Fast forward to the present and our cryptocurrency exchange has been approved as a viable project moving forward. Before we begin development, however, it is important for us to understand more about blockchains and smart contracts and to determine the advantages and disadvantages of developing on some blockchains instead of others. As of now most decentralized exchanges are built on the Ethereum blockchain, however, there may be other viable options. We have also started setting up our development environment by configuring tools that we will use to track progress and improve development. Some of these are but not limited to: Github, Jira, VS Code, and Microsoft Teams. We understand that the scope of our project is massive and there will be a lot of factors to consider and weigh, however, we are confident that we will be able to develop a decentralized exchange that can work more efficiently than current models. Most of us within the group have not spent a lot of time – if any – developing with solidity – crypto dev language – and thus have a lot to learn after our planning stages are over. I look forward to this idea coming to fruition in the coming weeks.