During the second quarter of 2019, Nash increased our management focus on the team’s performance. By concentrating on people and processes, we successfully brought execution to even higher levels. This will continue to be our management focus during the third quarter, as we believe we can still improve the speed and quality of execution across several teams. The processes we began to define and the formal workflows we began to implement are an important step in preparing our company for growth.
A second important mission over the past quarter was collaborating with important players and customers in the payments industry to define how the Nash Pay product should be brought to the market and what features it must possess.
The greatest testament to our success in pushing execution across the whole company was the large number of deliverables reached internally. The most significant milestone we achieved was the preparation of our minimum viable product for release on 23 August. From that day on, we will be able to improve our product thanks to feedback from customers and Nash Community members, many of whom we hope will become customers. Hearing from passionate users will be key if we are to reach our goal of offering the best user experience and customer support on the market.
The last quarter saw Nash achieve the major goals required to prepare our minimum viable product (MVP) for public release. The redesigned matching engine protocol we announced last year is complete and our user interface has been further refined in the light of April’s beta programs. The team is currently focussed on quality assurance (QA) ahead of launch, which will follow the timeline below:
Fabian Wahle’s legal team has continued to achieve significant breakthroughs over the last quarter, making Nash an industry leader in terms of compliance:
On the business front, Nash has entered a partnership with one of the largest credit card processors in the world. In addition to offering fiat ramps through our currency partners, this will allow us to provide credit card support, with users being able to buy digital assets directly from Nash. Further partners will enable Nash Pay to offer fiat settlement to merchants via global FX markets, with our partners sending fiat to the merchants.
Ten new employees have joined Nash over the last quarter. In anticipation of further expansion, we have redesigned our team structure and project management process. To improve coordination, Nash has replaced capability teams with product teams based on time zones. Every two weeks, we produce a potentially releasable version of our applications, with incremental improvements. This process of consistently testing and shipping stable software has led to a significant increase in productivity, and the company is now prepared for scaling to a larger operation.
During Q2 we performed foundational work for plans to expand our lineup of products during Q3 and Q4 of 2019:
Ethan Fast has taken on leadership of our Applied Research team, as well as being responsible for technical hiring within the company.
Joining this team is our new applied cryptographer, who will be working on threshold signing, multi-party computation and other challenges. In addition to several years of industrial experience in the telecommunications sector, they hold a PhD in electrical engineering and have significant publications in the field.
Over the last quarter, our Applied Research team has built a prototype for increased account security using ECDSA threshold signatures, conducted a literature review of academic work in multi-party computation and researched secure approaches to distributed key backup for enhancing the key recovery process.
The Security and DevOps team, led by Samuel Hagan, was joined in the last quarter by one new engineer. With over ten years’ experience in software development, our new SecDevOps team member has spent the last two years building a large-scale distributed content delivery network in Elixir/Erlang.
The team continued to achieve significant milestones during the second quarter, including:
Thomas Saunders’s team, focussed on blockchain and payment integration, welcomed two new engineers this past quarter. At Nash, they will be assisting with blockchain settlement and cryptography research, and taking on a product management role.
Over the second quarter, the Settlement and Portfolio team achieved the following major goals:
Key goals for Q3 are full wallet support for Bitcoin, Litecoin and related chains, and the implementation of our non-custodial Bitcoin trading protocol.
The Trading and Accounts team, led by Luciano Engel, deals with the matching engine and exchange infrastructure. One new engineer joined this team during the second quarter, having previously bootstrapped two SaaS products as an entrepreneur, built multiple web apps, websites and mobile apps as a contractor, and worked for eight years architecting compilers for a top-ten technology firm.
Q2 saw the continuation of work from Q1, with a focus on wrapping the system for production. Feedback from the Nash Community and information from our beta program has translated into new features, the elimination of bugs, performance tweaks and much else, leading to an overall improvement in performance. For the first time, all aspects of our application are working together in the setup we desire.
Chris Hager’s new product team dedicated to Payments and Mobile welcomed two new engineers this past quarter. One has a strong academic background in Computer Science and several years’ industry experience building user-facing software, having also worked for a top-ten technology firm on security aspects of Android devices. Joining them is an engineer who has been working as a full-stack developer since 2010. An influential member of the JavaScript community, they have created numerous popular packages that promote functional programming and have previously spent several years at a fintech company making banking data accessible to app developers.
Over the past quarter, the team has made steady progress on both Nash Pay and our mobile app. Besides important work on concept and business development, initial design wireframes for Nash Pay have now been completed. The first version of our iOS/Android mobile app is now ready for release, providing tools to complete Know Your Customer verification (KYC). Moreover, prototypes and wireframes for future releases of the app, offering access to additional Nash services, have now been completed, with user testing set to begin in August.
In addition to continuing our public relations work with various media outlets, Carla Paiva’s Marketing and Communications team spent the quarter finalizing materials for the exchange launch and planning our post-launch campaigns. Upcoming campaigns include a video strategy with a focus on YouTube and a “We Are Nash” campaign based on engaging the Nash Community.
Within this team, the support group has continued to expand and now covers multiple time zones, with technicians available to answer customer inquiries directly via email or live chat. Our new European support staff have many years’ experience in the customer service industry, including work for financial services companies (both on and off the blockchain). The team has worked to improve the AI support bot and to expand our knowledge base, which will soon include user guides, a comprehensive set of FAQs and educational materials on blockchain technology.
The Design group, led by Nathaniel Walpole, was joined in the last quarter by a new designer who will focus on working with the Marketing team to produce new visual assets. They have eight years’ experience in visual and interaction design and until recently worked for a major job listings platform.
The Design focus of the last quarter has been responding to feedback provided in our beta program. The team has tweaked and reworked those parts of the platform that caused major issues for many users, always aiming for the highest standards of user experience. In addition, our mobile app designs have progressed and are ready for user testing, and a new blog design, in line with our brand style, is now ready. This has allowed us to migrate the Nash blog from Medium to our own domain, which will help improve the visibility of Nash in web searches.
If you couldn’t attend our quarterly report presentation in Boston, you can watch a recording here. The Q&A session for this quarter is being conducted in the Nash Community.
