Topic: [ANN][PRE-ICO] R_Block | Blockchain Based Referencing (Read 4250 times)

New website 🖥
ZINC have a fresh new look. Complete with Zinc's signature branding, bespoke animation, and targeted copy, the new homepage is now live. ZINC look forward to welcoming both recruiters and candidates onto the platform as ZINC start to populate the Zinc ecosystem: www.zinc.work


https://medium.com/zinc_work/collecting-a-personal-reference-with-zinc-2a9d30e71cd1

#17/09  WEEKLY PROJECT UPDATE


Zinc is LIVE & available to the public, from today
We are thrilled to announce our launch onto the Mainnet. As many of you will know, this is a significant milestone for Zinc and a huge step towards achieving our vision for interoperable, decentralised identities.

Following beta tests with GoCardless and Booking.com, we have had great pre-launch feedback with Kieran Dodd at Booking.com describing Zinc as a ‘user friendly piece of software’ and Alexandra Kelly, a veteran in the world of referencing, claiming Zinc to be ‘a great innovation in the industry.’

Have a read here: https://medium.com/zinc_work/zinc-is-live-b6be39e5f224

FROM TELEGRAM

"#26/08 WEEKLY PROJECT UPDATE

Launch date
We are committed to launching the product in September but we want to make sure the product is the best it can be. For this reason we have decided to push the date back by a week to allow us to finalise changes to the website and amends to the aptitude and attitude reports which arose during customer testing. We are only a few weeks away and will be launching the week commencing the 10th September. As mentioned previously we are working with influencers to coincide with the launch as well as holding a Zinc event.


Community testing
We’re close to opening up the testnet phase to the community so members can test out the platform before the public launch. We are working on the details of this and will have more information early next week.


Website
We have been working on a comprehensive Support page to sit alongside the product. This will help answer any user questions and provide a smooth user journey for all personas. We will make the final changes next week and this will be pushed to the website along with the new homepage in a couple of weeks time.


Coverage
-  Comparethecloud: Recruitment | Blockchain | A game changer in hiring
https://www.comparethecloud.net/articles/recruitment-blockchain-game-changer/

- Hackernoon: A quest for web3 accessibility
https://hackernoon.com/a-quest-for-web3-accessibility-23956be2abef


Technical Update
We’ve released an article around the decentralised login. Have a read here:
https://medium.com/zinc_work/personal-identity-management-set-to-go-mainstream-5b575560186f

The team have almost finished making changes to the aptitude and attitude reports and have started implementing the ‘work proofs’ functionality where you can own previously inaccessible information. Zinc’s progressive platform allows you to hold proof of any hackathons, courses, bounties, open-source or assessments collected whilst interviewing as interview proofs. We are currently working with a hackathon in September to launch this feature.


Call with Fabian
The team spoke with Fabian earlier this week to discuss the launch of the Zinc’s new proposed identity protocol and plans for the next few weeks. We’re very lucky to have such a wealth of knowledge at our disposal and look forward to working with Fabian as we progress further. "

FROM TELEGRAM

"17/08 WEEKLY PROJECT UPDATE

Testnet: Week four
We’re into our fourth week of testing and we’re actioning the feedback we’ve received by redesigning the aptitude and attitude reports which we hope to have ready next week for community testing.

Here's what Kieran Dodd, Global Leadership Recruitment Manager, Booking.com said about the platform:

"I tested out Zinc and it's really user-friendly, good looking software. I'm looking forward to seeing how this product develops."

Zinc architecture
Over the past month, we have been busy designing and implementing trustless smart contracts written in Solidity. Ali From the core team has written an article explaining the architectural decisions made and lessons learnt along the way.

https://medium.com/@aliazam60/zinc-smart-contracts-architecture-56d751a02824


Community testing
We’re close to opening up the testnet phase to the community so members can test out the platform before the public launch. We are working on the details of this and will have more information early next week. This will be dependant on the testing of the decentralised login we are working on at the moment.


Influencer outreach
We are continuing to outreach to crypto and technical influencers as part of our launch strategy. If you have any suggestions or better yet an introduction, please send us a DM.


Technical Update
The decentralised login has been deployed and we’re currently testing it. The team have worked very hard to get it finished and we will be sending a press release out early next week with all of the information.

The team have started making some big changes to the aptitude and attitude reports which we will hopefully be able to share next week.

FROM TELEGRAM

"#29/07 WEEKLY PROJECT UPDATE


Testnet: Week one 🗓
We’re one week into testing the product and there are no major bugs so it’s going well! Two companies have been using the platform exclusively. As of yesterday this has been opened up to another small group of companies and advisors. We’ll provide feedback with the community, once we have formal statements to publish.

One of the Co-founders, Luke, has created a demo of the referencing tool to help on-board these initial customers. Have a watch here: https://youtu.be/QMsvH-oKvKI

For a recap on our testnet launch, have a read of this article https://medium.com/zinc_work/zinc-is-live-on-testnet-56e4ecaafb3c

Token page
We’ve consolidated important information regarding the ZINC Token, the Crowdsale and the utility of the token into a new page on the website. Have a look and let us know what you think: https://zinc.work/token/

We are continuously making updates to the website and we will be looking at the homepage over the coming weeks.

Competition
As part of the testnet we will be launching two separate competitions. The first will encourage the community to put forward relevant companies to have exclusive early access to the platform. This will be free and will give the companies exposure to our network as well as a written Q&A. Here is a form: https://zinc.work/testapplication.html

Technical Updates
We have been working on implementing various helper functions including an example reference and profile page to make it easier to navigate the platform. We’ve been refining the continuous development and deployment pipeline as well as IPFS backups. We’ve been embedding blockchain transaction links into the platform as well as Linkedin links on verified profiles. The error handling has had some general work done to it and a subset of mainly UI bugs that have come up."

 Zinc is LIVE on testnet

The Zinc team are thrilled to announce that after months of hard work coding and internal testing, the referencing dApp is live and available for customer testing. This is an exciting step for us and we’re happy to share with the community what we have been working hard on.

The first version of the Zinc platform is running on the Ethereum Ropsten Testnet. We will be giving key customers early access to the product to test and provide invaluable feedback prior to the hard launch on the mainnet, planned for early September.

Keep an eye out over the coming weeks as we will announce new updates once every few weeks until the mainnet of Zinc.

Read the full article here and show your support: https://medium.com/zinc_work/zinc-is-live-on-testnet-56e4ecaafb3c

FROM TELEGRAM

"V.1 goes live to early customers. "
The team have been hard at work testing V1 of the product on testnet this week and it’s ready to go to our first customers and early backers at the start of next week. This feedback and testing phase is part of a soft-launch for Zinc and will allow us to make improvements before the scaling phase and hard launch in September. We will release more information next week.  


ZINC listed on TokenJar
We are pleased to announce that you can now trade ZINC tokens on TokenJar. TokenJar is a robust decentralized exchange for Ethereum and ERC-20 tokens. Based on 0x protocol, TokenJar dedicated to provide superior trading experience for users all over the world: https://tokenjar.io/zinc


https://medium.com/zinc_work/r-block-becomes-zinc-4cad6c60f5fb

IMPORTANT

"We have an important update we want to make sure everyone is aware of. We hope you’re as delighted as we are to have listed on KuCoin and now CoinMarketCap. The volume, site traffic and Telegram members are all up and things are going well with the trading competition (you’ve got until Saturday at 23:59 to participate)

Alongside KuCoin we’ve been working with KuCoin’s marketing team to increase our brand awareness at this crucial time. The campaign comprises of social and banner advertising, PR, emails, content creation and influencer marketing. This will run for the next 6 weeks and will bolster our presence in the space and help the new Zinc brand take off as well as our listing on KuCoin. Good news for everybody.

We wanted to give a formal update on the circulating supply of ZINC (formerly CVT) and make people aware of future updates or possible updates to be as transparent as possible. The supply changed following the communities decisive vote to use tokens for listing and trading competitions.

As of last Friday the circulating supply is now 4.55m tokens.

- 750k tokens were used for the trading competition which provides a great incentive and opportunity for new investors.
- 800k tokens have been spent on the marketing campaign necessary to list with KuCoin. We will be sending some of the benefits and exposure gained from this in the coming weeks.
- An additional 900K worth of tokens were used to supplement the KuCoin BTC listing fee. These tokens are locked for 3 months. When unlocked we have been reassured they will not move but regardless this will bring the circulating of unlocked tokens up to — 5.45m.

This leaves 2.24m tokens from the unsold T1 of 3.89m. Given we brought the vote forward for using unsold tokens it makes sense to offer another vote on the remainder now. We will be holding a vote in the coming weeks for you to decide what to do with the remaining tokens. Please look out for this to make sure your voice is heard.

Things to note:

- The overall total supply of 24 million tokens has not changed and will never change.

- The supply could change again depending on the outcome of the next vote.

- As a reminder, if the team is successful in hitting all the project milestones it will trigger the option of another crowdsale. There could be a total of 2 additional crowdsales in the future as outlined in the whitepaper.

- We will be holding a vote next week to decide what to do with the remaining T1 unsold tokens.

- The total circulating supply is now 4.55 million and 5.45million in 3 months time.

- The choice to use tokens for listing fees was based on the two community votes in June.

You will receive updates in Telegram in regards to the next vote commencing. Due to the engagement we had with the Telegram vote bot we will be using this to conduct our next vote. The main priority is to be as inclusive as possible so sadly we’ll be dropping the decentralised vote dApp for the next vote.

Thanks for your support.

Team Zinc"

https://medium.com/zinc_work/token-update-279c335de337

UPDATE FROM TODAY

CVT ticker becomes ZINC
After listening to community feedback, we held a vote on the name of our ticker. The results were conclusive and our new ticker is... ZINC, perfectly streamlined with our new company. The changes are already underway and once this has been accepted by the network you will see your CVT tokens change to ZINC. The contract address is not changing and you do not need to do anything.


Start-up Grind Conference
We exhibited at the Start-up Grind Conference this week which was hugely successful for the soft-launch of our brand. Luke pitched Zinc on the main stage  (with an audience of over 300 people) and we were invited to speak with many investors throughout the day.

We were honoured to be unofficially names as one of the Top 5, Top 20 Startups (see below) to participate in the StartUp Court. Luke presented a longer pitch and answered questions from a panel. Both pitches provided Zinc with some great brand awareness and a we exchanged business cards with a lot of useful contacts.

Start-up Grind Top 20 Europe Program.

We received a huge accolade from the Start-up Grind Conference and were selected as one of the Top 20 Start-ups to watch in 2018. Here is the official link (we have requested that the name be changed - will update next week) https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/startup-grind-inducts-20-innovative-companies-into-the-2018-global-class-of-startups-program/

Here’s a snippet…

The latest Startup Program class represents an exclusive class of pre-seed and seed stage companies. Consideration included several thousand startups. Of these, 50 were selected to represent the Startup Grind community across 80 countries. From those, the top 20 were inducted into the London Startup Program for 2018 (see attached list below).

In describing why these startups were selected and what the program is intended to achieve, Derek Andersen, Founder and CEO of Startup Grind, explains, “Our class of startups have incredible talent, potential, disruptive technology, and opportunistic markets. In working with them, our goal is to help get these Startups to that next level of innovation, strategic intent, and growth.


Tech XLR8 at London Tech Week
We also exhibited at TechXL8, a very large exhibition this week and met with lots of potential partners and customers including Consensys and Bitfinex

Luke spoke on the panel alongside Lawrence Lundy from Outlier Ventures, Ellis Lyndsay from Nokia and Jonny Voon from Innovate UK which was absolutely rammed. We couldn’t have asked for better participation, and again leveraged the new brand nicely.

We were also offered the opportunity to speak to Tech TV @ TechXLR8 during the exhibition which was streamed across the exhibition. You can view Luke’s interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IujQKcYyU30


We’ve had a lot of really positive press this week. Here’s a recap:

Crowdsale press release:
We’re sending out two press releases this month. The first of which went out on Tuesday 12th.  We decided to focus on the milestone framework of our crowdsale as a good introductory feature to new media.

(The next press release at the end of the month will be around the rebrand and launch of the product.) Here’s the coverage we’ve had:

*Silicon Republic https://www.siliconrepublic.com/start-ups/zinc-blockchain-hiring-funding-crowdsale

* HR Technologist
https://www.hrtechnologist.com/news/recruitment-onboarding/zinc-raises-295-million-in-funding/

*Tech Startups
https://techstartups.com/2018/06/12/top-tech-startup-news-stories-need-know-tuesday-june-12/

*CTRLShift
https://ctrlshift.co/2018/06/12/blockchain-hiring-platform-zinc-raises-2-2m-through-crowdsale/


As part of our PR strategy we are positioning Luke as a thought leader in the crypto market. Read his  thoughts on Litecoin - which have been published in the Express & Inside Bitcoins amongst others (6 in total)

IMPORTANT INFORMATION:

Developers are very pleased to confirm that the token information has been updated in your contracts, changing from CVT to ZINC. They will be updating Etherscan by the end of the week.

Developers are sending out an email today that includes this update.

In venture capital there are always several rounds. If we have shortage of money for big exchange and marketing then print more tokens and raise more money.

I am glad that despite the weak fees, the developers do not stop working on the project, but promote it with all their might.  ZINC should replace Linkenid.  If this happens, the project will be a big success.  It is clear that you can not expect that everything will happen quickly - but the developers are moving in the right direction.

DREAM.ac Partnership. 🤝
We're proud to announce a partnership with DREAM.AC: https://dream.ac/  (We’re letting our Telegram community know about this partnership before it's publicly announced.)  DREAM uses AI to scope projects and assemble teams and is underpinned by open blockchain reputation systems.

Both R_Block and DREAM believe users should retain complete ownership of their reputation and work identity. With visions for the future of work and decentralised identity that align, R_Block and DREAM have decided to form a partnership.

We will be providing full information about the partnership as well as a press release and blog article in the coming weeks.


Name Mutiny. 🤓
We will be making a decision on the name of R_Block next week. Make sure you have your say and vote here: http://rblock.co/vote.html For information about the names go to our announcement channel: https://t.me/R_BlockAnn

*Instructions to vote*

We’re holding the vote on the blockchain! So you’ll need to have Metamask installed and be connected to the 99Ropsten network. You'll also need some Ropsten ETH to vote (get it for free here: https://faucet.metamask.io/). You can only vote once.


Messaging workshop.🗣
As part of the rebrand we have been working on the messaging of R_Block with our agency. We want to make the company vision as easy to understand as possible, for as many people as possible. We held a workshop on Tuesday to drill down our key USPs and competitive differentiators. Reducing crypto jargon and drilling down the fundamental benefits will enable us to cut through the noise, and enable us to better engage with high-profile mainstream media.
 

Login identities.  🗝
Alex from the Ethereum foundation shares the same vision as R_Block for login identities. Alex spoke at the Unconf this week. As you know we've been working with Fabian from the Ethereum foundation, using Fabian's ERC725 contract, marrying an ENS name with an R_Block identity in this contract, this is how we will make identity on the blockchain real for the mainstream. Watch this video for a glimpse into the future:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qF2lhJzngto

Developers will be taking a vote on the COMPANY NAME and will publish an announcement TOMORROW with a link where you can vote for your favourite. Developers will be using a voting dApp that they have built inhouse for the R_Block community....

As I understand, developers have applied for a lot of exchanges, many of which have come back asking for large sums of money. At this point, they have therefore made the decision to wait until the launch of the product (whilst maintaining current conversations with those contacted) When the product is launched, coincided with the rebrand of the company developers will be in a much better position to negotiate.

weekly updates that are just announcement of announcements or just some random js meetup that is not related to rblock directly
there are many ways to engage the community better
for example, how about you keep us updated on the rebrand, do a vote of some sort, engage the community a little

Weekly project update....incoming!
#11/05 WEEKLY PROJECT UPDATE


Partnerships.
We’ve had extremely positive conversations this week with four potential partners. It’s too early to make any announcements but we’re working through some of the finer details and expect to update you with some exciting news in the next month.


Elite Business Magazine.
Our CEO, Luke Shipley got a mention in the Elite Business Magazine. Read his comment here; http://elitebusinessmagazine.co.uk/technology/item/revealing-the-six-things-entrepreneurs-get-wrong-about-cryptocurrencies


PR Power.
We’ve started working with a new PR and copywriting agency based in London. We’re working with two amazingly talented people (ex Zipcar, ex Ebay) who have come very highly regarded. We’ll provide more details about them soon. The team are working together with them to build the re-brand.
 

NodeJs event. 
We hosted another great tech event on Wednesday which looked into the journey of implementing Serverless APIs with NodeJS. We had 2 speakers presenting some real-life implementations; Peter van Holland, CTO at Ruuby who presented “All aboard the Serverless Express” and Fabio Ponciroli, Developer from 11FS who presented “My Serverless journey so far”. The group we co-founded has now reached 1000 members strong. We had some interesting conversations with relevant people in the community.


Startup Grind Europe Conference
We’ve been selected to exhibit at the Startup Grind Europe Conference. The Conference is taking place on the 13th of June in Westminster and welcomes founders and thought leaders from all around the world for conversations around trends in tech, software, education, building and scaling a company, venture capital, and more. We’re putting together our marketing material for this event and expect to make some really good connections.

Find out more here: https://www.startupgrind.com/europe/#/

Developers just had a really nice mention in Andy Spence's webinar - have a listen! This is very important information.

https://app.livestorm.co/p/335cf66d-fb23-4e2e-877d-d186c85efbbd

When is the network launch. Wasn't it supposed to be in April according to the roadmap? Thanks for any answer. I hope - R-blook will be greater soon.