Hi. And welcome to the first development log, detailing the journey and process of re-building the Copernic Space Platform and making it even better. My name's Liam, I'm the new Technical Director & CTO of Copernic Space and I'm really excited to be able to bring you these updates on our platform. Since the founding of Copernic Space, we've prided ourselves on our open standards & ethos, however we haven't been as proactive with our communications when it comes to product development. At the start of Q2 this year, we decided it was time to overhaul our product and usher in a new development period, and we figured that we needed to communicate with you every step of the way to ease any anxiety or fears around changes in product. "What's going to happen to my artwork?", "Why can't I log into the platform anymore?", "Is Copernic Space going away/dead?" are just some of the questions we knew we'd receive if we didn't communicate things properly to you; and we never do things half-hearted.

So, let's have a chat about what's happening with the platform, the marketplace, and how you can stay involved while we're conducting this overhaul.

Why are we doing this?

The cliche, PR-focused answer would be that "we pride ourselves on creating the best experience for our users and taking a period to reset & rebuild will give everyone the best experience in the long term".

However, we are always going to be honest with our users and followers. The truth is that the development standards in the crypto world have moved incredibly fast in the 4 years since Copernic started and there have been a few areas that we haven't been able to match the pace. Some of the technology & frameworks we were using have been surpassed by competing standards and after realising the amount of work it would take to try and slot some changes into our existing workflow, it was clear that just starting again would be the simplest, most efficient and best thing to do.

No more bugs.
No more failed transactions.
No more slow load times.

Yes, it means there's going to be a period where our users will feel a bit of a pinch and it's going to hurt us in the short-term, but we feel that in the long-term, this decision is going to pay for itself multiple times.

If you've got any questions about what's happening to your assets, where you can view them (now that we've disabled the old marketplace), and when we'll be back online, view the FAQ. This page is updated frequently and will give you the most up-to-date picture and recommendations.

What's been happening recently?

Well, the biggest priority was for me to get over to the EU and meet my new team. I've only been working with Copernic since late December, and originally I was working in the Research & Innovation team, which wasn't heavily involved in product. Around April I started having some conversations with the board at Copernic and started discussing my suggestions for what we should do next. Because of the work I've done in startups around Australia, and also in the banking & decentralised science industries, almost from the start I'd been advocating that we take a look at conducting an overhaul of everything.

I've spent the last 2 months living in Europe and working closely with our CEO, Grant, as well as other members of our team - and I think we've come up with an approach that is going to work really well and get your assets back to you as quickly as possible.

In short:

1. We've started to piece together some new team members for this stage of product development
2. A concrete plan for development milestones, features & milestones has been crafted & agreed upon by our team
3. Development started back in May on the new platform, and we've already conducted some short previews on our Discord community. We're getting ready to open up the new platform to a very early "beta testing preview" where our passport holders and payload owners can test out the current development versions

What's the format of these updates going to look like?

Every week, I'll be letting you guys know about how things are going. We don't want to give away too many things too early, but we'll be giving you a behind-the-scenes look at what product development looks like at one of the most exciting and forward-thinking companies in the aerospace industry. Decisions around tech stack will also be conveyed to you guys, and occasionally we'll be showing off some new features (but if you want to get the best chance to see things fresh, join our discord community and jump onto our Twitter spaces).

How can I stay up to date?

You can sign up to this newsletter with just an email, allowing us to send these updates straight to your inbox. Also follow us on Twitter to see everything we're saying.