January 21 2018

Bloom Community Alliance Livestream #1 Recap & Analysis

Shannon Wu

Thank you to everyone who tuned in live for Livestream #1 of our Community Alliance Program. The livestream was a great success.

Nearly 400 people tuned in live and over 1,500 people total watched the recording of the stream! This was our first ever stream, we took a ton of notes as well as recorded your feedback. Our goal is to bring you high-quality livestreams with even more information. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.

Prior to launching the first livestream, we collected and processed nearly 100 pieces of feedback, questions, and notes from our community. We’ve processed a recap of the livestream and answered the most common questions in this post.

Kicking off the Community Alliance Program

The Bloom Livestream marks the first community-voted decision from the Bloom voting dApp. The community voted to have a livestream once per month, and 100’s of thousands of BLT was staked to this vote.

We’ve established the Community Alliance Program to work closely with the community on future votes and initiatives. The livestream is just one part of the program, which takes a few different forms:

Updates: Ongoing updates at a pace and cadence decided by our community in the Bloom voting dApp, starting with a monthly livestream.
Feedback: We’re launching a feedback program for the community to submit ideas to be up to a vote, feedback for the Bloom team, and ideas to help improve the protocol. This also includes periodic community code review and code audits of our open sourced smart contracts.
Relationships: Our community are our users. We want to enhance our relationships with the developers building on Bloom, the lenders lending capital through Bloom, and the community supporting Bloom. This will take a few different forms, but primarily an ability for the community to engage directly with the Bloom team.
Management: We have a unified mission of rebuilding credit. Along the way, we’ll be defining milestones and building what the community needs. We’re actively hiring a manager for this program to ensure that no stone goes unturned and every voice is heard.

Time to Apply! We want to hire from our community.

We’re committed to finding the best talent across the globe, wherever that may be. We do not believe that talent needs to be geographically centralized.

Right now, the Bloom team is small and tasks are broadly spread among the team. As a result, responsibilities of design, growth and protocol development are shared among team members.

We have a strong preference to hire from the community. This essentially means: If you’re watching the livestream and interacting in the community, we would prefer to hire you over someone else.

Given our focus on deploying live Mainnet code as early as possible, we’re actively looking for a few development and business development roles.

To apply, please read our full hiring post here.

You can submit an application to: Jobs@HelloBloom.io

Applicants will hear from us the week of January 22nd and onward.

Phase 1 Is Launched: We Need Your Support!

Since our first release on January 1st, more than 1,000+ early adopters and initial users have signed up for their BloomID.

It’s important to highlight that this is a Mainnet release, deployed on the Main Ethereum Blockchain.

This means that actions are logged to the Etheruem Blockchain, not the Testnet.

In addition to launching the smart contracts, this release also includes our app to easily interact with the smart contracts. You can access the dApp here.

How do you invite users?

In order to secure and grow the network, Bloom Token (BLT) is needed to be staked (tied up) in order to generate a BloomID.

There is no way to sign up for Bloom without an invite, this means existing BLT holders will need to invite new users.

The initial staking fee is .1 BLT. Modifications to this fee will be open to a community vote.

Protocol Voting

This is one of the first main ways to use BLT.

Bloom is a community driven project. The voice of the lenders, developers, and Bloom community leads the protocol direction.

Our model follows a proof-of-stake methodology. This means that your influence over the vote is based on the number of BLT you stake to the vote.

REMEMBER: You do not lose BLT by voting. The BLT is not spent.

Our smart contract checks and verifies the amount of BLT held in your wallet and applies this level of influence over the vote.

Committed to ease of use

We are working on a mobile app that will greatly reduce friction in our application. We’re commited to ease of use, ensuring that everday people, lenders, and developers will not need to materially change their behavior to interface with Bloom.

While blockchain projects are still early, we aim to put UX at the forefront of everything we do.

As part of this, the mobile app and future versions of Bloom will mean that users will not have to worry about interfacing with smart contract code or dealing with MetaMask.

We are also looking into ways to automatically reimburse gas fees for users.

Who is Building off of Bloom?

Bloom’s vision of creating a global ecosystem will only be achieved with large scale community support. The Bloom protocol isn’t controlled by one government, one state, one bank, or one company, it’s controlled by everyone.

We are heads down in further partnerships, growing the accessibility and preparing for a Phase 2 release.

Please see ongoing partnerships here: https://blog.hellobloom.io/bloom-partner-round-up-2c445d355ae0

Bloom’s Position on Exchanges

As long as any cryptocurrency exchange that has decided to list BLT complies with all applicable regulatory requirements, Bloom has no objection to BLT being included on such exchanges and appreciates that such exchanges are necessary in order for potential Bloom platform participants to acquire BLT.

In particular, Bloom understands that new participants interested in joining the Bloom community must be able to acquire BLT and that one source for acquiring BLT is from other holders of BLT. Further, Bloom understands the role played by certain cryptocurrency exchanges in facilitating the connection of buyers and sellers seeking to acquire utility tokens such as BLT.

Bloom does not object to those exchanges that operate in accordance with all applicable law from facilitating the ability to acquire BLT by those interested in participating on the Bloom Platform.

If an exchanges chooses to list BLT, we have no objection to this as long as the exchange is compliant with all laws and regulatory requirements.

Where can you purchase BLT?

RadayRelay
Idex
EtherDelta

Please note: Bloom does not provide support for any crypocurrency exchange, nor do we endorse buying BLT for speculative purposes.

Bloom Economic Research Division (BERD)

We’re thrilled to announce the Bloom Economic Research Division (BERD).

This division serves as a core team within Bloom responsible for leading an open-source data approach to credit analysis. Twice annually, we will compile and publish benchmark reports assessing credit risk, credit scoring, fraud rates, and the global macroeconomic credit climate.

We’re also hiring for BERD!

Please reach out to Jobs@hellobloom.io if this is interesting to you.

Technical Overview:

Open Source Smart Contracts:

We’ve published our Phase 1 contracts on GitHub.

Bloom is a community first project. We’re thrilled to open source our contracts for public review and discussion. This marks a big milestone on our long term roadmap and we’re incredibly excited to continue to make progress on defining the future of credit.

Accessibility Improvements:

Always pulling SafeLow gas from ETHGasStation — This will help ensure that transactions always go through, while keeping cost reduced for our users.
Avoiding dependence on existing ETH knowledge — We don’t believe you should necessarily need to know your friend’s ETH address in order to invite him, or know exactly how to use Ethereum dApps. We’re putting a big focus on usability for first time users.
Working on pending TX detection to provide a notification while transactions are pending and give users a better analysis of what is happening on the network.
Preempt additional bugs that a user could experience and prevent them inside the dApp
To make UI more immediately clear (pending vote, link to etherscan)
Working on TX batching to reduce the gas fees and time to submit votes and updates.
Reducing any delays with metamask

How will original identity be established? How will original credit be established?

Bloom allows data providers (IDV, financial history) to be reported and linked on chain.
All data imported for Bloom is reusable from then on, there is no personal information that is stored on chain.
We are currently in the process of setting up Phase 2 which will introduce the concept of attesters, which federate and validate BloomID’s. Once this phase rolls out, BloomID could begin use for lending purposes.

What are the biggest technical challenges we’re working on?

Rapid iteration with smart contracts. Given the nature of smart contracts and their immutability, we’re looking into ways to deploy updates faster.
Iterating long term and finding suitable stopgaps to work with Ethereum while also proposing protocol improvements
Implementing core infrastructure and user facing improvements. Work we have done so far (developer tools, gas station integration, invite system) are things we want to share publicly.

How will the system adjust to variation in the value of BLT when fees on the Bloom system are quoted in BLT?

Lenders can decide prices they want to pay.
Data providers, identity verifiers, risk assessors can dynamically set the prices of their service. This works sort of like an Augur style oracle, or a payment processor like Bitpay. Overstock can charge Bitcoin but they can reference a price in fiat and adjust the rate.
Overall, Bloom will be an ecosystem that combines a large number of vendors, data providers, lenders, users, and developers. Our place in the ecosystem is to facilitate the protocol level, the interactions between participants of the network will happen organically.

Future Livestreams

Thanks for tuning in! Submit the topics you’d like us to cover in future livestreams here in this form: https://bloomteam.typeform.com/to/KcRgOq