Nash made significant progress towards the general availability (GA) of our platform during the first quarter of 2020. The company shipped a milestone product in API keys based on secure multi-party computation (MPC), which are currently only available on Nash. We also brought our revolutionary Bitcoin trading system online.
These core products represent essential functionality required before Nash can increase promotional efforts. We have also defined and are currently working on other features that will determine the beginning of general availability: our own fiat ramp, simple Tier 2 identity verification for high-volume traders and improvements to our transfer flow.
Our community has already noticed the many refinements and fixes that we have pushed to our sandbox environment during the last quarter and has provided valuable feedback. These continuous efforts to polish the platform UI represent another key initiative in improving our Minimal Viable Product and preparing it for a larger public.
With the completion of our planned platform, Nash is transitioning from product feature–focused development to growth-focused development, where product additions and iterations are driven more by growth signals from our metrics than industry and market research. While a few of our recently completed features, or those currently in testing, have yet to be deployed to the public, it is an inspirational goal for our company to conclude the production deployment of our complete core feature roadmap in Q2.
The main achievement of the Applied Research team during Q1 was implementing and shipping our non-custodial API key system for ETH, BTC and NEO.
The team also worked on refining security across the Nash platform. This included a security review and improvements to the Rust implementation of threshold signatures underlying the API key system, as well as investigating continued improvements to state channel security.
Finally, the team carried out research relating to potential decentralized finance products to be deployed in our existing platform. We investigated options, perpetual futures trading and other possibilities for providing non-custodial leverage, and also researched non-custodial lending and other forms of interest generation for user accounts.
The SecDevOps team continued to improve multiple aspects of our infrastructure during Q1, including:
During Q1 the Settlement and Portfolio team’s primary focus was on preparing our non-custodial Bitcoin trading system for production. The team also worked on other improvements essential for the general availability of the platform. Major achievements were:
The past quarter saw several improvements in terms of stability and performance. The Trading and Accounts team has been working closely with our liquidity providers and algorithmic traders from the community to gather feedback, ensuring we deliver a stable and fast service. This work has set the direction for many internal improvements and the development of a new client featuring MPC-based API keys, websocket support and new endpoints.
In addition, the team worked on supporting the integration of new Nash products, such as Bitcoin trading, fiat ramps and Nash Pay.
We have also seen great improvements in our development cycle, with a much clearer, lean and effective process. This had a huge impact on the quality of the products being delivered and the speed with which we address support tickets.
The Payments and Mobile team continued to expand the functionality of our mobile app during Q1, with additions including:
On the payments side, the team finished integration with one further fiat provider and continued work on Nash’s own fiat ramp. The Nash fiat ramp will initially support SEPA transfers in EU countries and will offer a market-beating 0% fee. It will launch simultaneously on both our mobile and web platforms.
Assisting in these developments was one new engineer who joined the team during Q1. A developer since 2011 for frontend, backend and mobile, they have worked on developing multiple mobile applications, including one with more than 500,000 active users.
Design
Over the last quarter the design team worked both on refining the current platform and preparing interfaces for new features. Major achievements were:
Marketing and Communications
The Marketing and Communications team began several initiatives in Q1 that will be crucial once the platform enters general availability. The launch of our Ambassadors program will provide many opportunities to promote Nash on alternative social channels and within the broader cryptocurrency community, taking advantage of the power of word-of-mouth marketing. To accompany the program, we carried out various improvements to the Nash Community platform itself, including the addition of a dark theme, and new user classes and badges to encourage participation.
A second major initiative was a full redesign of the Nash website, aiming to communicate more clearly the services and advantages offered by Nash. The new site features a flatter, more efficient design, entirely new SEO-driven copy and separate Business and Personal tabs, with pages targeting specific customers more directly. The team has also produced marketing materials for new products, such as MPC-based API keys and Bitcoin trading, which include sharable materials for Ambassadors and promotional videos. Planning has begun for further initiatives, such as a Nash newsletter and podcast.
The Markcomm team was pleased to welcome a dedicated engineer during Q1. Our new engineer will be responsible for development work required by the team (such as updating the Community and implementing the website redesign), but will also work generally as a growth engineer. They have sixteen years of professional experience developing software for distributed systems, mobile, web, embedded systems, music and arts.
Support
The support team maintained their record of excellent service during Q1, responding to chats within 22 seconds and with a satisfaction rate of 98%. Overall satisfaction rate remained at 95%, with 68% of tickets being solved in a single touch by our agents.
The team has continued to add new articles to our knowledge base, more of which are now linked within the Nash platform to reduce the load placed on support. Improvements have also been made to our internal processes, such as better monitoring of satisfaction levels, and issue tagging and tracing. Support continues to work closely with the development team to report bugs, test the platform and find definitive solutions to problems.
Watch our online Q1 2020 report presentation, including an AMA with the Nash founders, here.
