LIQUID update with QUOINE Chief Trading Officer Andre Pemmelaar

Hey guys. Good evening. Andre Pemmelaar, Chief Trading Officer here at QUOINE with an important update about the World Book and the LIQUID platform.

So we’ve had a lot of discussions with the tech team and a lot of deliberation around this and we have made the decision to extend the testing phase to the end of April — and I’d like to give you a little bit of background about why that is so that everything’s very clear for everyone.

So if you’ve been following my previous AMAs you will know that we rolled out the World Book beta in a kind of limited testing form, or more specifically we rolled out what we call the multi market orders (MMOs) on the QRYPTOS exchange, and that they were performing correctly but that we were surfacing issues around some of the services that connect to our matching engine.

Overall it seemed to be pretty good, but there was one issue in particular that we could not seem to pin down. This is a memory leak issue, so if you have a tech background you’ll be already aware of what that means, but for those of you who don’t, the way you can think of this is to think of it as you have a process running on your computer and it’s constantly consuming more and more memory even though it shouldn’t.

So we were aware of this and could see this happening in real-time, but we were not able to pin down the cause.
Finally we went back to one of our third-party vendors, so if you know much about QUOINE you will know that we develop almost all of our software internally, but we do have a few generic pieces on which we rely on third-party vendors.
In this case we have a well-known third party vendor who supplies their product to small, medium and large companies and it’s been in the tech world for quite some time, so it’s not a new product or anything like this. It’s a relatively stable product, but when we went to them and we explained the issues we were having, they did a deep dive into this and they came back to us and said, ‘Guys, look, sorry, this is an issue on our side. This is our bug.”

That meant that we had to properly communicate to them the issues, they had to go back and figure out what exactly was causing those issues and then finally push out a kind of a temporary fix for us, which they did a little over a week ago.
Then we had to take that fix and test it in our own pre-production testing environment. What we found was we actually had to do a considerable amount of upgrading of our pre-production testing environment just so we could really thoroughly check whether this issue had been addressed, which we did and we were able to come back to them and say, ‘Yes, we believe this is fixed, the way you’ve done it is correct.’

We then needed to take that and then integrate that back into their existing product. So that is not a small piece for them because they need to make sure that that does not interfere with anything else out there.

They went through this, what they call a certification process, that is still ongoing. We expected to hear from them that that might be completed today, as far as I know, when I left the office earlier tonight it had not been, but even if it does come back, you know it might come back tomorrow, we expect that at the latest, they’ll probably come back with a confirmation early next week.

So where does that leave us? Well assuming the worst case where they come back late or early next week, at that point we would take that and then push that to our production on QRYPTPOS, and probably shut down QRYPTOS for about fifteen to thirty minutes as we push this upgrade, and then we would enter it into what we are calling a stability testing period or a cooling period.

So this is a period where you don’t change anything you just monitor everything very, very carefully, and we do a lot of tests around that and because this is a memory error or memory leak, it’s not something that is so easy to test for. You have to monitor, you have to carefully watch for its emergence so the tech team has asked for about a week to a week and a half to do this, and we have decided to go ahead with that recommendation.

So, given early next week back from the vendor and on a week to a week and a half, that takes us to say the middle of the following week. At that point we will feel confident to take what we have on QRYPTOS and upgrade QUOINEX to have exactly the same systems and at that point we’ll enter into a very similar sort of stability testing period, or cooling period, where we do exactly the same thing but we’ll have some additional testing.

At that point we’ll be doing some quantitative testing around MMOs, so we’ll actually turn on periodically the world book and the MMOs in a limited fashion. We won’t inform you about that intentionally. We’ll turn them on for a half an hour to an hour to generate some proper testing data so that the quants on our team can make sure that what we think should be matching is matching, and that no other matches are happening and that it all adds up on the back end when we do our back end reconciliation.

Also there’s a considerable amount around load testing, so if you understand how everything works, and if you understand QUOINEX, you’ll know that QUOINEX is a very vibrant exchange one of the top BTC to fiat exchanges in the world, and we need to make sure that there are no issues around load here as we roll out the MMOs. So we’re taking a very careful approach to rolling this out.

We think that’s the right way to go. You know Mike has emphasized in so many different ways how important it is for us to play the long game, to emphasize quality. You know we’ve done a lot around that and security and we’re taking the same approach and rolling out the MMOs and the World Book beta.

You know, in a way I’m almost proud about how we have handled this on the tech side. We’ve constantly made the decision to prioritize long-term value and in this case, it is no exception.

So I hope the LIQUID community will be happy about this announcement, will understand why we’re doing this, and I want again once again to reiterate that the extended testing phase will mean that the World Book beta launch is now expected to happen at the end of April.

OK, alright guys thank you very much. Bye-bye.