March 2023 Community Update with Richard Ells

Hey everybody, Richard Ells here from Electroneum with a long-awaited update. I’ve recorded a project update video for you that’ll give some context around what we’ve been quietly working on behind the scenes over the last year or so, as well as to give you some insight into where we’re headed with Electroneum and AnyTask.com. In case you’re unable to watch the video found below, I’ve also included a written summary.

For the last year and a bit we’ve been in negotiations to become a significant blockchain partner to a major multinational corporation. It was ridiculously exciting. Unfortunately, the FTX disaster last year has since reduced their risk appetite. Whilst this isn’t the outcome we were hoping for a year and a bit into negotiations, the good news to take from this is that we managed to secure major interest from a huge multinational corporation, and there were good reasons for this.

Our business model is very different to other blockchain projects. From very early on we embraced KYC and AML. This is what corporates like to see. There is definitely more interest now as corporates are beginning to understand the potential of blockchain technology. Whilst we are still very much pursuing this partnership, we are actively looking for others, whilst at the same time implementing the features and functionality they were looking for from our network.

Our new blockchain is coming along well

Later this year we plan to launch an entirely new blockchain that is aligned with the needs of corporates, developers, and ETN users alike. It will do more than just allow you to play with NFTs, although we do have a really funky idea that’ll allow people create instant NFTs through the ETN App. The core purpose of this new blockchain is to provide greater interoperability, higher throughput, increased liquidity for ETN, an easier way for developers to build blockchain applications, whilst of course maintaining our existing levels of security, transparency, and low energy usage.

We’re using a really interesting model for our consensus mechanism that’s going out to our permissioned validators, which by the way, from a corporate perspective is a really positive thing, because, in the permissionless model, which nearly every other project is, it does mean that anybody can be a validator. And as such, no one knows who the validators are. From a corporate perspective, that’s slightly worrying. So we’ve seen quite a lot of interest in the fact that we allow corporates to know exactly who is operating the network.

The blockchain will use a new consensus model called IBFT (Istanbul Byzantine Fault Tolerance). The new model will enable us to introduce near-instant transaction speeds and five-second finality. What this effectively means is that a transaction will complete within five seconds of it being sent. This is quite an extraordinary thing. Bitcoin, for example, uses 10-minute blocks, but then an awful lot of people would want to see other blocks added, called confirmation blocks, before they would consider that there’s no chance of a chain split. And so as such, you don’t normally find that Bitcoin would be considered fully transacted in those 10 minutes, you would normally consider it confirmed five or six blocks after. And so that might well take an hour for confirmation.

Those of you who have followed Electroneum from the early days will know about our instant payment notification system, which uses a really clever way of ring-fencing funds to assure ETN App users that the transaction is on its way. Whilst we’ll continue to maintain this system, the new blockchain alleviates much of the need for it. With a five-second transaction speed, Electroneum will be amongst the fastest blockchains in existence today, alongside the likes of Ripple.

In terms of when the new blockchain will be launched, it’s honestly hard to say. The project as a whole is coming on nicely. As you can imagine, it’s a slightly terrifying thing to do. You’ve seen the amount of hacks and security issues that occur across the blockchain space, things have to be tested so vigorously and scrutinised to the highest level. So that is all taking place now. And at the same time, of course, we’ve also got to test those bridges. We’ve got bridges that enable the old blockchain to interface with the new blockchain, enabling ETN balances to move across from where they were to where they’re going to be on the new smart contract blockchain. It’s not just a new smart contract blockchain, there’s lots of other stuff going on in the background.

An exciting year ahead for AnyTask.com

AnyTask.com continues to go from strength to strength. We’ve got some absolutely fantastic freelancers on there, and if you are not using it already, you just literally have to use it. It always blows me away. We’ve got amazing web designers, graphic designers and other people that are right into the design space. But they’re also people in all sorts of other facets, data mining and processing, blogs and articles, video and advert production, photo background removals, NFT design, just so many things on there. It’s ridiculous.

When I talk to corporates, they love AnyTask.com. So I’m very much focused on trying to find a really good corporate partner for AnyTask.com. Bear in mind, anyone who’s in the cryptocurrency space will know projects like to talk about financial inclusion (and there are a lot!), AnyTask.com genuinely demonstrates it. There are people earning an income in the cryptocurrency space with AnyTask.com. You can’t show financial inclusion in any better light, in my opinion, than AnyTask.com. So we will be using AnyTask.com as a lever to push us into the corporate market further and find a really good partner. So I’m very excited about that opportunity.

When AnyTask.com was first launched, we only had ETN payout and MasterCard and Visa card payments on the way in, so inbound payments were on the traditional payment rails, whilst outbound payments transacted over the blockchain. Then we implemented a feature that enabled people to pay for services with ETN as well. Very good reason for that. Of course, for those people that are, let’s say, for instance, making a website but they need a logo for their customer, they can take some of the ETN they’re earning and feed it back through the system and buy from somebody else. They can even start to bundle packages of skills together by having that ETN.

We’ve now taken it one step further and have just launched the ability to pay with Bitcoin. Freelancers still only get paid out in ETN, so every single person who sells on AnyTask.com will always be paid in ETN, but we’ve opened the front door, the payment gateway in, to also allow Bitcoin.

You’re going to see other cryptocurrencies coming in the future and we’ve done this for a very, very good reason. The first reason is that from a corporate and brand recognition perspective, Bitcoin has a massively high profile. But there’s another reason as well. When you think about communities within the cryptocurrency space, you’ll find that people are fiercely loyal to their favourite tokens. Bitcoin crosses all those boundaries. Everybody who is in crypto is in the Bitcoin space. It’s therefore a great starting point. Other really big projects include the likes of Ethereum, XRP, Dogecoin, all of whom have massive social media communities.

So by introducing them one at a time, those communities get to understand the benefits of their favourite token being used on AnyTask.com, and in turn, will help to support it’s use on the platform. We still see people in the cryptocurrency space using Fiverr. Fiverr is a great platform, but if you support crypto, why would you not support the use of crypto on AnyTask.com. It makes a lot more sense. This activity not only drives AnyTask.com, but by default, it drives ETN adoption. So the Electroneum project is always aided by every benefit that there is to AnyTask.com.

In the coming months, we’re going to make it even faster to find the services you need. We’re overhauling the search functionality on AnyTask.com. We’ve got more than 28,000 freelancers on AnyTask.com and our analysis suggests people are sometimes experiencing difficulty with finding the right freelancer for the job. As such, the team are currently hard at work building a new algorithmic search, which I trust will go live in the coming months.

Plans for the year ahead

So you’ve heard me speak about the massive upgrades coming to Electroneum, as well as a little bit about where we’re going with AnyTask.com and what we’ve launched recently. My personal job, with the help of the team feeding information into me, is to find new big corporate partners.

We’ve found over the years that dealing with smaller companies takes just as much time and as many lawyers. When we got a lot of interest from a big multinational corporation last year it made me realise it’s a waste of time going small, so let’s go really big. So I’m out there looking for giant corporate partners.

We’re in a brilliant position to work with corporates, probably better than virtually any other project, because if you look right back at our history of KYC/AML implementation, low energy consumption, and permissioned validators, we tick a lot of boxes for corporates. It gives them the assurance and oversight of who is validating the network, which is absolutely key. So I’m confident that we’ll get somebody on board for Electroneum or AnyTask.com — either way, both projects benefit.

As soon as the new smart contract blockchain is complete, our next project is to expand compatibility with other blockchains via additional bridges. This in turn will provide even greater flexibility for corporates, developers, and ETN users. For now, that’s all I can share. But as always, thank you for your continued support and patience. We very much appreciate all your likes, positive comments, and encouragement. Thank you.

Originally published at https://news.electroneum.com on March 20, 2023.