Recapping Our Announcement Week
What a crazy week here at Bloom. This week was our announcement week. Wednesday, we shared our project for the first time on Reddit. Little did we know… the largest credit breach in the history of the United States would be announced less than 24 hours after our announcement.
(If you haven’t seen the news, Equifax reported that over 143 million of its U.S. customers were victim to a hack that exposed Social Security Numbers, credit information, addresses & more.)
I wish I could tell you we saw this coming, but really the timing was quite coincidental. While it feels terrible to have your personal information exposed, the silver lining is that these events help underscore the great need for decentralization. It’s much easier for the world to align on global change when everyone realizes it is broken.
Be careful: If this isn’t bad enough, Equifax has hidden clauses….
You might wonder if you were one of the nearly 50% of American’s impacted by the largest personal data breach of all time. I wondered this too. Equifax set up a system to check if your ID was compromised.
Be careful: A quick skim through the terms points out: “You will be forfeiting your right to bring or participate in any class action”
Yes — Equifax placed a hidden clause that waives your rights to sue if you check to see if your data was stolen. New York State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman did not find this very acceptable…
Earlier today, after conversations with the NY Attorney General, Equifax clarified their position on the language, but the office is continuing to monitor the situation closely.
In related news…
(Source)
Bloom: The #1 Upvoted Project on Reddit!
I am beyond thrilled to see this level of community support. In just a day, Bloom is already voted to the be highest project announcement all month on r/Ethereum! We had hundreds of people reach out to us with insightful questions, amazing feedback and incredible offers of support. (Link to post here)
Bloom is a community driven project at every angle. We are working together to fix credit. Community support isn’t just appreciated, it is absolutely fundamental.
If you have anything to share with us, please don’t hesitate to reach out directly Slack. You can message any of us directly. If you are not on Slack yet, join us!
Getting Some Mainstream Attention?
Bloom was featured on Inc!
It’s very hard for Blockchain projects to get mainstream news attention.
(I’m sure the timing with the data breach didn’t hurt our cause…)
Please help spread the word of our project by tweeting and sharing the link. The article did an excellent job highlighting some of the problems with the current credit ecosystem today.
Product Hunted
We were very surprised to see Bloom listed on Product Hunt yesterday! Most projects put quite a bit of effort to get submitted and perform well. When my friend texted me a link, I was quite amazed that this happened organically. Thank you all again for supporting this project. (Link to Hunt)
We’re Slacking!
Our Slack community grew by over *700* people in the last 2 days alone!
Thank you to everyone who joined the discussion there yesterday and today!
Here’s a snippet:
We will send out update emails like this occasionally, but Slack is going to be the best place to join in the conversation. So please join here if you haven’t done so already!
Ways you can help:
- We believe in the concept of decentralization and community. Given that this is the first time we’ve announced the project, we are still trying to get the word out.
- Our ecosystem involves lenders, borrowers, identity attesters and data providers. Input from everyone is critical at this stage.
- If you or anyone you know has time to provide feedback, please point them to our Slack and white paper
- We are still growing our Twitter, so please follow us here.
