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Howdy friends,
Happy Friday! How we all doin’? Feelin’? We’re feelin’ fine for this rendition of our Friday Night Happy Hour 🍻. Sit back and grab a cold bevvie 🥤of your choice — as always we’re here to regale you with the latest from the world of the DeSo blockchain and the apps built on top of it 🪐. Shall we?
Bits on the menu tonight:
#2 Gas on the fire update ⛽🔥: The first DeSo state of the union 📜
While the core team tries to ramp up DeSo with its $50M Octane Fund for development teams and a new referral team, they’re also leveling up on communication w/ the community 🤝. Yesterday @nader and team published their first-ever ‘state of the union’ so-to-speak, dubbed the “State of Decentralized Social.” Via posts on the DeSo blog, the team notes these updates will provide regular check-ins re: DeSo, taking stock of progress made, and forecasting what’s on the near-term roadmap 🛣️.
This is a very welcome step — previously communication from the core team has come close to, if not in concert, with the actual launch of the updates in question. Now teams working on DeSo have more visibility, which can help them decide how (and what) to build. Further, by moving the updates that typically just happen in our feeds and bringing them onto the DeSo blog, these ‘State of Decentralized Social’ posts will also achieve what we have been doing in these confines for 6 months — i.e. they’ll make it easier for the general public to learn about what’s happening over here 📢. @nader posted on Twitter too. That post got some traction too, although we suspect that was probably mostly DeSo degens 😂.
Importantly, the team also owned up to some things they’ve admittedly not been ace’ing. No one said building a blockchain and managing the expectations of a rabid community of thousands of DeSo degens would be easy. The DeSo blog post notes that sourcing, organizing, and acting on community feedback is an area where the team hopes to improve:
Community management
We’ve been doing a very weak job of this. We have extremely active Discords and a highly-engaged community, and yet we don’t have anyone from the team with deep experience on how to manage it. This is especially painful when weird things are happening, like people scamming the referral program, because we need to be there to explain to people what’s happening and what we’re doing about it. Our hope is that we can hire someone very talented to fill this role full-time. If you can recommend anyone with deep community management experience please tag #DeSoFeedback on Diamond App. (read more here).
Ideally, long-term this also won’t be a problem at all. You know, because there won’t be a ‘core’ team to speak of if DeSo does achieve ‘true’ decentralization. In the interim, the core team aren’t the only ones tapping the community for feedback. Yesterday, @Krassenstein noted they were in touch w/ @zordon, creator of the Diamond App, to source and curate feedback on the app 💡.
The State of Decentralization blog post also went much deeper on what UX/UI upgrades we can expect to come to DeSo soon. For more on that… read on to the next section 👇👇👇.
#3 UX/UI drops: @nader and co outline the Q4 roadmap 🛣️
What’s been up on the UX/UI front? Nothing immediate. The team is taking their time to get referral round 2 right, likely a prudent move after the challenges faced by the first wave of referrals over the past week.
Further, in the “State of Decentralized Social” post, the team also spilled some more ink ✍️ on those aforementioned referral challenges:
One issue we experienced with the referral program rollout was that scammers in certain countries with click farms were able to game the anti-bot check. However, this was limited by a cap on the number of referrals, and so it didn’t result in significant issues (each person got a maximum of three referrals). After some discussion with other senior people in the crypto space who have implemented similar programs, it seems like solely whitelisting certain countries like the US, Canada, UK, etc… is generally how people solve this issue. It is unfortunate that this is what we have to do for now (read here).
The team did position these lessons as exactly that — lessons. If the first wave of referrals 🌊 was more of a proof of concept to “work out kinks” before a bigger second wave, then the money lost to scammers can have some ROI after all. We’re skeptical this was the plan all along, and a lot of money was spent, but hey, it’s cool to pivot along the way and frame things positively 🌈.
Moving on, what were some of the highlights from the outlined roadmap?
- “… several high-profile projects launching in the coming months. We will be introducing you to some of them soon.” 👀 (Wen @Gem???) 💎
- The transition to Proof-of-Stake is still a high priority. Last month @nader noted this would be done by EOY — tbd if that’s still the case 🔜
- A bridge to ETH!!! This is huge as a wrapped DESO coin would unlock the entirety of the ETH DeFi universe (i.e. anything you need a smart contract, which don’t exist on DeSo, to do. 💥
- For the blockchain nerds, a scaling roadmap (how to get supported TXN volume to the 5k posts per second that apps like Twitter support?) 📈
What else did the community take note of? Here’s @JasonDevlin w/ one take:
With no shortage of other line items, if you’re hungry for more, we recommend you take a gander at the blog post yourself. If you’d rather wait for Sunday morning and just ~vibe~ w/ a drink rn? That’s chill too 🙌.
#4 General absurdity: DeSo milestones and more 🏆
First and foremost? HUGE congrats to everyone involved, whether core or only peripherally, with the DeSo project. The blockchain hit 50M confirmed transactions yesterday! LFG 🎉🥳. Three cheers for DeSo! 🥂 And thanks @ProsperClout for keeping tabs on this milestone for the squad :) 🏆
Who else is keeping tabs on literally everything DeSo analytics wise? Well, he’s in about every issue of @BitsTODAY. His name is @tijn 🧙. His latest project? A dashboard tracking the efficacy of the ‘gas on the fire’ phase of DeSo that we’re currently in. Hopefully, the visibility into the progress that @tijn is building transparently and openly helps the team refine their process. Especially cuz things have gotten off to a rocky start … more on that in our last edition.
Something that was absurdly not dope that went down? A DeSo OG, @DOZ, was inexplicably blacklisted from the main DeSo nodes ❌. The ability to ‘blacklist’ (when you search their handle, you get a 404) users from apps that run on a ‘decentralized’ social blockchain is … a touch strange to begin with… but why certain users get shadowbanned at times is even more opaque. Is it simply a mistaken click? Something else? We don’t know why @DOZ was blacklisted, but the community reproach to the node operators was so strong and swift that the profile has thankfully been reinstated 🙏.
What else is up on DeSo? Well, NFT hype is still strong, and folks are amping for the @PixelPirates launch (wen???). We’re all feeling a little too landlocked around here, ya feel? Need the plundering to start 😂🌊☠️.
Last but not least? @BitPerks, which launches today, looks TRULY absurd. Absurdly dope that is ✨🔮. Check out their preview trailer here, as well as what legend @HPaulson had to say about his test run below:
Cheers for joining y’all! Hope you had yourself some fun while getting informed too. Enjoy the weekend. 🤙
@BitsTODAY
