A Shrimpy Year in Review

2018 has come to a close. After 12 months of a cold crypto winter, some of us in the north are reminded of this fact every time we leave our homes. Our faces hurt, just like how it hurts whenever we look at our portfolio.

Thankfully, not all things in 2018 were bad. Shrimpy was launched as a desktop application on January 20th, 2018!

That’s right folks, a desktop application. One which was downloaded to your personal computer and ran 24/7 if you wanted to constantly rebalance.

What is this, the backdrop to a sushi restaurant? Nope, just the first version of the Shrimpy application. Powered by the minds of two engineers, our initial release would haunt the dreams of any sane UI/UX designer.

Subscribing to the iterative process, we took less than a month to release this first version of Shrimpy. It was a desktop application that people would download to their computers. What this meant was users needed to leave the application running 24/7 if they wanted continuous data and rebalancing.

We quickly realized this model was a mistake!

Nobody wanted to download an application. I mean nobody. If we asked all of our users to join a basketball league, we wouldn’t have enough players to make a full team. People were scared of downloading crypto applications from the internet. Even Microsoft would repeatedly ask people trying to download Shrimpy if they were sure they weren’t downloading a virus. Which certainly didn’t strike confidence into anyone trying to use the application.

After realizing our huge mistake, we spent the next two months rewriting the application to function as a website. On March 25th, 2018, Shrimpy was re-released as a website application.

This is when we knew we hit the spot. Shrimpy started taking off quickly.

Ok, I’ll admit this design wasn’t great. Sure, 10x better than the last interface, but still not the best. Nobody in crypto wants to open an app that makes them feel like they are splashing around in a blood bath. After all, it’s the crypto space and everyone was dealing with enough red this year. We had enough!

It was time to hire a designer. We couldn’t keep going down this path. Someone needed to save us from ourselves.

With an axe in hand, Sumaya joined the Shrimpy team and started chopping up the design. Putting it back together as a fine Mahogany desk, sanded to perfection. The design started coming together.

With the feature development, redesigns, and quick iterations, we were able to turn Shrimpy into an application everyone loved using. It felt magical. Shrimpy began evolving into something that everyone could feel proud to share with their friends. It turned into something that changed the way we all participated in the cryptocurrency community.

The Shrimpy team has their work cut out for them in the next year. The feature roadmap is endless, the growth plan is aggressive, and partnerships are in development. Each of these areas will facilitate our global adoption strategy into the next bull market.

I said global adoption.

Our goal is to target every institution, crypto user, and business.

Shrimpy will become the universal layer on top of exchanges which facilitates the emergence of new platforms. Our trading engine will be released to the public so everyone in the industry can start building products on our innovative solutions. No more hassling with each exchange, trying to figure out each of their unique quirks and how you can deal with them. We will do it for you. Accelerating the adoption of trading applications will improve the liquidity and stability of the market. Anyone and everyone can get into crypto quicker and manage their assets through our unified trade automation layer. A layer that will generalize exchange access and integration. Stop struggling, start using Shrimpy to accelerate your development.

Originally published at blog.shrimpy.io on January 8, 2019.