
5) Make a test payment with fake card details.
6) See the dash client notification that the transaction has been submitted and is awaiting blockchain confirmations.

The next month I'll be working through refactoring areas of the codebase which are not very maintainable, writing tests, focusing on how all the various errors will bubble up to the user with well written responses - essentially a lot of sanding down the rough edges and generally trying to bring it to you as a high-fidelity demo for your feedback.

We were in two minds whether to host what we have so far on an aws instance so you could have a play and recieve some test dash, however the current UI was created purely for testing.

We'd rather manage expectations for now by showing you what it will look like without functionality as opposed to a usable demo without sleek and sexy asethetics.

So that's it for my first write up, thanks for reading.

My next scheduled update will be at the end of June along with a useable demo before the August full launch.

Stay tuned,
Alex.

 

[AshFrancis]

Hi guys, here's some light reading for you (hah):

Marketing Strategy Doc
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gQ12kMQoX6ahfSbJBebaqdZYWPActG8sfjWLvIOEmX0/edit?usp=sharing

In other news here's a peak at our dashboard:
http://ewallet.co.uk/design/dashboard-mockup.png

Intentionally simplistic and modelled off Coinbase (reasoning explained in that marketing strategy doc, in short it's about user experience and familiarity). We're looking forward to showing you a more in-depth look later in June.

More exciting news
We'll be going to see Dash Core Inc & Kuvacash at Moneyconf in Dublin from June 11th - 13th.

More to follow!