This blog was originally published on Medium.

As a follow up to the Feb 2020 Monthly Update Video below are some additional details on our two priorities:

The year has been off to a tremendous start for The OAN. Over the past two months, we’ve continued to progress quickly and we’ve achieved multiple milestones towards our two key focuses for 2020; launching a consumer application that solves a vital platform problem and increasing the global awareness of Aion.

1) Building a Consumer-Facing App

At the current state of maturity in the blockchain ecosystem, we need to directly own our relationship with end-users in order to achieve product-market fit. If we rely solely on third parties, we cannot develop empathy for our audience and establish rich feedback loops. As such, we are scaling our product teams to develop a consumer-facing application, leveraging The OAN tech stack. This focus enables us to control our adoption strategy and showcase how The OAN can solve real problems within platform economies.

After months of product discovery, we’ve identified significant gaps in the accessibility and affordability of basic products and services for gig-workers. In the U.S, over 35% of the workforce participated in the gig-economy in 2019. Despite the massive growth of gig-workers and the platforms they operate on, basic services such as insurance, pensions, and credit remain difficult to access, unaffordable or ineffective. If the pace of this growth continues by 2027, 50% of the U.S workforce will be participating in gig-work. We believe that new bottom-up solutions focused on the individual can increase the financial mobility, security and well-being of this rising workforce.

You can read more about the gig-economy and our thoughts below:

• Fixing the Unintended Consequences of the Gig Economy
• History Repeats Itself For Gig Economy Workers — And Not In A Good Way
• Freelancing in America: 2019 — by Upwork

In order to build this solution, we have established and grown our product development team to eleven people including a mix of technical development, research, design, and product management. The product development team has been focused on product design and validation as we approach our private alpha testing this spring.

The marketing team has begun the new brand development for the app so we’re very excited to share initial branding elements with you soon!

2) Building Aion Awareness & Value

In order to scale the security of the network, Aion must continue on the path to establishing itself as a leading digital asset. Supporting and growing the value of Aion is critical to the sustainability of network operations. We have established a Growth team exclusively focused on Aion marketing, ecosystem development (exchanges, custodians, validators) and relationship management (stakers, miners, investors). This team, in collaboration with external partners, will grow global awareness and access to Aion.

A few recent milestones in the Aion ecosystem:

• New exchange listing with Bithumb Korea
• Over 120 million Aion staked with 40+ validators
• Additional Binance pairings of Aion-USDT & Aion-BUSD
• Blockchange Ventures doubled-down on its Aion investment
• Hired 3 new marketing team members
• Korean Telegram community grew from 194 to 2724 in February (1404%)
• WeChat Official account following grew from 147 to 1009 in February (686%)

Looking ahead, we’re very focused on our two key priorities that we can rally the team around and we’re excited to share more updates with the community throughout the year.