The end of Sprint #8 is just around the corner, and like always, Giant sums up the outcome of the past two weeks (24 September — 7 October 2018). Like many other IT projects, Giant tries its best to solve the majority of short-term tasks in two-week periods called sprints. This management model for software developers is called Scrum.
Technologies Development
In full accordance with the backlog, Giant developers have been working on the safe and secure integration of smart contracts into the Giant blockchain. Due to the fact that Giant.Exchange and all other planned decentralized applications will actively use this technology, it is very important not to act rashly. As evidenced by the history of other smart contracts projects, it’s in the best interest of the community to prevent vulnerabilities from the start instead of dealing with the tough consequences of hacks and thefts.
This refactoring included many various subtasks, and the development of the future update for Giant CLI was the most notable one. Users will be able to get the information on a chosen smart contract by using simple commands.
The Giant.Exchange underlying assets price motion graphs mentioned in Sprint #8 Backlog have seen several changes as well, as reported by the developer directly responsible for the issue. Other front-end matters, for example, Oracles list, are actively being upgraded.
The Giant website has taken a lot of our resources but the result of our work is objectively better than the one you can see right now. And here it is — which, unfortunately, cannot be said about the beta version of Giant.Exchange. The decision to postpone the Giant.Exchange Beta introduction was not taken lightly by our team.
Overall, the biggest development issue of this sprint was to implement design solutions exactly as intended — this can prove difficult in practice.
New Website
The website of Giant has been updated at the end of this sprint — this is a direct result of our combined efforts. The old Giant website was outdated, as unanimously agreed by the team after an independent review. New descriptive texts on Giant products have been composed, and again, it was critical to create quality materials. You can report any interface mistakes on the new website in case they escaped our attention.
The biggest challenge of the update process was to provide an easy-to-understand explanation of a sophisticated project filled with countless features. This became possible through new illustrative means such as infographics, annotations with links to extensive articles — all this was not present on the old website. Now you can, for example, switch between different features to understand the strengths of the Giant project in a eponymous section.
This major change will have a long-term positive consequences related to marketing, as it will raise the level of conversion. This term means that less people will be discouraged with the poor design before even realizing the project benefits. The new users will immediately recognize the project potential after arriving on the new website.
Informational Materials
The project White Papers on the old website were far from ideal. With the help of the project founders and developers, the Giant writers have seriously raised the quality of these documents. The new website contains the new version of the Giant, Giant.Exchange and Giant.Contracts White Papers.
The long-awaited comparative analysis of Giant.Exchange with other projects is finally published! This is the biggest educational material on our site by far. Several platforms — Betex, BlockOptions.io, Spectre.ai — are compared to Giant.Exchange by several criteria.
The most important conclusion of this research is that the Giant underlying asset price motion data supply mechanism (Oracles) has no full equivalents on the market of blockchain binary options platforms. Another serious inference from this comparison is that sometimes the attraction of funds through initial coin offerings (ICOs) is more important for the project team than the actual product itself. This is yet another solid reason against Giant holding its own ICO. And, lastly, no other project from the article will have customizable fees which can be determined by the community voting instead of centralized management.
Although we have already described everything that the Giant founders, developers and project managers viewed necessary to outline in the form of articles, there were some serious text-editing tasks this sprint. In a notable occasion, a Giant wallet setup instruction had no factual errors yet had poor grammar. As you can guess, nobody would take the project seriously if we ourselves cannot express its gist properly.
The current market of masternodes projects is experiencing a wave of pessimism built on stereotypes: masternodes are viewed as a tool to control the coin supply circulation and manipulate the price. To debunk the myths, we might post a material dedicated to this issue. It will also describe the clear advantages of masternode projects in the context of certain trading fields. But this is likely to be the task of the next sprint the backlog of which will soon be formulated and published on the Giant website.
Social Media
It was unanimously agreed that the Giant social media channels need more attention, and now you can read daily descriptions of the aspects of our work. We were quite interested to see how the community would react to the delay of Giant.Exchange Beta — and many responded that such events are usual in the world of IT projects. Giant thanks its supporters for the trust they put in our enterprise.
You can read other progress reports on our website to see what Giant has been doing since this summer. We intend to stick to this reports format in the future. You can also find out more about our immediate pressing matters on Discord.