Jaxx – Dash server upgrades almost complete, 99% uptime

Jaxx_adiiorio on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dashpay/comments/63cann/jaxx_dash_server_upgrades_almost_complete_99/

Dear Dash community,
Many of you are aware that over the past couple of weeks the Jaxx dev team has been working to upgrade our Dash server capabilities. As we mentioned in a previous Reddit post, the surge of new Dash users on our platform and the sheer amount of Dash transactions we’re facilitating on a constant basis overwhelmed our previous configuration and has caused intermittent Dash service interruptions. During this time we’ve scrambled to compensate, redesign, and roll-out server upgrades. We’re almost finished with the Dash upgrades and are now confident stating that, should further service interruptions be required during the final stretch, we only expect them to last for minutes, rather than hours.
Now its very easy for questions to arise such as “why weren’t we prepared?”, or “why can’t we fix things quicker? These are very good questions, so I’d like to take this opportunity to provide more information about our operations & infrastructure. I’d also like to let you know more about our company and our team, and then hopefully answer any questions that might arise from this post.
Here’s a little about us and our product offering. Jaxx is a small, self-funded company that launched v1.0 of our wallet / interface just one year ago. Our overall mission at Jaxx is to create a unified interface that brings blockchain tech to the masses, and done in a way the allows users to be in full control of their digital assets. Wallet keys are created client-side (meaning they are created on your local device) and are never sent to or stored on our / any servers. Our code is auditable, its very simple to pair multiple devices, you don’t need to download the entire blockchain or even headers, and we provide a similar user experience across all our platforms. Currently we support 8 coins across 9 platforms (Android / iOS Mobile and Tablet, Linux, PC, Mac Desktop, & Chrome and Firefox extensions. With a single 12-word seed (backup phrase) you can derive the keys to any coin / token we carry, or will carry. In the future, encrypted messaging systems and tools such as identity layers will also be able to be derived from your single seed. All private keys are easily exported to other services and are always in your control. We currently are a team of 12 with everyone working full-time out of our Toronto office at Decentral – 325 Front Street West (except for 1 dev in Argentina). The breakdown of our team is 6 devs (up from 4 just last week) 1 on UI / UX / Graphics, 2 on Technical support, 2 on Operations & Admin, and myself (CEO). The typical workday is roughly 8:30-5:15 EST Monday – Friday. During this time we offer 4-hour targeted technical support response times via our support site. On weekends and off-hours you can expect the average response time to be 12-16 hours. Annie and Lean head our customer satisfaction team, so feel free to hit them up at Jaxx.io should you ever need support.
Multi-token wallets are still in infancy stage. Working with multiple Blockchains is extremely difficult and with client-side wallets there’s ton of moving parts and complexities that arise when tx need to be signed from the local device and communicated to back-end servers. You’ve got frequently changing Daemons, updated operating systems to account for, recurring indexing of chains, relay systems, third party libraries, API & RPC calls, user connection errors, slow user devices, etc. etc. that all lead to potential issues. For a single token wallet it can be very challenging. For a wallet that supports many platforms and handles many blockchains and technologies the complexity multiplies many-fold.
Its been a constant battle for us to balance server costs with our monthly server needs. Currently we spend approx $4000 / month on our servers and overall we spend >$50k / month to keep operations chugging along (salaries, rent, etc.). Income is realized via integrations such as Shapeshift where we receive a commission from SS for every “shift”. Currently income is roughly 25% of monthly costs. One important thing to take into account is that Jaxx is a free service that requires nothing in return from its users. We don’t charge anything to use Jaxx, we don’t require you to submit any personal information- not even email addresses, and we’re 100% advertisement free. Another important thing to mention is that 100% of our focus currently is on infrastructure improvements. Business development, further monitization efforts, internationalization, and user acquisition have been shelved for the time being as to focus solely on improving our infrastructure.
Jaxx is in the midst of common growing pains, something that all small, young companies face when taking things “to the next level”. What I can assure you, though, is that the result of these challenges will be great improvements to our infrastructure and that a more robust, scalable, faster, and reliable Jaxx will emerge. We’re confident that we will be able to answer the call for new and current Dash users looking for a simple way to manage, exchange, send & receive their Dash for many years to come.
In closing, I know I stated above that we don’t ask for anything from our users, however, I’d like to ask for something from the Dash community. We’re good people at Jaxx, providing a free, valuable service for the ecosystem. It would be really cool to know the majority of the community believes in what we’re doing. It could be by leaving a review on the app stores, standing up for us when we’re being trolled or even giving us positive shout-outs via social media channels. We love being supported be the community and we love supporting the communities and the technologies we believe have a lot to offer to the world.
Onward and upwards.
Anthony Diiorio
CEO & Founder, Jaxx
(p.s. We plan on submitting our latest v1.2 with Dash to the appstore soon. Finger’s crossed Apple’s policy has changed since our last attempt.)