After a lengthy hiatus from our projects to work on the Blue Papers, our team is back at it and pushing out updates. Since late February we have been ramping up our work on Anchor, Unicove, and getting a better flow for the processes we use to support our users. We have also continued to increase the size of our team and are finally bringing some new hardware online!
Anchor
We have made a number of updates to some versions of Anchor, and have a number of builds currently being tested with release anticipated soon. We have been seeing an increasing amount of support requests specifically with regards to account creation across all versions of Anchor, so a large focus on these releases has been bug fixes and improvements account creation.
Anchor for macOS/Windows/Linux has seen two releases over the past few weeks to resolve some bugs and improve clarity during account creation. We are up to version 1.3.4 now with these fixes, so update first if you plan to create an new accounts! The Windows desktop installer was also reverted back to one large file instead of a web downloader, since some users were not able to install over the web. The file size (~150mb) we recognize is large, which we’re going to have to resolve with an architectural rework of the desktop version. We’re experimenting with technologies for that right now.
The Android version of Anchor has seen a release with bug fixes and account creation improvements too. One new feature that will be available soon is the ability to retrieve keys that might have otherwise been invisible on the device. This will help some users who have lost the metadata around their account but still have the keys. We also have a complete rewrite of the key storage engine in development as well with even more crucial features.
The iOS version of the app is in a similar state but a new release hasn’t been published yet. You can expect the same types of improvements the other two version have received, as well as some UX enhancements to improve the signing process.
Unicove
Many months ago we announced Unicove was going to be the new brand for our web wallet interface and the redesign is nearly complete. The pull request on Github is nearly complete and we’ll hopefully be deploying it as soon as we make a few final tweaks.
This release won’t bring too many new features (aside from account creation), but will server as the starting point for development of all the additional tools we’re looking to build into this site. That’ll include various token management systems, gateways into governance, ways to interact with smart contracts, and see your account activity.
We are really excited to make this project into one of the premeire ways to do the basic operations you need on EOSIO-based blockchains!
Data Center Expansion
Our Season 1 Pomelo grant for our public APIs is finally making some progress. After waiting nearly 5 months for delivery of our new hardware, it’s all installed in our new Vancouver data center and is now being configured.
Over the coming weeks we will be configuring the hardware, deploying our virtualization stack, and then start deploying test services to ensure everything is running smoothly. We decided we will be starting with a full Jungle 4 testnet deployment, including the Fuel APIs and databases, a full history deployment using Robo, setting up our estimation services, and everything else we’d deploy on a live service network.
Team Expansion
We continue to grow our team, now at a total of 11 people! The grants we received for the work on the API+ and Wallet+ Blue Papers primarily went towards bringing in additional staff to keep Greymass operational and our projects moving forward at a steady pace.
We are looking for a diverse set of people who have experience taking charge in areas related to development, management, infrastructure, support/education, and marketing. If you think you have the knowledge and skills to help, and are interested in exploring opportunities, please reach out to us at team@greymass.com!
Account Creation
During the first Eden election, Aaron ran on the idea of expanding account creation to make it more accessible to all applications. At this point we have a nearly complete MVP of this product and will likely be debuting it within Unicove. Our Unicove integration with this SDK will serve as a live example of how it can be used and as a way for us to “dog food” this new service ourselves.
We will be releasing an SDK that developers can integrate into their application. The SDK will allow developers to trigger a creation process, in which the user will see a popup that goes through the account purchase flow, through Anchor, and then back into the application they originated from.
Recently we also started a complete redesign of the web flow users go through while creating an account on create.anchor.link. As mentioned in the Anchor update, we have seen a number of users get lost during the creation process and have found a number of ways we can change how the website works to better guide users as they are getting started. We will begin prototyping these flows out in the near future and deploy them both for our website and the new SDKs at the same time.
Analytics
To give you a sense of the trajectory we are on with a number of our projects, we decided to publish some of our project analytics with a brief description of what they are.
Account Creation
To start with, let’s look at account creation metrics, with this chart showing the number of accounts we are creating through our services.
Despite some unavailability the past few months for the Android version, numbers have remained stable and we anticipate them to start increasing again once we have the Android issues worked out.
Anchor
Next up is Anchor installations and the metrics we have to highlight how many people are downloading and installing the app. First up is Android, which while still in early access, has a user base in the tens of thousands at this point with the rate of new installs remaining steady. The chart below shows downloads per day of the Android version.
The new iOS downloads has slightly declined which we hope will reverse as we start releasing new updates and features.
We still don’t have these metrics available at this time for Anchor desktop in chart form, but the desktop version over the course of its life is nearing 400,000 downloads! That’s a 75k increase from the beginning of the year.
Unicove
Unicove traffic continues to grow at as we continue to encourage Anchor users to help us test it out. This growth is especially great because it means the application, completely unbranded and in it’s most simple state, is actually serving a purpose and seeing enagement.
Wrapping things up
It’s been a stressful start to the year with nearly all of our focus on the Blue Papers and a growing backlog of Greymass related projects that need to be maintained. We are getting back on our feet now though after the diversion to focus on research and we’re very excited with where everything is heading.
The years of work we’ve put into the technologies and products at Greymass all have a place in the future EOSIO ecosystem and we are very excited to see where this technology heads.
Previous Report
Our previous report can be found here: