To Make a Universe
Thoughts about ecosystem development & the Shimmer dApp space
Observers floating in the void before the big bang would have sounded similar to a few rascal degens living in the Iota discord’s meme channel:
Fortunately for them, it turns out the answer is right about now. With the release of the Shimmer beta, projects will be pushing the limits of its features. With the following Shimmer mainnet, smart contract functionality, and a little bit of luck, we will see an explosion of dApps hurling themselves into the Shimmer universe.
The job of ecosystem development within the Iota Foundation is to make this bang as loud as possible.
For transparency, I thought I’d take a second to explain this effort and my involvement in it.
Note: everything here is from my own point of view and doesn’t necessarily reflect the opinions of other within the Iota Foundation or even in the Touchpoint crew. It’s also very much a joint effort and I’m just one of many trying to build the best ecosystem possible.
A bit about myself
Adam / @Schpoopel here. My first interaction with cryptocurrency was installing — and subsequently forgetting — the Bitcoin mining software on my computer in 2010. I’m not sure it even fully synced to the network.
It wasn’t until 7 years later that I purchased my first bitcoin.
During this time I was schlepping around the globe as an army aviation officer. After nearly a decade of this, I went back to university. Yet, this weird hobby with magic internet money kept pulling at my attention…
I was keeping an ear to the themes of crypto, playing around in different ecosystems, trading my way up (…and down), minting NFTs, falling for the odd scam, and thinking about decentralization and the difference between innovation and vaporware. Eventually I gave in and focused on crypto full-time.
My first professional assignment in crypto was spent scribbling and designing educational courses for ZeFi, which aims to bring crypto knowledge to the Arabic-speaking world. Luckily for me, their content is also in English (my Arabic doesn’t get much past habibi). During my tenure there, we wrote beginner courses on blockchain, smart contracts, cryptocurrencies, and NFTs, while participating in talks on the social impacts of distributed ledger technology. I also traveled a bit to help spread the good word.
Later, I was fortunate enough to get picked up as an ecosystem developer by the Iota Foundation, which I’d followed since I initially drifted into the crypto space. The task at hand: contribute to a flourishing and robust universe of decentralized applications (dApps) built with Iota smart contracts.
“Ecosystem Developer”
A job title as equally ambiguous in crypto discords as at family dinners (on par with “consultant”), one could be forgiven for assuming I’m either doing something for the environment or programming. While I enjoy those things, the job instead entails building up a network of applications that are usable, useful, economically sustainable, and even fun.
Sometimes this effort involves learning lessons from other protocols, e.g. when examining how Avalanche’s daily active users (DAUs) got up the slope:
At other times, I’m reaching out to payment gateways (Simplex, Transak, etc.) to see how we can get a fiat-on ramp onto the native Firefly wallet.
Regardless of the task — of which there are many — everything revolves around making Shimmer and Assembly as successful as possible. Perhaps nowhere is this effort more evident than in our open builder's program, Touchpoint.
Builders. Investors. Experts.
Touchpoint was designed late last year and officially announced in March 2022. A product of Dan, Corey, and Christian, the vision was to create a dedicated space for builders to work together while getting hands-on support from the IF and connect to investors. You can think of it as a mix between being a cohort-based accelerator (a la Y-Combinator) and an ecosystem hub. Such a space, involving recent multichain converts and pioneers of Iota tech alike, allows us to find and remove common obstacles between the projects.
Our “hands on support” can take the form of introducing projects to potential partner dApps, investors, or a slew of experts ranging from product designers to code auditors. We’ve even met up personally with some of these projects at Iota meetups and at the Berlin office to talk through their roadmaps.
Some other activities that have gone on in Touchpoint are:
- Networking: We made connections with law firms and smart contract auditors, to find cost-effective solutions for project teams. Projects have also coordinated among themselves and with IF members on ideas for e.g. DeFi educational platforms.
- Fundraising: We advised projects on their fundraising strategies (developers don’t work for free after all…), discussed valuations, and reviewed a hefty stack of pitch decks.
- Communications: Suz ran an excellent communications workshop, and the projects have since had 1:1 assistance with her on their their comms strategy. We’ve also helped them gain exposure via blog articles and retweets.
- Product studio: The Iota design studios held a community call and worked individually with UI / UX / product strategy among the projects.
- Technical Support: Ani, our developer advocate, and some from the Iota Smart Contract team have been in close contact with many of the projects in the discord, allowing them to prepare their dApps for deployment.
In these aspects, Touchpoint is unique in the crypto space; we simply do not find this level of support, open communications, and networking in other ecosystems (…we asked around).
This is also a lot of work! Christian has the honor of managing over one-hundred-fifty channels in the discord… This spans around 50 groups, all of which are at different developmental stages (from ideation to launch). Besides the general chat rooms, there are chats with each project, investor, expert, and matchmaking channels where we introduce projects to each other. You know all those “we at [X] are proud to announce a partnership with [Y]”? You can thank him for some of those.
This isn’t to mention the telegram groups we facilitate between, say, a project and an outside auditing firm. Lastly, there’s the screening, which involves 30 minute calls with the projects to make sure they are seriously building something relevant for the ecosystem. Multiply this by 200 applicants, and our time gets filled up very fast.
Because of that, we expanded the team. Even while many VCs went “risk-off” with their capital and tech layoffs abound, the Touchpoint team took me on board in February. More recently, Austin joined up as has been focusing on outreach into other ecosystems. If you need a reason to be optimistic about how seriously we take Shimmer, here you go.
The State of the DAppspace
Meanwhile, teams have had their heads down in development mode. Even as the IF fine tunes the Shimmer mainnet, many projects have claimed a piece of this universe for themselves. These include DEXs, wallets with in-app payments, lending protocols, yield aggregators, metaverses, meme projects, domain name services, NFT marketplaces, launchpads, DAOs, infrastructure projects on the level of Alchemy/Infura, real-world asset platforms, and games. The full list can be found here.
I should note that not all of these projects are working with Touchpoint. This is of course ok! If a project team wants to go on their own and not be a part of Touchpoint, more power to them. But we’re here if you need us. :)
It is not only dApps that are popping up. We also have seriously informative and funny content producers spicing the place up (and this is only the English content!). Thanks to these creators, our message is starting to build and propagate. People are becoming aware about feeless native assets & NFTs on the layer 1, unchained liquidity between layers and smart contract chains, and our composable architecture.
Going Forward
Is that all? Well, no, we are also in looking into bringing oracles, bridges, indexers, stablecoins, block explorers, blue-chip dApps, and multi-signature wallets into the ecosystem. I can’t spoil anything here, but I can say that some of these conversations are already months in the making.
Within the Touchpoint program, we are working to source more funding for projects. One of our biggest challenges has been to get capital flowing to projects during a year when 2/3 of the crypto market dried up. Fear not! We are connecting with more investors, and converting older connections to the Shimmer vision.
Touchpoint will increasingly leverage its role as a coordinator to host events within the server, as well as helping the project teams broadcast their events outside of it. From these, the community can expect more talks, demos, and generally more awareness for the dApps and the ecosystem at large.
Will it all be enough to outshine (✨outshimmer?✨) the hundreds of EVM-compatible networks in existence? We’re doing all we can on that front, but part of this relies on you too, dear reader. Here’s how to get involved:
- coordinate meetups / Stammtische and invite your favorite IF member
- get involved on the Iota Governance Forum
- vote in Firefly
- apply for Touchpoint
- register your project on the ecosystem page
- listen out for the community calendar
- follow any of us on twitter (or on medium)
- invite us to your twitter space, online event, podcast
- keep building
- don’t be a stranger
For my part, I will be available on discord and twitter. Feel free to ping me to talk ecosystem dev stuff! Perhaps you know of a project we should be looking at, or just want to know where our attention currently is.
Until next time, I hope this gives some insight as to what is going on behind the scenes and how we plan on making the biggest boom in the crypto space.
May all your wen’s be soon.
- Adam
