VariabL Development Update (Q4'2017) — From Alpha to Production

Published in

VariabL Blog

4 min readJan 15, 2018

The last few months, we have been focused on creating a new infrastructure for the production version of the VariabL exchange, together with running and improving the existing alpha. Thanks to our numerous participants, it has been a very valuable and enriching experience.

We are now moving forward to the next version of our exchange that will be put into production in 2018 and we are scaling our product team to achieve our goal: feel free to reach out if you know product profiles that might be a good fit! (more information below)

Here’s a short summary of what has been done in the last quarter, and what’s to come.

Challenges and future of our Alpha

As you may know, we have stopped the trading challenge just before the holiday season. We believe that we have now gathered enough information from our trading challenges to move forward.

The Alpha as it stands will remain open for testing and demoing purposes, with no defined date for closing. You will continue to gain VariabL Contribution Tokens (VCT) by trading on the platform and providing us with valuable feedback but there will not be trading challenges anymore on this alpha.

We will provide an extensive update on our roadmap and our future product in the next few weeks.

Research on VariabL v0.2

Our research team has been hard at work building the infrastructure for the next version of VariabL. They have built a customized state channel infrastructure that will allow for cheap and efficient transactions, and a new financial model that will allow for more complex products and a better management of liquidity, incentivization and hedging mechanisms.

We will have exciting news to share in this regard during the following weeks and at EthCC, but we can already say that the next product will be even more interesting and efficient than the current one!

Price feed v0.1

During the alpha, we built and implemented the first version of our own price feed.

Charlotte, our Finance Engineer and Quantitative Analyst, wrote an article about the work done on this part.

Legal & Regulatory Progresses

We plan to be a regulated and compliant exchange at launch — creating the best practice for our users and reaching institutional investors. We are in active discussions with the financial regulation bodies in France and in Gibraltar.

Last month, we had a very important meeting with the Head Secretary of the AMF, and we are waiting for their official position on our product. We will also meet the authorities of Gibraltar in the following weeks.

In addition to this, Claire made extensive research and drafted an article on the state of blockchain regulation in the world with a specific focus on the EU — check it out!

Back-end and front-end improvements on the VariabL Alpha

We have made significant improvements on the back-end side regarding proxy account management, matchmaking, price oracle and other subtle features of the Alpha product.

There were also a few UI/UX improvements such as the introduction of the much-anticipated candlestick view or the night mode.

VCT rewards

We have distributed A LOT of VCTs in the last few months.

We are very happy with the community engagement on our project and we will start rewarding our most engaged contributors very soon.

A thousand thanks to our 450 token holders!

Team workshops

We have stopped the trading challenge for a few weeks just before holiday season — during this time, we took a few days off and came back to do a full week of workshops to define our roadmap for the next year: for the research, product, finance, marketing and legal teams to work on the contour of the production version of VariabL.