Today marks an important expansion of Gliph with the release of Gliph Marketplace: a new way to buy and sell locally using cash and the Bitcoin digital currency.

Our team has brought together secure messaging, transaction workflow and digital payments into an awesome new P2P transaction experience we call Deal Flow.

• Deal Flow helps you stay focused on completing a deal by integrating messaging and useful push notifications into the buying and selling experience. Gliph Marketplace has privacy built-in eliminating the distraction of “burner” phone numbers and “email gateways.”
• Deal Flow saves you time with intuitive listing status updates. For example, when someone is ready to buy something from you, the status moves from “Q&A” to “Offer Submitted.” Deal status updates ensure you have the most recent information so you can make the best decision with your time.
• Deal Flow earns you money faster by making digital payments an integrated part of the Gliph Marketplace experience. Once you’ve accepted an offer, paying for the item using Bitcoin is handled in a single tap.

You can view a complete video demo of Gliph Marketplace and Deal Flow here:

Gliph Marketplace Deal Flow on Android

Initial Release
Gliph Marketplace and Deal Flow are initially available on Gliph’s Android and mobile web applications. Desktop Web and iPhone versions are coming soon.

While waiting for the iOS update, iPhone users may visit https://gli.ph/m in mobile Safari to start using Gliph marketplace now.

Items available in Gliph Marketplace (like this Playstation 4) may be viewed on the Desktop Web right now.

Becoming a Seller in Gliph Marketplace
At the onset of Gliph Marketplace, our team is personally interviewing and approving every seller on the platform. You can apply to become a seller using this form.

We’re also reviewing each new listing prior to publishing in Gliph Marketplace because:

1. We want to make improvements on Gliph Marketplace as quickly as possible. We can gather feedback and respond to it faster by limiting how many sellers are using the system at first.
2. Gliph Marketplace is not a dark market. It is intended to be well-lit and safe place to buy and sell stuff. Especially at the beginning, we want to make sure people’s first experiences are good ones.

One of the results of this will limit the selection of items available in the Marketplace at first. So if you don’t see something you like nearby please be patient. :)

We are planning to approve new sellers regularly.  At first, we are focused on people in the San Francisco, New York City and Portland, Oregon regions. However, we’re looking for people who are knowledgeable about Bitcoin and are happy to accept it as an alternative to cash so please apply regardless of your location. We encourage you to apply.

Conclusion
We are very excited to be bringing this product to market today. It represents a culmination of creative ideas, privacy, technology and embrace of Bitcoin that our entire team is proud of.

We acknowledge we have a lot left to do and over the coming weeks we will be working hard to bring the remaining clients online, add or improve features and find and fix issues. Thank you for your support and feedback! Hit us up at username ‘support’ or at our support email address support at gli.ph.

Today, we’re excited to welcome a new member to the Gliph team, who will help us maintain and improve our customer support, Levi Luke. Gliph customer support runs the gamut of resolving problems with logging in to identifying and tracking bugs that require development work to fix.

Levi distinguished himself as a user of Gliph first, including creating the intro video for Gliph’s desktop web app. In learning more about Levi, we found he brings a variety of technical and media expertise to the team.

Levi has been helping out at Gliph for a little while now, and we feel like it is time to recognize his work.  Next time you are in the Gliph app, please consider saying hello and welcoming Levi to the team. You can simply send Support a message in-app, or you can reach him at support@gli.ph.

Please join us in welcoming Levi! You can say hello by sending a message to Gliph Support.

Bitcoin has been Returned to the Gliph iOS Application
We’ve just released version 1.90 of the Gliph app, which was approved by Apple for the App Store late this last week. The release restores the ability to send Bitcoin between Gliph users, and adds the new capability of paying outside the Gliph network using QR codes.

New Desktop Web Application Now Available
Gliph now supports all modern web browsers with a brand new desktop web application. Whether you’re on a tablet, laptop or desktop computer you can now take advantage of everything Gliph has to offer.

Revamped Android Application
We’ve completely rebooted our Android application and it now stands in near-parity with our iOS application. We’re particularly pleased to bring this long awaited update to the Android platform.

The update includes a refreshed look, Secure Group Messaging support, Profile photos and a brand new QR code scanner. You can now use Gliph on Android to spend Bitcoin from your Coinbase or Blockchain wallet outside the Gliph network.

Introducing Secure Group Messaging
Gliph now supports secure group messaging across all of its existing clients and its new Desktop Web application. Group messaging offers the same data impermanence technology as Gliph’s existing 1-to-1 conversations.

Privacy Policy Update
With all of these product updates, we also took the time to make the first update to Gliph’s Privacy Policy since we first got started. Our entire team stands behind this policy, and it served as the basis for many of the features that Gliph continues to offer.

We improved the Privacy Policy by focusing on its readibility and clarifying language on how we handle personal data. We have a blog that explains every change in great detail, and encourage everyone to have a look.

Apple, Bitcoin and Gliph

The call from Apple Worldwide Developer Relations came just before Thanksgiving last year. Without much elaboration as to why, Apple told us the Gliph iOS app would need to remove the ability to send Bitcoin or risk being pulled from the App Store.

That event kicked off months of publicity in reaction to our blog post on the state of Bitcoin in the App Store and Google Play. The press feasted on the controversy of Apple’s behavior and Gliph became something of a poster-child for Bitcoin’s fight for mainstream acceptance.

If you wiped away the media hype, and focused on the appeal letter we made public, you would find the real reason why Apple should not have made that choice in the first place:

“By inhibiting the creation of Bitcoin apps Apple holds innovation back from the world. We are witnessing the dawn of a massive technological innovation. The potential impact of virtual currencies stretches further than any company or platform.”

At Gliph, we feel Bitcoin is a transformative technology. We also love developing software for the iOS platform. It was challenging to understand how this company we respected deeply would rule against Gliph and Bitcoin.

When Apple unveiled updates to its App Store Review Guidelines to allow “approved virtual currencies” at WWDC 2014, we became optimistic Apple had thoughtfully considered the language of our appeal.

Gliph’s new approval confirms Apple is now allowing apps featuring Bitcoin transactions in the App Store. We’re proud to have taken the lead in pushing for this important change.

For more information about the new version of Gliph for iOS, please check out this blog entry.

Introduction Section

Changed: “Your Privacy is our Mission” to “Introduction”
Reason: We felt this was too splashy. This document is an outline of privacy considerations for Gliph users.

Removed: “Your Facet information is, by default, kept private.”
Reason: Many users have given us feedback that it is too confusing to see people as Gliph’s only. In our own use of Gliph, we notice that in the great majority of cases, people do want to be seen as either their First Name or Pseudonym, rather than a symbol-based username. It is just much easier to recognize who is who.

For this reason, during sign-up and while editing profile we will set certain facets to Public by default if we feel it dramatically improves the overall Gliph experience. We will still provide you the option to set them to Private before they are saved the first time, or at any time after initial setup.

Removed: “We provide the platform; you have the control.”
Reason: We don’t feel like this adds information to the privacy policy.

Changed: “How safe is your information on Gliph? We encrypt all of your Facet information and Gliph messages using the AES-256 cryptography algorithm and a private key generated from your secret password. The AES-256 encryption algorithm is the only one approved by the National Security Agency (NSA) for transmitting information classified as Top Secret. [NSA Suite B Cryptography]”

to:

“We encrypt all private Facet information and Gliph messages using the AES-256 cryptography algorithm and a key generated from your secret password. ”

Reason:  We believe when used properly, AES-256 is a solid cryptography algorithm to protect information. However, revelations around the NSA’s surveillance program degraded trust in the agency and therefore we do not wish to highlight their approval of the algorithm in our Privacy Policy.

Since we’re discussing this passage, we also want to share more information about  how personal data is protected in Gliph.

First some terminology:

• Facet – A piece personal information saved in your Gliph account like your First Name or Phone Number. You choose the privacy and discoverability settings on each of your Facets and you can choose to share a Facet with other Gliph users.

• Private Facet – A Facet that is only displayed to other Gliph connections or Groups you have explicitlychosen to share them with.
• Discoverable Facet – A Facet that is not in open display to the public, but may be discovered and associated with your Gliph account if someone knows to search for it.
• Public Facet – A Facet that may be openly displayed to anyone on the Internet visiting your Gliph profile or to a logged-in Gliph user that views your profile.
• Account Facet – A Facet that is accessible to Gliph’s system (and administrators), but not other users unless explicitly shared, set to Public or Discoverable. Current Account Facets are your personal gliph and your email address.

Saying something is encrypted does not necessarily mean it is being stored securely. Here are some more details about the security you can expect from these different privacy settings:

• Private Facets are encrypted and may only be decrypted in conjunction with a key generated from your secret password. You may enforce complete privacy from Gliph administrators via an optional setting that removes the ability to reset the password on your account. (See our blog on Lockdown Privacy Protection).
• Discoverable, Private Facets are encrypted but also hashed. If Gliph’s database was compromised, Facets with this setting may be less secure than Non-Discoverable, Private Facets.
• Public Facets are encrypted, however their encryption keys are stored in plaintext. This means if Gliph’s database was compromised, these Facets would not be stored securely. The Facet content must be accessible without your password. Therefore, it is necessary for Gliph to have access to the encryption key for that Facet.
• Shared Facets are encrypted, and the Facet key is shared with the other user or users. That Facet key is then encrypted again using a connection specific key. The security of Private Facets you share depends on both you and the other party keeping your passwords secret and may be strengthened by having all parties turn on Lockdown Privacy Protection.

To summarize, Gliph not only takes measures to protect its database, it has specific additional measures to protect the data. How you use the service and interact with others will affect how securely we can protect your information.

Removed: “Please review our privacy policy below. We worked hard to make it simple and understandable and we will continue to improve upon it. Let us know if you any questions or suggestions.”
Reason: These words do not add useful information to the Privacy Policy.

Gliph Privacy Mission Statement Section

Changed:

• We do use trusted service providers (such as Mixpanel) to help provide us with information about the use of our services, but only after anonymization. Our trusted service providers cannot see your Facet information.

to:

• We do use trusted service providers to assist in sending email and to help provide us with information about the use of our services. Our trusted service providers do not have access to your private facet information. Your email address is an exception; it may be shared to assist in sending you email from Gliph.

Reason: We removed the reference to Mixpanel, because the example is likely not familiar to most people. We also changed language about how information is shared with trusted service providers:

The idea of a Trusted Third Parties may not be familiar to everyone. It is generally a service that assists Gliph in getting something done. For example, sending email is a bigger concern than it may seem. We rely on a Trusted Service Provider to help deal with delivery and spam issues.

We also removed the word “anonymization” because that word means different things to different people and is better explained under “Information We Collect” below.

Changed:

• We keep your Facet information and Gliph messages encrypted by AES-256 with a private key generated by the password only you know. The only exception is your email address.

to:

• We keep your Facet information and Gliph messages encrypted with a key generated by a password only you know.

Reason:  We cleaned up the language to clarify and avoid repetition. We removed the sentence about Email address because as clarified above, even Public Email Address Facets technically are encrypted.

Privacy Policy Section

Changed: [Last Updated Date]

Changed:

1. Information You Provide to Us
   We receive and store only the information you provide to us, including the Facet information you choose to add. Information you provide as Facet information may include your name, email address, Twitter handle, website and other information. We store your Facet information on our servers and encrypt them as described below (See “How We Protect Information”). Except for your email address, we cannot see your Facet information unless you choose to share them with us and/or make them public. You can choose not to add certain Facet information, but this may limit your ability to take advantage of certain services or features we offer.

to:

1. Information You Provide to Us
   We receive and store only the information you provide to us, including the Facet information you choose to add. Information you provide as Facet information may include your name, email address, Twitter handle, website address, profile photo, and other information. We store your Facet information on our servers and encrypt them as described below (See “How We Protect Information”). Except for your email address, we cannot see your Facet information unless you choose to share them with us and/or make them public. You can choose not to add certain Facet information, but this may limit your ability to take advantage of certain services or features we offer.

Reason: We plan on adding optional Profile Photos to Gliph, We will be treating these types of photos as Facet information.

Changed:

Other Users
Please keep in mind that any information you make public on Gliph will be accessible by other users and may be used by them. However, you control the Facet information you keep private and you decide what you choose to share with others.

to:

Other Users
Please keep in mind that any information you make public or discoverable on Gliph will be accessible by other users and may be used by them. However, you control the Facet information you keep private and you decide what you choose to share with others.

Reason: We wanted to clarify that if you set a Facet to discoverable, it may be indirectly accessible to other Gliph users. For example, if you want to be found by your friends on Facebook we must set your Facebook Facet to discoverable which will allow friends to make a connection between your Facebook identity and Gliph identity.

Changed:

How We Protect Information

We use a variety of security measures, including encryption and authentication tools to make security a priority. Your Facet information and Gliph messages are encrypted by AES-256 with a private key. Only you know your password; we do not. Besides your email, we don’t have access to your Facet information or Gliph messages.

To:

How We Protect Information

We use a variety of security measures, including encryption and authentication tools.

Reason: We shortened this paragraph because the language is unnecessarily repetitious introduction to this section.

Conclusion

These changes allow us to continue to protect personal data and communications. They also clarify language so it is accurately representing our user experience. We hope this entry has been helpful and appreciate hearing your feedback: privacy@gli.ph.

The Blockchain Awards are being put on by the Bitcoin Foundation and Blockchain.info, and will be presented in Amsterdam at the upcoming Bitcoin 2014 conference. The awards cover a variety of categories, including Most Insightful Journalist, and Most Impactful Charity.

Nicolas Cary, CEO of Blockchain, explains that “with these awards we hope to take a moment and reflect on the amazing contributions from the Bitcoin community. We want to honor the exceptional quality, leadership, and technical innovation we see every day.”

Update: Mycelium Bitcoin Wallet for Android won this award! We think Mycelium team is also doing some really cool things and congratulate them on the win. The other finalist was Airbitz.

We’re excited about improving peer-to-peer transactions and providing a great platform for identity. In following this passion, we’ve iterated on Gliph by adding new features and changing the way the system works.

Some of the additions were in response to insights along the way. For example when we learned that  the majority of Craigslist deals were handled via email and lacked privacy, we built Cloaked Email to make that a better experience. Later, we realized Bitcoin would be a a fantastic way to close transactions and built in simple Bitcoin transfer into Gliph secure messaging.

We’ve learned a lot about email and believe communication can be faster and better than that. GliphMe‘s secure and private instant channel is the first of our efforts here.

Adding these capabilities over time caused a build-up of technical debt. And like any debt, it can not be ignored. But unlike some debt, it wasn’t the type of thing that could be paid off slowly over time. As a result, this re-factor was focused on two areas of the Gliph platform:

the backend application and the iOS application. On the backend, we re-worked the API which now allows us to build the Android, iPhone and web clients more consistently. On the iPhone client, we’ve changed how data flows internally. To get very specific, we’ve moved to reactive programming, making Gliph more event-driven and providing us a more responsive user experience to work with.

Because you can only make so many major changes at once, we did not focus on updating the Android app to leverage the new API during this project. However, now that the backend is completed, documented and working, we will be tackling this as well. We’ll announce the release of the iOS app as soon as it has been approved.

This release will have few outward facing changes on the web, Android or iPhone. However, it did involve a great deal of effort from our team and has set the Gliph platform for a solid march forward.

Please join me in congratulating the Gliph engineering group on completing this challenging and important development cycle. Say hello on Twitter.

Gliph subsequently opened a Seed investment round led by Silicon Valley veteran Timothy Draper. Tim served as a mentor to Gliph during our work at Boost and has personally played an important role in bringing services like Skype, Baidu and Hotmail to the world.  Gliph also raised money from Portland’s Rogue Venture Partners, the Boost Bitcoin Fund, and follow-on investment from the Portland Seed Fund. You can learn a bit more about Gliph’s fundraising on its page on AngelList.

With increased energy and newfound support from Silicon Valley, our team began looking at a move to the San Francisco bay area. After much consideration, we chose the city of San Mateo, which lies between Palo Alto and San Francisco. San Mateo is home of a growing innovation center made up of Draper University and Hero City.

Gliph was founded in Portland, Oregon, and deciding to relocate our headquarters was not easy. However, our team is committed to helping people transact with their peers in a trusted, efficient and delightful way. We feel this relocation will help position Gliph for its best chance of success.

We want to thank Adam, Brayton, Ross and all the founders from class 2 of Boost VC for the wonderful summer session. We’re excited to have new partners in this venture, and most importantly, we look forward to taking Gliph to new heights from our new home in California.

You’ll notice on the home page that we feature a screenshot of a Gliph messaging conversation that includes a picture message. Currently, one of Gliph’s founder’s cats is featured. We would like to open this photo to the Gliph community. For the next 10 days, we’ll take submissions of photos. After that, we’ll choose a selection to include in regular rotation on the home page. Please note, we favor cat photos.

How to submit your photo: Send the photo to the Support Gliph with the message “photo contest.”

Terms and conditions: You keep rights to the photo, and grant Gliph the right to use of the photo on the front page of Gliph’s website.

Gliph Co-Founder Nicholas Asch and Gliph iOS Developer Joakim Fernstad in our freshly laid out booth at Bitcoin 2013. (It featured beanbag chairs and foliage)

The company first got involved when your blogger and co-founder (Rob Banagale) accepted a panelist spot on the Law Enforcement and Financial Privacy track at the conference. At this time our development team was working feverishly on the first release of the Bitcoin integration into Gliph.

Wanting to do something special for the earliest and most core Bitcoin adopters, we created custom Bitcoin branded merchandise for the event. This included hats and hooded sweatshirts embroidered with a great looking Bitcoin logo. We sold these for Bitcoin at our booth.

We did our release on Friday, May 17th, which included a feature article in PandoDaily. That article was written by Erin Griffith and included our news of joining the Boost VC startup accelerator.

We had a few media events scheduled for the conference as well. On Friday morning, Rob did an interview with Adam Levine of the Let’s Talk Bitcoin podcast. The discussion covered a wide range of topics, and if you’re a fan of Gliph you will probably appreciate some of the details shared in the interview.

Rob was on a media blitz of sorts and also had a chance to sit with Scott Morgan of BTC Journal on Saturday morning. A portion of that interview, which covers “The Future of Bitcoin,” includes our take on what Bitcoin needs to do to be successful:

You can view a variety of other media from the conference, including video of many of the panels and speakers on Youtube.

We decided to expand our involvement in the conference when it became clear we would be able to launch the first Bitcoin-ready Gliph feature set on the first day of the conference. We did this in two ways: we secured an exhibitor’s booth and also planned for one of our iOS developers, Joakim, to participate in the Bitcoin hackathon.

Joakim’s project was focused on using low-power bluetooth as a discovery mechanism for people around you who are capable of trading bitcoin. He went up on-stage and demo’d his work on Sunday under the guise of “Gliph Labs.”  It was really cool to see what he was able to get going in such a short period of time. We see some great applications for his hack in Gliph’s future. Sourcecode from this hack is currently available in our Github.

One of the funnier things that happened for our team was the delivery of a nearly naked mannequin to our exhibitors booth. We had rented only the torso to show off the Bitcoin jackets, but were instead treated to a full-sized athletic looking dude wearing only underwear. We hastily got a pair of shorts from our hotel room and got them on before many conference attendees had showed up.

Another interesting thing about the Bitcoin 2013 conference was the Comic Wow! convention going on at the venue at the same time. There were many people dressed up in cosplay costumes, including a full sized, highly detailed Iron Man costume, an Alien costume and many, many more. Seeing them run up next to Bitcoin enthusiasts was pretty funny. @thebitcoinwife got up close to the mannequin before we got the shorts on.

Overall, the team had a great time at the event and we hope to attend next year as well. It was a terrific place to launch the first version of Gliph with Bitcoin!