Janus Status Update
As you may have noticed, things have been a bit quiet lately. This post is an attempt to explain what has happened over the past few weeks and to clarify our outlook for the future.
Active Sites and Dividendsa) As you probably know, we got involved with the ETC (Ethereum Classic) community. As an icebreaker and to prove that we're men of our word and know what we're doing (more on this later), we launched EtcBets.com ... an upgrade of our existing codebase to use websockets as a transport layer which gives our site awesome betting speed and massively reduced server load. The site was well received and some of the site profits were distributed to both the ETC dev team(s) and Janus holders.
b) Parallel to this, BetterBets.io is still running and processing bets using both BTC and NXT. While it's initial reception from the NXT community was quite positive, traffic has dropped quite a bit over the past 2 months. Part of this may be our fault because we've been focused on our future businesses and have not done a lot of promotions and marketing; another factor contributing to the drop in traffic may be that the NXT community is simply too small to sustain large betting volumes now that the initial site 'newness' has worn off.
c) Since betting is an unpredictable business and lady luck can't be relied upon to always smile our way, EtcBets profits in May were basically wiped out by a lucky (and/or skillful) player who managed to win a large pot. The same player came back in June and repeated his performance, leading to another low dividend month for Janus holders. Our feeling on this are (of course) mixed. On the one hand, we don't mind players winning and our investigation showed that this player's winning were legitimate; as such we can only congratulate him on his success (on a sidepoint, the fact that this player was able to win a significant amount of ETC should serve as proof that we run an honest and fair casino). On the other hand, since we own the bankroll and could not distribute any significant dividends to Janus holders we're a bit saddened by our loss. But such is the gambling business, you win some and you loose some.
d) Adding insult to injury, in early July a flaw in our site was discovered and an attacker managed to make off with about 490 ETC. Due to the fact that we have certain safeguards in place the attacker could not extract more than his amount from our site, but the loss, while not crippling still hurts. We put the site into maintenance and have since re-engineered the code which was responsible for the exploit. As of 2 days ago the site is live again with dice bets; Parabolic will be put live during the course of this week. To be clear: our server was not compromised and the majority of our bankroll remains unharmed and in our possession.
Future Plansa) We have reached agreement with a new developer who will join our team before the end of July. We hope that the addition of this developer will lighten the workload of our main dev (Lobos) and allow us to speed up development of our new sites.
b) We have always said that we will not put all our eggs in one basket. As such, we have for some time had plans for some side initiatives which at least deserve a shot to see if they can grow into viable businesses. One of these initiatives is about 50% complete and it will be the task of our new dev to take the code we have so far and bring it to completion.
c) In addition to everything else which has been going on, work on our first mainstream site - TradeMimic.com - has begun and some basic pieces of functionality are starting to come together. There is still lots of work to be done for this site and completing it will be our devs primary focus for the remainder of Q3. We will keep everybody posted on progress and hope to invite some of our Janus investors to be beta testers when the site/code is ready for that.
