2017 was not only an incredible year for us as a company but the crypto-asset space as a whole. A nascent financial system has exploded into the mainstream and we’re ecstatic to play an important role in the usability and security of these emerging assets and networks. We’ve come along way over the last few years and are proud to be at the forefront of such an exciting and competitive industry.
We’ve not only survived the last 3 years but thrived and finished 2017 with a bang, catching the attention of Forbes on the last day of 2017 profiling our vision for security.
Edge’s first product was a bitcoin wallet and business directory, which launched in the winter of 2014, under the company name of “AirBitz” and has been successfully securing millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin ever since.
“Airbitz” quickly advanced from a first class bitcoin wallet in 2014 to a paradigm shifting data security solution and multi-asset wallet in late 2017. Given our company’s evolution and core value proposition we thought it would be best to highlight this focus on “Edge Security” as the core of our brand.
And that’s exactly what we did in October 2017 by rebranding from “Airbitz” to “Edge”.
So what did we accomplish in 2017?
After a successful capital raise at the end of 2016(no it wasn’t an ICO), we deployed much of what was raised toward increasing the usability of our security platform and creating an entirely new crypto-asset wallet, built from the ground up.
We originally wrote our “Airbitz” Core library in C++ but spent the last year rewriting it in JavaScript(JS). This was necessary to increase the platform’s usability on multiple operating systems and environments such as desktop, mobile, and web. Javascript also happens to increase the ease of development and availability of libraries to support other crypto-assets so we basically killed two stones with one bird(we’re animal rights activists) by rewriting our Core in JavaScript. We didn’t write our Core library in JS originally because it was not an option for mobile development at the time.
We also rewrote our GUI libraries for many of the same reasons. Since the release of our Airbitz Wallet in 2014 we used the default iOS and Android GUI environments but have since rewritten the GUI for the “Edge Wallet” in React Native(RN) a language created, developed, and maintained by engineers at Facebook. React Native can run on iOS, Android, and the web. This will save us a ton of work going forward.
After months of refactoring our Core library and GUI libraries we were able to connect our new Core with our new GUI and release a beta version of our new multi-asset wallet “Edge Wallet”. The Edge Wallet Beta was released at the end of 2017 with support for Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Ethereum, ERC-20 tokens, Dash, Segregated Witness for BTC & LTC, and an integration of Shapeshift!
We’ve received a lot of great feedback from the community on our Beta release and are looking forward to a public release very soon. Stay tuned.
While our developers were busy building every day, our public app “Airbitz” saw about a 3x increase over the last year across the board in many traction statistics we track such as active users per week and new users per week. This increase happened despite very little allocated to marketing. The ramp up in usage of the Airbitz Wallet usually correlated nicely with various waves of crypto-asset price movements, media saturation, and general industry trends.
To round out the ground covered in 2017, we formed some important partnerships and completed several successful integrations which give many a taste of what is possible not only for our public facing applications but also how we can help the ecosystem make their offerings more secure, private, and useful for their users.
In 2017 alone, we inked 4 new partnerships with projects that will utilize our Edge Security SDK for their applications: Projects such as Open Ledger, Cashaa, Matryx, and Indorse. Each is trying to do something unique in this emerging industry and we are more than happy to help them and their users interact with their platforms.
We were also able to add some new plug-ins to our Airbitz Wallet such as, Bity and Liberty-X, which gave our users more ways to go from fiat to Bitcoin and vice-versa right from inside our wallet. The Edge Wallet will have the same plug-in architecture as Airbitz which allows our users to connect to premium crypto-related services such as exchanges, debit cards, mobile top-ups, gift cards, etc right from inside their wallet.
2017 was clearly an incredibly productive year for Edge and we look forward to an even better 2018. We still have a lot to accomplish and we look forward to building great products and navigating the uncertain road ahead. “Crypto” is always full of interesting surprises.