[Thanks to our wonderful community of translators, you can soon read this report in Español, Italiano, 中文, Русский, Tagalog, Bengali, Português do Brasil, and 한국어 <3 ]
We’re pleased to be back with another edition of our quarterly report. We can’t wait to share with you everything that we’ve accomplished and have been busy working on.
Why do we keep doing what we do? There is still a lot that’s wrong with entrusting communication and social networks to centralized technology. Even apps with security and privacy at their core are still subject to issues like large scale data leakages which compromise user security. We solve these kinds of problems by design, by simply not retaining sensitive data about our users that can be leaked.
Decentralization is at the heart of everything we do. We’re convinced now more than ever that if an app offers transaction functionality but is centralized, this simply isn’t good enough to protect users (governments can and often do have the power to take down payment networks).
All across the world, users like you and us are becoming more cognizant of the surveillance economy, understanding how our data is the product that’s being monetized and sold off.
Q2 2020 saw the start of a new chapter for the Status Network, with the mobile app launched and our attention set to expanding and engaging the user base. This report will explore our flagship Status app, plus all the projects and initiatives currently underway within the Status Network ecosystem.
Picking up from v1.2 in Q1, in the past quarter we focused on shipping features that make your Status experience more convenient and secure.
Q2 2020 saw two new releases - v1.3 and v1.4. These brought in new highly anticipated features like:
We currently have 30,259 Android active devices and 3,114 iOS installations. We’ve also been doing some work on how to measure the success of features and enhancements that are shipped - something that at first appears to be straightforward to do, but becomes trickier when we consider that we don’t track user activity in the app.
You can see our user cohort dashboard work here, where we look at weekly user retention based on peer IDs.
Security is a critical design consideration in everything we build. @Jakubgs wrote a tutorial on how Status solved the problem of reproducible builds for Android using the NixOS package manager. Reproducible builds - also known as deterministic builds - are a way to verify the authenticity and security of products. Using the tutorial as a guide, you can use reproducible builds at any time to check the authenticity of the Status app by building the software yourself.
The coming quarter’s focus will be on making it easier and more appealing to join Status, adding more baseline features, and improving retention and out of view experience. Our upcoming releases are tentatively scoped as:
V1.5
V1.6
We’re proud to be a transparent and open source project, You can:
We’re looking forward to hearing your ideas!
We have experimented with parallel implementations of Desktop to see how best to move forward. On the one hand, we were continuing the development of our existing `react-native-desktop-qt` version that was created in 2019 (but put on hold to focus on mobile app development). On the other hand, we also built a new implementation using `Nim-qt`.
We eventually settled on the latter, as it supports our bigger goal of Nimbus implementation into the Status app, with the whole Embark team working to push it forward.
Since then, the alpha binaries for Linux and Mac have been shipped, including an alpha 2.
Status Network Token (SNT) is the utility token that powers and incentivizes the Status Network.
There are currently 85,654 SNT holders, with 899,746 transfers made to date, and a total supply of 6,805m SNT. You can see more token metrics here, as well as our own SNT analytics dashboard over at: https://analytics.status.im/.
Checking in on our SNT utilities live and in development, we have:
Keycard was formally launched in Q2, fully integrated with the Status app from versions v1.4 onwards 🥳 - this was a huge cross-Status effort, so massive kudos to everyone involved!
Keycard is a secure, contactless, hardware wallet, which, when integrated with Status, enables users to:
To learn more about Keycard integration with the Status app, check out the Keycard launch press release here, or get yours now here, and check out press coverage on Keycard from Coindesk and Cointelegraph.
With a successful launch in the bag, the Keycard team has now shifted its focus to StatusPay, a layer2 open and decentralized payment network where users can buy goods at points of sale with crypto using Keycard. The Keycard team has been bouncing ideas with former Incubatee LeapDAO. Design work for the network is ongoing - you can track it here. More to come in the next report!
Active work on the Embark Framework has been on pause, as the Embark team has been focused on building the Status Desktop app, as well as integrating Embark with Status, so no updates to report for this edition.
@Acolytec wrote a wonderful guide on how to use Subspace to power DAO notifications, read his blog post here.
Still on core Eth2.0, we've managed to speed-up block and attestation processing by about 10-50x (by caching hash-tree-root), and have implemented EIP2333:BLS12-381 Key Generation (important for cross-client compatibility).
On the security side, we put out an innovative RFP for our Nimbus Eth2.0 security audit - we were lucky to get some great responses and just announced our chosen vendors: ConsenSys, NCC, & Trail of Bits. We’re looking forward to working together!
Our efforts this quarter culminated in the launch of the Altona testnet, which we were extremely proud to be part of.
We have also started working on the Nimbus Beacon Chain book. The goal is to cover all you need to know in order to start validating with the Nimbus client. The book covers all the details for running a validator node on the testnet from your computer.
We've also updated our three-part guide that takes you through how to install Nimbus on your Android device (see part 1, part 2 and part 3). You should now be able to use them to connect to the testnet.
We kicked off this quarter a working group to integrate Nimbus into Status. Stimbus brings together efforts on Mobile, Desktop and Nimbus, gradually replacing `status-go`, which is something of a franken-library filled with historical baggage.
The benefits of Stimbus are:
Why now?
You can follow along on Stimbus’s progress here.
Waku is a fork of Whisper (EIP-627), optimized for better usability for resource restricted devices. Q2 saw the release of four new Waku specs (v0.5, v0.6, v1.0 and v1.1).
Waku v2 is on the horizon and coming soon, bringing a much-needed solution to known fragility and scalability issues.
We published three research posts during the quarter:
Marketing team has been on a roll this quarter, powering through campaigns and content supporting the launch of v1.3 and v1.4 of our mobile app.
Our DeFi campaign continued, spotlighting our favorite DApps that can be accessed via Status.
Q2 saw the formation of our performance marketing team, with @simonam and @alek coming onboard to drive our programmatic campaigns. We’re excited to turbocharge our marketing and reach a far bigger audience.
This quarter we also relaunched our Instagram, we’re excited to now have another channel to connect with users globally.
Looking ahead, there are many more exciting projects and initiatives in the pipeline, including introducing Status to the LatAm region (partnering with influencers on the ground to spread the word about Status) and the launch of our referral program, allowing users to earn crypto by onboarding their friends into Status.
You can follow along with the Marketing team’s plans in real time here.
Security is a key principle in all that we do, we continued this quarter sharing our wisdom in the press on things like 2FA, fighting censorship with blockchain, the need for a new digital paradigm of security at the core, and offering website security tips for businesses.
With Q1 closed out on the books, here’s a look at our project finances over the last year:
Expenses ($1,000s) | Q2 2019 | Q3 2019 | Q4 2019 | Q1 2020 |
---|---|---|---|---|
Salaries, core contributor fees & individual expenses | $1,800 | $1,700 | $1,882 | $1,696 |
Third party vendors | $200 | $300 | $620 | $550 |
Marketing & sponsoring | $50 | $40 | $161 | $187 |
Reserves ($1,000s) | Q2 2019 | Q3 2019 | Q4 2019 | Q1 2020 |
---|---|---|---|---|
Crypto (excl. SNT) & fiat holdings | $57,000 | $34,000 | $23,000 | $25,000 |
[For ease of reference, we’ve shown our financial data in this report in USD. When putting together this information, we used the following Coingecko exchange rates to convert ETH balances:
In spite of sluggish economic activity globally, we’ve managed to continuously secure half a year of rolling fiat runway and maintain our asset diversification strategy. Project operations have been funded from our existing treasury (composed of fiat, ETH and BTC). Fundraising is planned for later in the year.
From the outset of the project, 29% of the total supply of SNT was set aside for future development. This SNT reserve remains untouched, and we have no plans currently to do anything with those SNT. We’ll keep the community informed as plans materialize.
Not many in-person events this quarter, for obvious reasons. We had mostly some virtual events on our calendar in Q2:
Core contributors typically get together once a year in the Fall for an Offsite to plan for the coming year. However, with travel restrictions still in place and the risk to our people’s health being too high, we’ve indefinitely postponed plans for 2020’s Offsite.
The world may be returning to some semblance of normality, with people returning to offices all over the globe. We remain, and have always been, fully remote.
We’re excited to see more companies implement remote working in their “new normal” and will continue to be advocates for this way of working which has clear inclusion, environmental, and work/life balance benefits.
Our headcount has remained relatively flat since 2019. We’re currently at 66 people, including core contributors and, now included in our headcount tracking, part time community contractors.
Looking ahead at our hiring plans in Q3 2020, we’re predominantly adding the following to our team:
Turnover has been relatively flat in the last couple of months, having had some departures at the top of the quarter in April:
During Q2, we said goodbye to four core contributors (@mcbain, @adam, @rachel & @tina). We welcomed the following awesome new core contributors to Status:
In Q2 2020, we had 11 new ambassadors joining the Ambassador Program. The current number of active ambassadors is now at 41, with representation across 21 countries - spreading out to more corners of the globe. We accept applications on a rolling basis, and received 58 applications from candidate ambassadors in Q2 alone.
Ambassadors completed 82 tasks in Q2 2020, broken down by category into: events (2), content (68), community building (5), and technical (7) 🎉
Here you can see the development of the ambassador program since it returned from a hiatus in Q4 2019:
Some highlights from the program in Q2 2020:
Q3’s focus for the ambassador program will be:
Thanks to our community of ambassadors and contributors, the Status mobile app has now been translated into multiple languages. If you’d like to learn more and get involved, head over to translate.status.im.
Supported Languages | Progress |
---|---|
Chinese (Simplified) | 100% |
Chinese (Traditional) | 99% |
Korean | 100% |
Spanish | 99% |
French | 96% |
Italian | 99% |
Indonesian | 99% |
Filipino | 99% |
Arabic | 94% |
Russian | 96% |
Brazilian Portuguese | 99% |
German | 99% |
Turkish | 99% |
Shout out to our translation heroes: Nicolas, Luis, Erol, Floyd, Albed, Alexia, Oleksandr, Andrii, Paulo, Peter, Nasib, Kuanghen Tao, & Tbenr 👏
It’s been a whirlwind first half of the year, and we’re looking forward to more decentralized goodness in the second.
As Status matures as a project and ecosystem, our strategy in 2020 will continue to be twofold:
Thanks for reading this report, we’re always excited to tell you about the work we do. Here’s hoping that wherever you might be, you’re safe and well. Take care! - your friends at Status.
A huge and heartfelt thank you to those who helped translate this report, we’re super grateful for your contribution:
This report was made for your entertainment, and we’d ask you not to rely on it for any other purposes, e.g. making investment decisions. Just to be super transparent, we want to highlight that:
Thanks for your understanding!