🎛 Manager Updates: Token exchange, unique tokens (NFTs), support for multiple languages & the addition of Trezor Wallet
By: Richard Burton
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Startup, Ethereum, Bitcoin

We really appreciate the work StevenJNPearce did on this.

🐱 Crypto Kitties, Unique Tokens or “Non-Fungibles”

We love our kitties and really dislike the acronym NFT (Non-Fungible Token). Crypto-assets are already confusing enough. When I first heard the term fungible I thought the topic of conversation had moved to mushrooms. 🍄

We need to use clear language to help people grasp these concepts and acronyms seriously suck. We like the term collectible but that doesn’t work well for tokens that represent debt, insurance and options. We have decided to call them Unique Tokens. Although the community understands what NFTs are, our customers do not. People understand the concept of unique tokens a lot more easily. They grasp the underlying concept quickly and see how exciting these unique digital assets are.

A huge thank you to Palevoo and Igorline for their time and effort. We connected with them through Gitcoin and they have been great.

🗣 Managing Multiple Languages

The Balance Community has translated Manager into 🇪🇸 Spanish, 🇩🇪 German, 🇷🇺 Russian and 🇮🇹 Italian.

We have open issues on GitHub for 🇰🇷 Korean, 🇯🇵 Japanese, 🇵🇹 Portuguese, 🇵🇱 Polish, 🇧🇷 Brazilian and 🇨🇳 Mandarin. If you would like to help us translate the product into your native language, please get in touch.

💻 Contributors & Collaborators

Now that Balance Manager is open source, we welcome any open source contributions from the community. If you would like to collaborate with us and earn money, we would love to work with you. We are using Gitcoin to help us attract and reward remote collaborators. As Gitcoin matures and Balance starts to generate free cashflow we plan to deploy a lot of capital very quickly to help us design the best user interfaces for promising protocols. If you want to earn tokens, check out: https://gitcoin.co/profile/balance-io

Forgive the typo. Gitcoin needs to pull in my correct spelling of the word #BUIDL.

🤓 How can I help if I am not an engineer?

The biggest non-technical things we need help with are in community buidling. The only moat in the world of open economic protocols is the community of people who believe in the code. We need to widen that moat as quickly as possible as people start to move their assets out of closed source banks and into open source ones.

Never fork with the community.

If I forked Bitcoin and called it Burtoncoin, no one of you would support it. In the open source world the community has to be earned; it cannot be bought. That is what makes this movement so hard for traditional entrepreneurs, economists, bankers, politicians, investors & journalists to understand. Economic protocols are digital religions that people can believe in and benefit from.

A lot of the discussion goes on in our forum. We would love to welcome you to the Balance Community: https://spectrum.chat/balance

We really need help with our Clothing. If you can help us, we would love to talk.

📈 Better Beta Data

Nearly all of the customer support requests we have received have fallen into two categories: feature requests and data issues. We are working incredibly hard on getting clean data out of Ethereum. It turns out that counting all of the tokens within an Ethereum wallet is not an easy task. We are partnering with The Graph Protocol to get an open interface for token balances specified and shipped as quickly as possible.

We also have lots of issues with the price data. This is a really hard problem to solve. Lots of tokens trading in lots of places makes it hard to find a good provider. Lots of people refer to CoinMarketCap.com but they have a bunch of issues. We hope that a combination of efforts in this space from projects like Messari and MakerDAO will help us improve our pricing information.

When we are happy with the quality of our data sources, Manager will finally lose the Beta tag and we will call it a 1.0.

😍 Thank you for all of your help

We really appreciate all of the people who are helping us buidl Balance. Your friendly tweets, feature ideas, thoughtful links and recommendations really motivate us.

Onwards 🖖