We are happy to provide you with the first edition of our monthly team update.

 
The opening of Trust Square at Bahnhofstrasse 3 marked an important milestone for VETRI. Not only do we now have over 30 desks at our disposition, we also greatly benefit from the synergies created by the 40 startups sharing the blockchain co-working space.
In spite of the hectic time during the office move, we have been working intensively behind the scenes, focusing on scaling the team and developing a comprehensive roadmap to deliver VETRI.
Our solution will be the first-of-its-kind, pioneering the way we own and use our personal data. At the same time, broad-ranging adoption is key to the success of the VETRI wallet and marketplace. To achieve this, it is crucial to have a thorough understanding of the market as well as the needs of our target groups. For this purpose, we have reserved the time between the end of the ITO and the second week of July to conduct extensive market and technology testing and to expand the team to ensure rapid scaling once the road map has been determined.
Consequently, we are happy to announce that over the past 2 months, we were able to engage 10 additional team members spanning the areas of product development, project management, marketing, IT development and blockchain network management, bringing the VETRI team to a total of 23. Over the next month, we plan to hire 3 more software developers, bringing the team to a total of 26 by the time the road map is finalized.
Through this additional man (and woman) power, we were able to conduct extensive market research and ideation based on the initial proposition put forward in our white paper. We have conducted a variety of focus groups, qualitative interviews and large-scale surveys of potential users across countries and demographics. Furthermore, we have also started to engage potential corporate partners (data consumers) for the VETRI marketplace, to understand their needs and pain-points.
Not only has the research confirmed our initial vision — a self-sovereign identity which allows the user to authenticate, safeguard and monetize their personal data — it has also produced leads for a variety of additional features which further enhance what we laid out in the original white paper. Based on this enlarged scope, we have made significant progress in laying out the technological framework of the VETRI wallet over all.
After this initial market testing phase, we are now looking forward to 6 weeks of applied technology testing, which will determine the final features and timeline we will communicate in our road map.
The technology testing will be focused on 3 main areas
– Secure identity: how to reach the best possible level of security and privacy as elaborated in the previous blogpost.
– Data retrieval and management: testing user-friendly ways to retrieve data from different data brokers and organizing it in the user’s wallet. We will likely follow a modular framework which will allow future contributors to easily add additional data sources as they become available. Moreover, we are also going to test secure ways to sync data across multiple devices to allow for backups of the decentralized data storage.
– Marketplace: what’s going to take most of our effort is the architecture of the marketplace and how to enable a real p2p ecosystem. We need to design a system that protects the privacy of the users but prevents fraudulent accounts from abusing it. We are currently exploring a mix of incentive and reputation systems as a way to reach this goal.
Looking beyond technological feasibility, we are also closely collaborating with data privacy activists and GDPR experts, such as our advisors MEP Eva Kaili and Christian Sillaber, in order to implement compliant and state-of-the-art privacy practices with our solution.
Lastly, we have been very busy spreading the word about VETRI both in Switzerland and abroad. Some of the events we were represented are listed below:
– Schweizeraktion.net — Workshop Blockchain — Chancen und Risiken für KMU
– Blockchain Symposium, University of Basel
– NEO Zurich meetup
– CXO-Event Sylt
– Zürich Economic Impulse
– GDPR and Dataportability meetup at Trust Square
– Blockchain Technologie — Hype oder disruptiver Strukturwandel? — Business Blockchain Hub Bern
In the coming weeks, you can meet members of the VETRI team at the following events:
– BiPRO Tag 2018
– Women in Blockchain
– Blockchain Adoption Round Table at the European Parliament
Join us on Telegram or follow us on Twitter to stay up-to-date until next month’s update. The detailed road map will be published shortly after in the second week of July.