This holiday season Intense Coin (ITNS) celebrates 4 months. Our community, network, and market value continues to grow in parallel with our development team’s commitment, your online contribution and continued involvement within our online network.
The community you have helped to create here provides a lot of value to the overall efforts involved in this process. We hope you enjoy this graphical overview of the growth and evolution of Intense Coin over the last few months:
TRANSITION FROM A PROJECT TO A PRODUCT
We are extremely pleased to announce our official move from a“Project” based protocol, to a professional entity based “Product” platform.
This transition is a result of ITNS becoming a victim of its own success. It doesn’t always make sense to move forward in this direction, however, given the progress the project has achieved in the first 4 months alone, the move to a ‘Product’ based platform is the logical next step.
What does this mean?
Intense moving forward as a product rather than a project involves several key elements including recruitment of an internal advisory board, legal entity incorporation, emphasis on a brand and diversification of our products across the brand, and a much greater sense of forward thinking. Intense in the project phases was lucky to have a plan four weeks out. As a product, we are already thinking about 2019.
We should be encouraged and celebrate this development. Every project isn’t lucky enough to be able to redefine itself as a product, and it should not be interpreted as a setback. Evidence of this is reflected in the continued growth in the size of our ITNS community, team and reach within the software and development ecosystem. It has expanded more than we could have anticipated.
As a result, our team is more committed than ever in riding this momentum to further establish partnerships with targeted VPN providers and strategic outreach to venture capitalists and private investors.
INTENSE INTERNAL STRUCTURE OVERHAUL
We are pleased to announce the two team members and the addition of a 5 member world class internal advisory board.
Vladimir Jirasek has been brought on board as our Project Manager. Vlad is the Managing Director of his own company, Jirasek Security Ltd and brings with him 16 years of security experience. Vlad’s security certifications include CCSP, CCSK, CISSP, CISSP-ISSAP, CISSP-ISSM, and he is a Member of The IET, Member of the BSC, ISC2.
Miguel Alfaiate is a Software Engineer and CEO of Alfasoft, a portuguese based IT services company. Miguel provides our team with over 10 years of expertise in IT providing solutions for Health and insurance, Financial Markets, and a number of Tech Startups. He is a certified software producer by the Portuguese Tax Authority and provides software and infrastructure solutions across the globe to individuals and enterprises.
Miguel has been bought into to help produce a minimum-viable product (MVP) of the Intense VPN. Miguel and Alfasoft are a very capable team to lead the development of the VPN implementation and their contribution will serve as a great asset in this aim. We will update you as the developments move forward.
We are also happy to introduce ConsensusNode (Drew) as our Content Marketing Manager and Content Creator.
Drew holds an Associate’s Degree in Applied Sciences, and brings with him 6+ years experience working with national nonprofits and small businesses in education, marketing and software development in a number of leadership roles.
Drew has been working as a content creator and site contributor for bitcoin and blockchain related websites for the last two years. He currently works as the Co-Administrator of Ethereum Insight, with Starfish Insight based in Toronto Canada, and as a Freelance Author and Content Creator with Blockgeeks Inc. and BitcoinWorldwide.
This addition to the Intense team allows SlowGrowth to completely focus his efforts and time on the establishing partnerships with targeted VPN providers, strategic outreach to venture capitalists and private investors interested in blockchain investment opportunities, and the exchange outreach and partnership establishment role he was primarily brought onboard for.
ConsensusNode will be relieving SlowGrowth from most of the community management creation, support of our social media campaigns and the management of our relations on social media platforms role.
Feel free to reach out to him at anytime.
REVISED WHITEPAPER: V1.3
In simple terms, Intense Coin wallets and products will be to VPN services as eBay or Amazon are to general goods: multiple sellers from multiple regions will list their VPN capabilities, allowing end-users the ability to freely select the exit node which makes the most sense to them from a cost, bandwidth, speed and location perspective.
The Intense whitepaper originally posted on October 31, 2017 marked the official release of our vision for addressing the growing and persistent need for secure internet usage by establishing peer-to-peer, decentralized, blockchain driven, anonymous virtual private networks (VPNs). The whitepaper has been revised to help improve the overall readability, and further extend the reach of our platform to commercial VPNs.
As per prior whitepaper releases, any and all feedback is encouraged and welcomed.
The revised version includes updated stylized graphics and an emphasis on a bimodal approach to the decentralized VPN; discussing clear direction for commercial and end-user hosted exit nodes.
VPN DEVELOPMENT
After extensive assessment, collaboration, and evaluation, it was determined the previous team in place was not up to the task of creating the product we have in mind. Therefore, the entire development team tasked with VPN development has been replaced. Vladimir is heading the new team as Project Manager and will be overseeing Miguel and his associates. Miguel and his accompanying team of dedicated C++ developers have over 40 years of combined experience and are intimately familiar with our specifications, goals and deadlines for the VPN.
The previous team misled us on many occasions, missed several deadlines and lacked overall commitment to the product we felt was necessary. We have established rigorous checks and balances with the new development team to ensure our product is on schedule moving forward.
Given Vlad’s extensive experience in this area, having him at the helm as Project Manager instills tremendous confidence. We have allocated significant resources and conducted extensive planning to ensure that the new team is highly capable of getting us to where we want to go.
Our current team is on schedule with the roadmap for the release of the full VPN wallet integration in Q2 of 2018. The delays we have encountered are not due to a lack of innovation and have not resulted in any reduction in growth or adoption rates. Furthermore, the VPN product that we are on track to develop and release later than originally intended will be improved by orders of magnitude in its functionality and value due to the higher quality of the team producing the work, and the numerous technical improvements that have been established since beginning work.
MANDATORY WALLET UPDATE
In case you missed the December 3rd update, at block 76,500, version 1.4.1 or later of the Intense Coin wallet or daemon will now be required. If you do not update your wallet, you will no longer be able to synchronize the main chain, and you will be on a forked/alternate blockchain.
Version 1.4.1 included several adjustments to the software. Most notably among them was a revision to the difficulty algorithm to mitigate hash attacks. The new difficulty algorithm is derived from Sumokoin, which is based loosely upon Zawy v1b and incorporates a trailing block median assessment. The testing we have done has worked very well; it is a proven update that has been live on the Sumo network for many months now without falter.
Please update to the latest version at your earliest convenience using the links below!
GitHub Wallet latest release
GitHub daemon latest release
UPDATE: COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT AND BOUNTIES
Today, we are proud to acknowledge that 724 individuals have joined Intense on Slack, a 24% increase over this time last month. We also have accumulated over 140+ pages of chatter on the Bitcointalk forum, and have already reached 430 members Intense Coin Discord server in only 1 month of availability.
The Discord chat server platform is the easiest and quickest way to have your opinion or concern heard by the Intense team. Intense Team members are designated by red coloring in their usernames. Come chat with us!
Although the Intense community is still small and tight-knit, we are growing at a very encouraging pace. You can continue to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit.
Please retweet our posts that strike a chord with you and most importantly, we really encourage you to participate in the Slack, Discord, and Bitcointalk discussion!
Our Bitcointalk announcement post has been overhauled and features sleek graphics, and a new signature campaign (to be announced on the 16th december). Check it out!
Your voice is a welcomed addition to our community.
BROWSER PROXY EXTENSION
To bridge the several months away release of the in-wallet VPN feature-set, we are proud to announce the Intense team is working on a Chrome and Firefox browser extension to offer HTTPS proxy services in exchange for Intense Coin (ITNS). The details of this sub-product are still being hashed out as we consult with our advisory board and industry connections. Bridging the main in-wallet decentralized VPN with the release of the browser extension will allow ITNS to be marketed to a vast number of new users, and will facilitate utility and purpose for the ITNS currency.
We will release a whitepaper for this product by our next monthly update (January 15, 2018) and should be well into development of the extension by that time.
EXCHANGE OUTREACH
We are continuing to reach out to exchanges inquiring about the possibility of listing Intense Coin on more exchanges. Alex and SlowGrowth of the Intense team have continued to work with great diligence to perform strategic outreach to exchanges.
We are happy to announce ITNS will soon be up for vote to be included on the Bit-Z exchange.
From December 18th to 25th, if we manage to get 1 million votes Bit-Z will add ITNS to the exchange. In addition, all user that participate in the voting process and voted for ITNS will share a purse of 2.5 million Intense distributed by Bit-Z internally. We will share the vote link as soon as it is available, and encourage you to go there and vote for ITNS!
It’s important to keep in mind the Intense Coin project did not hold an initial coin offering (ICO). Blockchain based projects are growing by the day, and so are the number of projects asking to be added to various exchanges. We are continuing to first seek exchanges that are interested in becoming partners with Intense by accepting the listing fee in ITNS rather than in Bitcoin (BTC). Progress continues to be made here. We will update you as soon as another listing has taken place.
We have been very satisfied with stocks.exchange so far. They have been professional and consistent. To mitigate transaction time and fees, stocks.exchange has provided us with a ITNS-ETH trading pair. Currently, the highest trading volume on stocks.exchange is on the ETH side.
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
Today, Intense Coin is listed at 0.00000048 BTC (48 satoshis) on stocks.exchange, and currently ranks #505 on Coin Market Cap. The Intense Coin P2P decentralized anonymous VPN is a very novel and revolutionary idea. We believe it has the framework, roadmap and team behind it necessary to make it a great success.
OVERALL
The Intense team and community continue to have very positive feelings moving forward about the product. The goal of this post and every future monthly post is to keep the community informed. We will continue to be fully transparent with our business plans and endeavors moving forward. We’ll see you for our next monthly update on January 15.
Until then, don’t hesitate to reach out and join the discussion!
