Tabby Rewards

If you’ve ever tried to send Tokens to more than a handful of users at once, you already know the pain. First you have to collect the address of each user. Then you manually make a Blockchain transaction to send Tokens to each user. This is both time consuming and costly, as you’ll pay gas for every transaction. It also carries a risk of irreversible mistakes.

🔗 Tabby Rewards is live now.

So many new possibilities

Tabby Rewards solves these problems by uniquely offering Token redemption through a simple URL, allowing you to mass send Tokens without knowing the receiving addresses. This opens up huge possibilities on how you can reward users. Here are just some of ways you can use Rewards:

• Airdrop tokens to anyone on social media.
• Upload codes to your mailing list software for mass distribution.
• Encourage community actions with Tokens as a reward.
• Payback your customers’ patronage by automatically emailing codes after store purchases.
• Competitions and giveaway prizes.
• Gifts for friends and family. Introduce them to crypto!

Creating your first Rewards campaign

We value user-friendly solutions with all our products. You’ll find Rewards follows the same philosophy that allows anyone to make use of Smart Contracts.

Starting a new Rewards campaign requires a few simple details.

• Which Token are you distributing?
• How many Tokens are claimed with each unique code?
• How many codes are you generating?

You can create Reward codes for any ERC20 compatible Token.

Once your campaign has been configured, you’ll need to pay for deployment of your custom Smart Contract. We support both browser and hardware wallets.

After payment is completed, your contract is live!

Token Authorization

We put security and safety as our top priority when designing all our software. This is why we use a special Token Authorization protocol to distribute your rewards. This protocol allows you to keep Tokens in your wallet, while still sending rewards to users.

How this works is simple. Instead of sending Tokens to us, your custom Smart Contract is given Authorization to send only the preassigned Tokens for your campaign to users as they are claimed. This means the Tokens remain in your personal storage until codes are claimed. You can revoke this access at any time if you wish to end the campaign. This method is far more secure because you retain full control over your Tokens. This is a unique functionality of ERC20 tokens that cannot be done directly with Ether.

Managing your Campaign

The codes for your campaign are generated and made available to download in a CSV file. We developed a custom method of writing these codes to the Blockchain that prevents anyone from reading Rewards codes directly from the Ethereum ledger. This ensures hackers cannot read the Smart Contract and claim all the codes. As a result though, your campaign codes can only be downloaded immediately after deployment.

If for any reason you lose the codes file you downloaded, you can always cancel the campaign and recreate it. As the Tokens never actually left your wallet, this process is simple.

In the Manage Campaigns tab, you’ll see a list of each code which has been claimed, allowing you to easily track your Token distribution event.

Redeeming Reward Codes

To claim a Rewards code, click the code URL and you’ll be presented with a page to claim the Tokens. Using a browser or hardware wallet, you can claim the Tokens directly. It really is that easy!

🔗 Use Tabby Rewards today.

We’re excited to see how Tabby Rewards is used by the crypto community as we continue to release products that make Smart Contracts accessible to everyone.

Introducing Tabby Rewards was originally published in BlockCAT on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Letter to the BlockCAT Community, from Eric Huang, BlockCAT CEO

The crypto community has been enduring a long winter. Bitcoin is -75% from all time high. Ether is -85% from all time high. Most altcoins and tokens are experiencing similar markets. While the price of crypto doesn’t impact blockchain usability, it does put many crypto users into hibernation.

CryptoKitties was one of the hottest DApps at the close of 2017, peaking at 15,000 concurrent users, but has now fallen to a mere 400 current users today. On DappRadar, 85% of DApps receive less than 10 daily users. This speaks volumes about the overall adoption of smart contracts today.

At BlockCAT, we’ve always believed smart contracts will become an integral part of the future of financial applications. For this future to happen, we need to remain focused on building core technology that allows Blockchain to scale and become vastly more accessible. This has been part of our vision from the very start, and remains a key part of every decision about the work we do each day.

In addition to the crypto winter, we recently suffered a financial loss from the unexpected shutdown of the Canadian exchange QuadrigaCX. Until their shutdown in January 2019, they were the largest volume Canadian exchange and provided high liquidity and trading volume for over 100,000 active users. As one of Quadriga’s long term customers, we have been using them to liquidate Ether into fiat as part of our ongoing business expenses. We never stored any crypto on the exchange. Our crypto would be traded into fiat and immediately marked for withdrawal.

Unfortunately, Quadriga experienced problems in delivering withdrawn dollars. At this point we had a significant, multi-million dollar fiat balance owed to us. When the money failed to arrive in our company account, we retained the legal services of Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP, one of the best law firms in the country, in order to pursue the options we had against Quadriga. After a lengthy legal process and our demands for immediate payment, they announced the death of their CEO and their insolvency. This came as a shock to us all. We had no indication prior to their shutdown that the exchange would be unable to eventually meet their payment obligations. We continue to work with legal counsel on the Quadriga investigations and their ongoing CCAA filing, but we only expect to recover pennies per dollar owed.

Last winter we attempted to reduce our overhead by restructuring non-essential staff and sought to mitigate some of our monthly burn by bringing in some revenue on the side through contract work, leveraging our expertise to build blockchain solutions for other companies. While these measures have extended our runway and helped to tide us over during a period where Quadriga owed us the majority of our balance, we’re ultimately still a long way from being profitable through our underlying smart contract infrastructure.

Given the loss and the state of the adoption, it has become necessary to make significant changes to the development process currently active on the BlockCAT platform. We have made large structural changes to our staff as part of a significant cost reduction process.

BlockCAT will remain committed to our original vision in delivering user-friendly smart contract infrastructure that solves real problems. Tabby Rewards will be released as originally planned, and critical security and maintenance work will continue on both Tabby Pay and Rewards to ensure the continued safety of our users. Additionally, we will continue working towards releasing the remaining tooling as planned, but on a delayed timeline due to downsizing of our development team.

We will also be revising our community communications strategy to be more focused on achievements, adoptions, demonstrations and marketing activity. This means you can expect more focus on product related updates, but on a more irregular schedule.

I want to sincerely thank our supporters in the community for their continued encouragement throughout our entire journey. It’s been a rollercoaster ride over these few years, yet just like the crypto industry itself, BlockCAT remains resilient as we push even harder towards a decentralized future.

- Eric Huang.

Community Update — April 5, 2019 was originally published in BlockCAT on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Testing Rewards

Testing Rewards — Part 2

I want to write a big thank you to those of you who reached out after the last community update.

We have received a small amount of highly engaged interest, but we are still eagerly looking for testing partners who specifically are engaged in operating marketing projects — whether that’s Facebook advertising, forum or email distributions, landing page testing or coupon codes and experimentation.

The feedback so far has been positive, though with some pretty significant sticking points in terms of nontechnical user experience challenges. Like with Pay, we’ve done a lot of design work of mitigating confusion related to many of the details — but in this case, some of the details are considerably more complex. For example, a user of the platform must have a valid token ready to use (though, of course, we intend to solve that with a Token Creator integration and a series of affordances to use existing tokens).

We also rolled out a new version of Pay this week, pushing with it the new version of the Tabby Library, with the necessary adaptation for a series of Ethereum and MetaMask changes.

At the moment, we’re working with the executive team to prepare a bigger series of planning and timeline updates — addressing the release schedule, political hurdles, cryptowinter considerations and some transparency surrounding the rationale for our current priorities and decision making process — that we hope to release in the near future.

Community Update — March 22, 2019 was originally published in BlockCAT on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Testing Rewards

After some exploration with our local partners, we’re ready to start seeking further testers for the Rewards platform — but we’re not looking for just anyone: read on if you are interested in helping us get the product in hands of real users.

We had deferred further development on the platform (in favor of the token tool — the integration of which is likely a big piece of the Rewards platform usage for nontechnical users) until a round of actual users had gone end-to-end through the product, unguided, and provided their insights.

The platform has been met with initial success and a short-term goal is to run a second stage of aggressive testing, this time with people directly involved in marketing and promotional activity. We’re especially interested in having users who have no crypto background whatsoever.

This type of testing has proven to be very lucrative for identifying UX issues in Pay and in this case, we expect that our primary market audience will become the end-to-end marketing tool for operating reward programs, incentive programs and contests.

So, if you know of anyone on a marketing team, ideally at small-to-medium sized businesses, who:

• currently operates reward or incentivized marketing programs, or,
• is immediately interested in doing so, and,
• has access to at least 200 semi-technical to non-technical customers who they could distribute tokens to — either e.g., via an existing contest platform, tie in with our distribution tools or an email list, and,
• is willing to offer some form of incentive for the tokens, for example a store discount or credit, collectables or other valuable consideration.

Please connect us to them to play with the platform.

We’re looking for a lower bound of 200 — in our opinion, a very conservative number — but we’d love to see potential integrations that have considerably more than that. Initially, we’re only going to offer a partial distribution, both to ensure we have an extensible testbed and so we can continue to discuss the business arrangement once the system has been proven successfully. We’re also hopeful there are some creative distribution mechanisms out there which reveal locations we need better integration tools, guidance and UX improvements, or can help future clients better achieve their distributional goals.

Community Update — March 8, 2019 was originally published in BlockCAT on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Security & Trust

The start to 2019 has been an interesting time in the world of cryptocurrency. There has been issues with exchanges being hacked and shut down which resulted in the loss of millions of dollars worth of crypto. There are still “scams” being promoted on social media sites promising to double returns on crypto.

What can we learn from this? Well, clearly some of these issues are security related. Whether it is flawed code or poor business decision making, users have not always been protected. Security should be in the forefront when developing and managing Ethereum DApps. Business leaders and developers can only build solid infrastructure and trust with users if there are appropriate security measures in place. That may mean testing and re-testing products over and over until there are no flaws. Or, it may mean delaying the release of new applications.

Theoretically, transactions that occur on the blockchain should be secure as they are immutable. Ledgers that cannot be edited must provide users with trust. How do we measure, evaluate and rely on this when we have cases where millions of dollars are being compromised, stolen, or lost? Even in the ideal case, we expect people to adopt this “trustless” technology, but there still needs to be trust in the development of the products being used. Users have to trust that there are no bugs, flaws, or compromises in the software.

Cryptopia

Cryptopia recently announced that they are back to work and evaluating the breach. They have assured users they’re on the verge of a complete understanding and have approval to come back online.

At BlockCAT, we are committed to creating DApps for everyone. As you know, we’ve partnered with an number of real world businesses with little knowledge of blockchain technology. Together, we continue to discuss ways that this technology can serve these businesses and their missions.

According to Forbes, last year — fifty of the world’s leading companies invested in or began exploring blockchain technology. Even with trust and security concerns, it is promising that these real world businesses recognize that blockchain truly has something to offer.

Roadmap

We have received requests to update our roadmap to reflect the progress of the development of our DApps — this is in progress. One thing that we have learned since starting out is how unpredictable everything is within the “world of cryptocurrency”. We can tell you that we are getting Rewards ready for launch, but we likely won’t announce a release date. We have an expectation to provide a DApp that is secure, reliable and most importantly received well by the marketplace — not to release a DApp on a specified date. For the sake of our customer’s security, we cannot afford to release a DApp with bugs; for the sake of our business, we need to be certain we’ve reached the addressable market. All of this needs to be sorted out beforehand, and if that means delaying the release of a product by a week or a month to await appropriate opportunity or resolve uncertainties, we’re going to do what is best for the product and get it right. Some community members may perceive this as being ambiguous or misleading, but we can assure you that our number one priority is the security of our customers.

We continue working on the design of the ERC token creator — we have expanded a bit of the feature set and user understanding to ensure a smooth user experience for the class of users we hope to reach. Our work with partners has expanded the interest in using fungible tokens to represent supply constrained items or uniquely identified inventory; our internal discussions with regard to partner needs continues to focus heavily on viable staking models as a unique angle for blockchain and specifically valuable token use in real world businesses.

Community Update — February 22, 2018 was originally published in BlockCAT on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This week, work on the ERC creator continues with design and implementation phases both fully specified and progress is moving at a pace we are happy with.

There was some speculation 😂 in Discord that there was no team… or something. To satisfy the curiosity, we posted some current pictures of the office — on a snowy day here in Canada.

While we’ve regularly discussed some of the path forward with the staking model tool, ERC creator and “generalized smart contract” tooling both in the community and with other people involved, we are working presently to summarize a roadmap document for everyone.

A little update in the Cryptopia case, from New Zealand police: “Excellent progress is being made in the investigation and we are working with Cryptopia management plus current and former employees who have been providing valuable assistance.”

You can view the NZ Police Press Release for more information on the ensuing investigation.

Finally, there’s been a little buzz of activity around the DappRadar numbers showing just how cold this cryptowinter has been: there were 178 new DApps launched in December, but more than 90% of the DApps out there did not have even a single user.

We remain committed to the idea that smart contract tools must be genuinely useful for real world businesses to gain adoption — this means solving the big problems related to user experience, managing and reversing user errors, error detection, prevention, intermediating transactions, scaling beyond the global 7kb block limit and cryptographically-secured, trustless adaption/versioning — while ensuring we’ve reached an audience that can benefit from auditability, trustlesness and the useful advantages of decentralization.

Community Update — February 8, 2018 was originally published in BlockCAT on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Cryptopia

As many of you may have heard, Cryptopia experienced a significant compromise on January 14th.

Our efforts to collect information on what is going on at Cryptopia have been largely stonewalled by the investigation at the moment. We currently are attempting to understand — with specific evidence — the probability that stolen property will be recovered and estimate a timeline or probability of the exchange returning to functional.

At the same time, we’re monitoring how other groups impacted by the attack intend to respond. We have a number of very distinct possible responses in front of us but are not prepared to commit to any of them without more information as the impact on everyone is significant.

We don’t expect to wait for the conclusion of the investigation to make a decision here, but it is essential we make a calculated decision ideally with transparent lines of communication.

The police involved in the investigation have indicated they have promising leads and a meaningful direction.

Staking Models

In this update period, the executive team has been somewhat refocused on the hack and the big picture surrounding addressing that, but the staking model group continues to grow an understanding of how we can deploy staking systems and generalized real world valuable blockchain applications. As a reminder, we feel a core piece of the “smart contracts for everyone” value-proposition will be staking models, as they are one of the unique innovations available in a decentralized environment.

Prototyping and exploratory work is still an important facet of this work, but as the community has indicated some interest to us numerous times, here is a consolidation of the staking model posts we have made in the past.

• Staking Models: A Deep Dive in to Challenges. This post includes a partial glance at the fatal flaws we’ve identified in many of the existing staking model implementations and a discussion of the solutions.
• Real Businesses and Smart Contracts for Everyone.
• Smart Contracts, Game Theory and UX Assumptions.

Rewards and Token Creator

We plan to recruit a small number of community members for a round of feedback on Rewards in this sprint. You’ll see in our previous post about Rewards that the product, deployment infrastructure and proof of concept testing is in a “ready to release” state.

In this sprint, we continued moving forward with the Token Creator design phase — continuing to evolve mockups, user stories, flows and wireframes into graphical and prototype work. We expect to have something to demonstrate for feedback there shortly.

Community Update — January 25, 2019 was originally published in BlockCAT on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Return from Holidays

We’re back to work after the holiday season. We spent the first week back cleaning and reviewing our planning infrastructure with fresh eyes. This was productive and we believe tightened up some forward looking timelines considerably without materially giving up functionality. Everyone is fresh and excited for 2019.

Rewards in Use

We are actively using Rewards now! The first distribution end-to-end was done this week on a private deployment. This was a “proof of concept” in a sense, but we expect to show some actual use in the following weeks.

Deployment infrastructure is in place for a public demo and design cleanup is mostly done, though there are still finishing touches taking place. The next steps here are to prepare a promotion, public demonstration and appropriate marketing material — the timing of which will all be predicated on aligning a good release date for a public demonstration with the wider ecosystem and circumstance.

ERC Creator

Graphical design work has commenced! We do not expect much development progress on this for the next two weeks, but project planning, feature requirements and initial prototypes have been completed and visual/user experience look-and-feel is on its way.

Staking Models

We continue the experimentation and research prototypes with staking models that we previously talked about here. This has got some commercial interest from our network of friendly blockchain companies and we’re working to closely understand their needs.

Through a blend of smart contract development tools, framework infrastructure and deep expertise we can provide a solution that works for a variety of markets here — but, the focus remains on how we can put staking model tools directly in the marketplace to allow businesses and individuals to apply smart contracts usefully.

The secret prototyping staking project mentioned before is back on the radar now that the team has returned from vacation. We expect a cool potentially-viral-marketing-driven opportunity for the existing community to quickly and usefully get involved in applying staking.

That’s it for this week! If you have any questions, be sure to join our Discord channel, tweet to us on Twitter or chime in on the /r/BlockCAT subreddit!

Community Update-January 11, 2019 was originally published in BlockCAT on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What does “smart contracts for everyone” mean?

We’ve been hearing a lot of discussion that is already aligned with our plan — questions like whether we’ll make it through the current “crypto winter” and how we’re addressing the uncertainty about future demand for crypto products. I just wanted to take a quick opportunity to highlight how we’re thinking about these issues and make sure our communication is clear.

“Real” Businesses — Ensuring

A lot of the design and “next steps” feedback we’re focused on has come from networking with non-crypto businesses. This is essential to our strategy and will remain that way for the foreseeable future. The idea here is that to have real adoption, the underlying technology and solutions must add value to the economy, not merely move it around in hype bubbles.

As you can imagine, this means a focus on discussions with groups that have immediate applications — consider how staking models could change insurance, lending and other forms of reputation or risk management; how instant low-cost transfers could aid international remittances and banking; how trustees, lawyers and representatives can delegate their responsibility to simple value-storing confirmation systems; how high-stakes environments, auditors and controllers can benefit from the consistent and immutable audit log produced by a public blockchain.

But also imagine the next steps: how real estate and property registries could benefit from non-censorship, how a marketing team or game developer could issue fungible tokens and allow user-friendly decentralized exchange; how supply chain management can benefit from tractability of exchange; and how even musicians, photographers and software developers may benefit from measurable and auditable transfer of intellectual property.

There are many challenges to overcome for these use cases — computation costs, value fluctuations and stablecoins, the oracle problem, usability concerns just to name a few — but it is important to us that we’re constantly searching, understanding and applying how the pitch of blockchain and cryptocurrency resonates with busy business professionals.

“Real” Users — Addressing UX Challenges

Along the same lines, it is completely unreasonable to ask a banker or marketer to deal with the overwhelming domain expertise necessary to utilize current smart contract applications. This means patterns to make secure key management easy, solutions for managing computational considerations like gas and transaction costs, education material and careful language selection, and, consistent user-facing reviews that identify sticking points and sources of confusion.

Often, this will mean hiding features away in “advanced” menus or using slightly different language to address complex crypto products. It means things like abstracting notions of cryptocurrency in certain contexts — understanding the user who is too busy operating their marketing company to worry about what the value of Ethereum is today. Broadly, it is all the other little UX tricks and techniques we’ve picked up through these user reviews, casual conversations, business meetings and experimental iterations.

That’s it for this week! If you have any questions, be sure to join our Discord channel, tweet to us on Twitter or chime in on the /r/BlockCAT subreddit!

Community Update — December 14, 2018 was originally published in BlockCAT on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Tabby Rewards — Feedback Wanted 📣

We want your feedback! Before we get to that, let’s recap the main features of Tabby Rewards.

Tabby Rewards allows teams to distribute tokens quickly and easily via unique, redeemable URL codes — without requiring a list of wallet addresses beforehand.

Our goal is to provide teams with a simple and easy-to-use tool to promote their project and incentivize users.

One of the biggest benefits of Tabby Rewards is the ability to mass distribute your tokens in unique and exciting ways. Similar to coupon codes, there are dozens of effective ways to incentivize users. A couple of suggestions include:

• Email Signup
  By using a service like MailChimp, you can easily reward new email signups with a URL link that takes them to a page to redeem tokens.
• Distribution Through Partners
  You can provide partners with a list of unique URL address that they can then distribute to their own audiences. Popular influencers can link your tokens directly to their fans with promotional partnerships.

What Users Will See

Tabby Rewards gives users the ability to Create or Manage Existing Campaigns. The primary focus was designing a straightforward User Interface that was simple to navigate even for beginners. Take a look at the following slides and if you have any suggestions for improvement reach out to our team through our official Discord channel.

Configure your campaign:

There are only four fields required when creating a new campaign.
1. Name of Campaign.
2. Select you Token.
3. How many tokens will each URL code redeem?
4. How many redeemable URL codes do you wish to create?

Payment

Users are given the option to pay in ETH or CAT. If a user chooses to pay in CAT they will be given a discounted rate similar to Tabby Pay.

Distribute Codes

Finally, once payment is complete, the URL codes are generated and the user is able to download and distribute them.

That’s it for this week! If you have any questions, be sure to join our Discord channel, tweet to us on Twitter or chime in on the /r/BlockCAT subreddit!

We Want Your Feedback! was originally published in BlockCAT on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.