Dear Cloak community,

Today we are proud to have a roundup of news, timelines and progress to announce.

As you are well aware, the Enigma open source release did not happen mid September as it was planned to. Cashmen's step back triggered miscommunication between the development and communication team. This caused us more difficulties than we anticipated and forced us to reshuffle our priorities and readjust our focus. Our initial plan was to have an engineering team ready before releasing Enigma as open source. We realized it would introduce more complexity and the best course of action is for Razor to finish the release before stepping back and moving our focus towards onboarding new engineers. This will instead be done during the testnet phase which will foster onboarding and sharing knowledge on an collaborative environment.

Razor is part of the team that started Cloak with the mission and commitment to bring to the world a truly technological breakthrough around anonymous cryptocurrency. He has played a major role in the development and success of Cloak and we cannot thank him enough for his dedication, passion and motivation he has given over the last 3 years. The Enigma open source release will mark the successful completion of his endaevor as well as an end of his direct involvement in the project and the beginning of a new journey.

We updated our website and more importantly our roadmap and team composition to reflect these upcoming changes. The main part for this quarter is not only to open source Enigma, but also ensuring it is battle tested and correctly reviewed by different entities / members of our growing community. We are planning to have a bug bounty program, and we are also glad to announce we have established a relationship with an IT security firm to conduct a software code audit.

The most important part for the next quarter (Q1 2018) will be to expand our team. Attracting and retaining top talents is key which is why a developers fund will be created for that purpose.
This is a critical part and we could not be more happy to announce that Deepend will be joining the Cloak team. Deepend has more than 20 years of software engineering experience, a strong expertise in C++ and is a firm believer in blokchain technologies. As a natural team leader, he will help us prioritize, strategize Cloak developement and oversee the recruiting process. You can expect to start seeing Deepend involved during the testnet phase.

We have worked incredibly hard to get to this point today and we hope you find this information helpful and that it provides you with a transparent and clear insight of what to expect in the weeks to come.

The Cloak Team