The new Tokes Newsletter for May is now available: Welcome Back Tokes Enthusiasts!The past month has been a busy time for the team, primarily focusing on continued development efforts around the tokes transactional protocol. Along with this we have a number of other related announcements around marketing, deployments of software, and token adoption.
Merchant Gateway and Mobile ApplicationWe have been in final quality assurance testing for our merchant gateway software over the last few weeks and polishing the full release of the software for public use. While quality assurance testing has extended longer than initially projected, it is of the utmost importance that we ensure that any payments flowing through our merchant gateway software are secure and that no loss is incurred due to software bugs due to insufficient QA or user acceptance testing (UAT). These final stages are proceeding in parallel with final passes of our mobile application which we will be submitted to both the iOS and Android stores once QA is finished.
Demos of both the gateway (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQz9UxmYlHw) and mobile application (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fkoSGTgzF4) can be found via our YouTube channel.
Additionally, the API integrations of the merchant gateway are still being developed. Specifically, this functionality will allow merchants with existing inventory control software to import products from these systems, and in turn allow updating of product stock directly from the Tokes Merchant Gateway. This feature will follow after the initial public release of the merchant gateway.
Herbology ToursSome of you may recall our partnership with local cannabis tour company and shuttle service Herbology Tours here in Las Vegas, NV. We are excited to announce that with the upcoming rollout of the merchant gateway, tourgoers will soon receive an allocation of tokes to spend at stops along the tour, both broadening our user base and adoption of tokes by dispensaries. Herbology was the first in Nevada to obtain the needed support licensing requirement to function as a full-fledged cannabis tour company and shuttle service between dispensaries.
The Herbology Bus can be seen below sporting our logo…
Exchange ListingsWe are very pleased to announce that Tokes can now be purchased on CoinSwitch (
https://coinswitch.co). For those unfamiliar, CoinSwitch offers an easy way for users to obtain multiple cryptocurrencies at the lowest cost by aggregating the average price across multiple exchanges. CoinSwitch’s easy to use interface provides one of the easiest methods for new cryptocurrency enthusiasts to obtain an array of tokens and diversify their holdings without the usual difficulties associated with managing funds across multiple exchanges.
On a related note, we regularly see a plethora of our users asking about additional exchange listing of our token. While this is an important component to any tokenized project within the blockchain space, our focus for the past year has largely been on project development and strategic partnerships, and less on marketing pushes and additional exchange listings. Once our development projects are launched and gaining traction on both a consumer and business level, then we can refocus efforts on matters such as exchange placements. In the interim however, most exchanges have token request forms, and we encourage our users interested in these listings to inquire themselves, and request/vote for our token to be listed on your favorite sites.
Smart ContractsAs you may be aware, the Waves team launched smart contracts to the Waves testnet earlier this month, beta testing this functionality for deployment on the mainnet in future releases. As tokes is a Waves asset, this functionality can serve to benefit our users in a number of ways. The upcoming smart contract functionality will allow for multisignature wallets – that is, the requirement of two or more parties to private keys in order to move funds from a wallet – an important feature for businesses adopting tokes as a primary form of payment. Additionally, the new smart contract functionality will bring Turing complete decentralized applications, time-based token freezes, and atomic swaps, allowing more complex processes to be undertaken in a trustless on-chain manner, independent of off-chain applications.
Many readers might be scratching their heads at this point thinking: “so what?! Ethereum has had this functionality for ages!” Keep in mind however, that at its core, Ethereum and chains like it are primarily smart-contract and DApp centric platforms. Waves however is a transactional blockchain with asset creation capability, possessing the speed that makes it an ideal chain for consumer-to-business transactions (i.e., Waves has fast block times and the lowest fees). This added smart contract functionality on a fast chain improves the overall feature set of tokes, and allows for us to implement more robust feature sets to our offerings like the merchant gateway, soon with on-chain smart contract functionality.
EPCIS Open-Source BlockchainThe world’s largest blockchain and cryptocurrency focused conference, Consensus 2018, concluded last week in New York. Tokes founders Michael Wagner and Gabriel Allred were in attendance. This year, there was much discussion around blockchain as a disruptive force in supply chain management. For the curious, see the articles on pages 35 and 40 of this year’s program (“Manufacturing and Blockchain: Prime Time Yet to Come” & “Making Trade Wars Obsolete”). This recent buzz around supply chain management and the provenance of production data with blockchain only reaffirms our commitment to building projects like the EPCIS blockchain discussed in last month’s newsletter. To recap, EPCIS (Electronic Product Code Information Services) is a global standard for structuring event data across industries and tracking “objects” as they move through a supply chain. Utilizing Quorum (
https://www.jpmorgan.com/global/Quorum) for this development, our specific deployment serves as a backend integration to conventional enterprise resource planning software. We will soon release the initial version of our EPCIS Blockchain, an open-source project designed for storage of Electronic Product Code Information Services (EPCIS) information on the blockchain.
While many large players like IBM have already thrown their hat in the ring of supply chain management blockchain implementations, the opportunities for blockchain deployments within the cannabis space and beyond are limitless, as the need for the provenance of data within supply chains spans disparate industries from fishing, farming, shipping, medicine, to industrial manufacturing and beyond. Even capturing a small percentage of any industry’s data on the blockchain is a win for the tokes team, and while the cannabis vertical is our primary focus, it is important to note that the EPCIS chain (as well as all our other product offerings) are essentially industry agnostic. Keep an eye out for an announcement regarding the soon to be available public EPCIS Blockchain repository.
Lastly, Brave New Coin (link) published a great two-part article on the intersection of cannabis and blockchain, with a fair amount of discussion around Tokes. Read the articles using the links below:
https://bravenewcoin.com/news/cannabis-industry-and-blockchain-from-outlaws-to-outliers/https://bravenewcoin.com/news/cannabis-and-blockchain-pt-ii-the-future-of-commodities/ Until next time…
Here’s to something new. Here’s to the revolution.tokesplatform.org
