The AKASHA project, a blockchain-based social network built on top of Ethereum and IPFS, has announced that its pre-alpha version will be launched this month.

According to the official blog post by Mihai Alisie, founder and CEO of AKASHA, during the first roll-out of the pre-alpha version, AKASHA team plans to test the basic core features including creating an identity, following a person, publishing an entry, commenting, bookmarking, voting, following a tag, creating a tag, among others.

“Depending on our findings in the next few weeks we will test the rest of the functionality in anticipation of the public alpha release,” the blog stated.

The stage 0 will be released in October 2016 with invitations based access to early alpha subscribers using an Ethereum test chain. The main goals of this stage include testing of dapp on major operating systems, observing the interaction between smart contracts and dapp components, identifying the potential flaws in the system design, among others.

Apart from this, stage 1 will be launched in the fourth quarter with a public alpha release. This stage will focus on signaling that AKASHA is a community driven project, tapping into the collective intelligence of the community, collecting and incorporating feedback from the users, among others.

The release is yet to be determined for stage 2 on core smart contracts breakdown, stage 3 on tokens, tests and integration experiments, stage 4 on development roadmap proposal and stage 5 on AKASHA v 1.0.