Port Harbor — August ‘21

ANCHOR POINT

Batten down the hatches,

It’s hard to believe August has nearly come to a close. We’ve had a very productive month by all accounts. There were more business calls and proposals, and loads of developmental progress over the past few weeks. We’re humming right along and expect to meet all of our internal timelines for upcoming feature releases, backend enhancements, and Q4 engagement.

It wasn’t all unicorns and rainbows however, having experienced a bit of a hack ourselves this month. As we previously shared in our Telegram channel, a personal private key used during early development was compromised, and some of a team member’s tokens (50k) were stolen and dumped. This particular wallet also had transfer allowances with two corporate wallets for initializing rewards, and those tokens (19k) were also siphoned. The attacker’s wallet address has been flagged and labeled by ViewBlock with a Scam alert token.

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Within 15 minutes of being notified of the first transfer, we went into Defcon-1 and launched a full security audit of all contracts and wallets. We were able to quickly confirm the two most important facts: A) the attacker’s access was isolated and contained, and B) All servers, contracts, and user data remained protected. We then scrubbed all logins and reset 2FA across all accounts, and deployed new admin and multi-sig wallets for peace of mind.

I’m very grateful that we implemented numerous security updates months ago, to mitigate vulnerability and protect corporate supplies, while also improving private key management. Nevertheless, this was another public example of how seed phrase and private key security is paramount in this space. And a reminder to all to remain vigilant.

THE APP

The version update that enables KYC is working great for our testers. After our devs were forced to switch providers, they made quick work of swapping and shipping the code, and KYC is now working on both Android and iOS devices.

We’ve updated parameters within the proxy contract as well as the swap contract, and they will be deployed to the mainnet when we submit the build to app stores. Our goal is to get it released by the end of this month, after successful testing is complete.

Following this release, we will have a few more stability enhancements for v1.0, but most of the engineering focus will shift, with energies devoted to v2.0, so that it can be optimized and ready for an early Q4 release. More to come on that in next month’s newsletter!

THE BUSINESS

As the engineering output is in full swing, so too are the bizdev efforts progressing. This month, we began discussions with another e-commerce company that focuses on post-purchase consumer engagement. They’ve already got around 800 retail merchants as global clientele, so integration with them would make our services immediately available to hundreds of the world’s top brands.

Another positive development on the business side is actually found in our KYC feature. The ability to verify users and legitimize the veracity of our scan data, opens many more doors while also giving us more leverage with enterprise partnerships.

As we move towards the end of Q3 and approach Q4, we’ve narrowed and refined our value propositions, to lean more heavily into consumer loyalty management and remittance capabilities provided by our tokenized platform. Our executive sales meetings will also increase in velocity week-by-week during the final months of the year, as we take advantage of the increased online shopping over the holiday season.

THE TOKENS

PORT continues to be ranked as the 4th most liquid ZRC on ZilSwap, with an average of $3.4m USD liquidity locked. The daily trade volume varies dynamically from mid-five figures, all the way up to high six figures of value exchanged any given day.

The new ZilSwap proposal LIP-9, was a closely fought battle, but was narrowly approved, and will go live with the next season of rewards. This will provide a less corruptible form of pool selection for ZWAP rewards each month. At our current market cap, daily volume, and TVL, we can expect PORT to maintain around 145 ZWAP rewards per epoch (~weekly). That number comes down from 212.5 ZWAP, but will more evenly distribute rewards to the wider ZRC ecosystem, based on token activity.

Summer Shipments — Distribution #2 will ship out next week on September 1. Liquidity Providers on ZilSwap continue to accrue rewards automatically while in the pool. 100k PORT will be rewarded to LPs proportionate to their share of the pool during July & August. Then the following reward — Distribution #3 will occur on October 1, for those who LP’d during August and September. Finally, Distribution #4 will be issued on November 1, for those in the pool during September and October.

Lastly, the ZIL-ETH bridge draws closer, with Zilliqa network update v8.1 happening August 30th. We will monitor Zilliqa’s testing phase and be ready to go live with an ERC-20 $PORT as soon as the bridge is live and properly functioning.

STATS

Registered Users: 944,127
Users with wallets: 475.739
Total scan count: 8,126,602
Token holder count: 26.9K
Total transactions: 2.2M
Total ZIL Burned: 2.1M
Total Countries: 169

KEEL

The lengthwise timber or steel structure along the base of a ship, the backbone supporting the framework of the whole ship. In some sailing vessels, the keel is extended downwards as a ridge to increase stability in heavy winds and prevent cap-sizing in rough seas.

A FINAL WORD

by JG Whitley, CEO

We’ve been working really hard to mold v1.0 into a scalable enterprise solution. Much of what was in v1.0 is either evolving, or being changed completely. There will be noticeable differences to users, as the app will look and feel, and even function differently in many regards. But we couldn’t be more excited about getting these updates out to users, and bringing platform engagement into Phase II.

In efforts to validate users and data, we’ve also been purging bad scans and wallets as we grow. Clean data is important so that we can have accurate numbers to report on. While some startups may boast in hundreds of thousands of registered users, our hope is to maintain the integrity of our reporting for the sake of accuracy and honesty, without fluff of misinformation.

One way we’ve improved our numbers, is by clearing the queue of ~210k user wallet adds. You may have noted the decrease in the Stats section above, “Users with Wallets”; down from ~680k last month. The existing queue consisted of both fake users and well intentioned users, so removing the incomplete wallet events from the queue was a calculated decision. It requires good users to re-add their wallet address in the app, but bots have been locked out, so that the new wallet adds coming in can be marked as valid.

You may have also noticed that we added a Stat line too: “Registered Users”. This number (just under 1 million), represents the total number of account creations since inception; with or without a wallet added. The accounts with a ZIL wallet added is far less (~475k), and wallets holding PORT, is even less (~27k). But as we roll out KYC, and eventually v2.0, we will be positioned to track and report much cleaner user metrics to enterprise partners and interested token holders alike, which bodes well for business.

In closing, we are fast approaching the period in our lifecycle I’ve been most excited about since the beginning. That is, the phase at which we can begin to aggressively pursue enterprises with a turn-key service, and attract users with a clean and properly functioning product. Anchors Away.

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