Bloom Weekly Update 10/05
We have a number of exciting project updates this week. This week continued to be extremely chaotic in credit land. Former Equifax CEO, Richard Smith, was grilled on on Capitol Hill, revealing how little the company did to protect the security of the users.
It’s an incredibly unfortunate event for the 145 million Americans impacted, but the learnings from this session pushed a number of lenders and partners to reach out to us. We’re currently working through a backlog of requests so please forgive any slow follow up.
Since Last Week:
Our Slack surpassed 3,000 people!
This week we did a 30 minute interview with YouTuber, CryptoBobby. We announced a partnership with Self Lender. We wrote about the background of the Bloom team. We began the first round of analysis at the data from our survey, we made amazing progress on the core protocol development and we passed 3000 people in our Slack Community!
New To Bloom?
It’s exciting to see so many new faces join our community every day. A few people reached out asking how they can get started learning about Bloom.
Here are a few links to catch you up to speed:
- Bloom: Overview Blog Post (3 minute read)
- Inc: This Company is Making Credit Available to 3 Billion People
- Huffington Post: Caught In the Equifax Breach? Blockchain Startups Are Here to Help
- Nasdaq: How One Blockchain Startup Is Combatting Centralization of the Credit Industry
- Twitter: Brian Krebs (Security Researcher)
- YouTube: CryptoBobby Interview with Jesse Leimgruber (30 minutes)
- Podcast: 5 Minute Crypto: Bloom (5 minutes)
- Bloom: Technical Whitepaper
- Slack: please join our Slack community.
- Twitter: Follow us on Twitter.
Bloom Coverage:
YouTuber, Crypto Bobby, did an extensive, in depth 30 minute interview with me. He took the time to read the white paper and really understand the protocol, so we were able to talk specific at points. The mic & volume is a bit fuzzy so please forgive the technical glitches.
FULL VIDEO: Link Here
It’s a 30 minute interview, so feel free to jump to the parts that interest you:
- “You studied at Stanford, but how did this idea start? What is your background?” https://youtu.be/jHRr4txsIjs?t=40s
- “What is it like being in the Thiel Fellowship (with Vitalik, Joey Krug & Others)” https://youtu.be/jHRr4txsIjs?t=1m40s
- “Tell me about the Equifax Hack” https://youtu.be/jHRr4txsIjs?t=4m1s
- “Credit Freezes? They cost $30/month. Thoughts?” https://youtu.be/jHRr4txsIjs?t=6m46s
- “What is the 60 second pitch of Bloom?” https://youtu.be/jHRr4txsIjs?t=7m56s
- “How do you think about Cross Border Credit Scoring issue? https://youtu.be/jHRr4txsIjs?t=10m22s
- “Can you talk about the 3 Bloom Components” https://youtu.be/jHRr4txsIjs?t=11m40s
- “What Factors go into BloomScore” https://youtu.be/jHRr4txsIjs?t=13m20s
- “What do you have in mind in terms of partnerships?” https://youtu.be/jHRr4txsIjs?t=14m45s
- “Is this going to be US First?” https://youtu.be/jHRr4txsIjs?t=16m35s
- “What is the BloomCard? https://youtu.be/jHRr4txsIjs?t=18m1s
- “How far along are you? What’s the roadmap? https://youtu.be/jHRr4txsIjs?t=20m1s
- “What is the utility of the Bloom Token?” https://youtu.be/jHRr4txsIjs?t=21m35s
- “When is the ICO? Will there even be an token sale?” https://youtu.be/jHRr4txsIjs?t=23m20s
- “How is your team uniquely positioned to address this problem?” https://youtu.be/jHRr4txsIjs?t=24m30s
- “What is the biggest obstacle? What keeps you up at night?” https://youtu.be/jHRr4txsIjs?t=26m20s
- “Has regulation been a challenge” https://youtu.be/jHRr4txsIjs?t=28m8s
- “How the community can help” https://youtu.be/jHRr4txsIjs?t=30m40s
Bloom + Self Lender
We are incredibly excited to announce the Bloom partnership with Self Lender. The company recently raised a $5 million series A financing after experiencing rapid customer growth. Self Lender shares the Bloom mission and we’re extremely excited to announce our partnership.
Read the Full Announcement.
Beware of Scams:
We received a couple of reports from community members that fraudsters were falsely claiming that the Bloom team is collecting funds. These are scams.
How can you stay secure?
- Do not send funds to any Ethereum address claiming to be the Bloom team: We have not announced a token sale yet. We are not collecting any funds. Any announcements will be posted on our Blog, on our Website and on our email newsletter. We will never cold message you directly on Slack instructing you to send funds to any address.
- Join our newsletter for the most direct information: To further reduce any chances of getting scammed, please join our newsletter. This, along with the blog/website, will be the primary sources of official announcements. Be very weary of Slack, even if it appears to be coming from us. You can join the newsletter here: https://hellobloom.io/
- Double Check: Our Blog URL is https://blog.hellobloom.io/ — At any point, if you are wondering if we have announced a token sale or anything similar, just check the blog.
- Message Us: The team is always available on Slack and if there are any concerns, please message us directly. If you notice a potential scammer, please let one of the team members know.
Ways you can help:
- The survey is the most important thing we are looking for right now. We will be running this for 2 more weeks. We’ll be giving out 5 $100 gift cards to respondents. Help us spread this widely!
- We’ve been getting some great emails to our new team email. To make sure we quickly point you to the best team member, please include specifics if possible. team@hellobloom.io. If you want to email me, I can be reached at jesse@hellobloom.io
- The community was extremely helpful with introductions to many of the data providers and trusted nodes, so please continue to make introductions if you can. We want to have as many relationships established prior to launching.
- Please continue to ask and answer questions on Slack as your involvement and engagement has been extremely helpful. Thank you!
- If you haven’t already, please join our Slack community.
- And follow us on Twitter.
