Moving Forward: Marketing, Development, and Team
The past few weeks have been exciting ones for the Lethean team. Following our website release and version 3 beta release of our software, we have been working diligently on all aspects of the project. Today, we would like to share with you the fruits of our efforts on both old fronts and new, among which are increased marketing efforts, new members being added to the team, and more developments on the software side of things.
Marketing has begun!
Since our last update, we have begun some marketing campaigns. The campaigns consist of both banner ads on various platforms and YouTube ads. These ads have been performing very well, with a clickthrough rate of 2.33%. For reference, in most forms of ads the average clickthrough rate is approximately 2.00%. This shows that we are currently exceeding general expectations regarding our ratio of impressions to clicks. You can see a snapshot of our impressions and clickthrough rate from the start of our campaigns (October 5th) through the day the snapshot was taken (October 10th) below.
The graph does show October 11th, which was not calculated in this graph and has a zero value as a result. However, up to October 10th, we had 1,880 clicks and 80,000 impressions.
In addition, Alex, our Social Media Manager, will be visiting the Korean Blockchain Expo on the 23rd and 24th of October, which is located in Seoul. The purpose of his attendance will be to connect and network with venture capitalists, private investors, and other projects in the cryptocurrency area, as well as to raise general awareness of Lethean in the field.
You can find more information about the expo at their website here.
Dev Corner
We have continued testing and improving the functionality of the browser extension, wallet and dispatcher (exit node). Several bugs have been squashed including issues with sending and receiving payments for proxy services, a transaction processing bug reported upstream by Monero, and crashes in Windows. The development team is planning the next release (3.0.0 beta 3) for early next week (on or before Tuesday, October 23), which will address all of these issues. The Firefox extension has been brought up to speed with its Chrome counterpart and will also be listed on the Firefox Add-Ons store by the end of this week. Mac is still undergoing testing and repair due to persistent issues with dependencies.
On the topic of releases, we are very pleased to announce the promotion of Michael Iedema (@iedemam) to Release Engineer. With Michael dedicated to this position, we believe our release schedule will be more consistent and our overall productivity will be improved. Michael brings a wealth of experience in this area from his background in enterprise development, and his assistance is a greatly appreciated augmentation to our development flow.
The Lethean remote daemon node (sync.lethean.io) saw some downtime last week as interest in our work exploded, paralleling the rapid price increase. Our cloud solutions architect, Lee, was on top of the issue to bring the nodes back up to speed and put improved load balancing features in place to prevent issues like this in the future. Maintaining nearly uninterrupted uptime of the remote nodes is a high priority for us.
Another consequence of the increased attention on LTHN has been an increase in hash rate. This is great news for the Lethean network, because more people mining leads to increased decentralization of the system. Increased decentralization means there are fewer singular points for failure, and greater dissemination of the blockchain information. Since hash rate can fluctuate significantly, this led to several periods of slow blocks.
We want to reassure our users that slow blocks can be normal at times. If the network has a large influx of hash power, and the hash power then leaves, the blockchain takes some time to normalize and return to two minute block times. As the LTHN network grows, small changes in hashpower will not have as much of a significant impact on block times. If you are ever uncertain about the status of the LTHN network or would like to follow the network performance, check out our Zabbix monitoring system or the block explorer.
We are pleased to announce the full release of the Lethean Node List Marketplace. This sleek visual representation of exit nodes on the network brings us closer to a decentralized sharing economy helping to empower Internet freedom.
NYC video info
Some may recall that Casey, our Social and Marketing Strategy Manager, had a business meeting in New York City back in August. This was discussed in our update on August 1st. The meeting was filmed at Nasdaq Studios, which allowed Casey to meet with potential investors as well. The company that filmed the video, NewEconomies.com, interviewed Casey and discussed the ins and outs of the Lethean project, such as its foundation, why it exists, and some of the mechanics and reasons to utilize it. To view the video, follow this link.
New Mods/Team
Due to conflicts regarding schedules, our previous community manager, Bobby (also known as LastCrazyWizard) was finding it difficult to spend the time that we believe is necessary in his role as community manager. We believe that our community is one of the most important aspects of our business, and because of that, we have added a new community manager to the team. Previously acting as a moderator, Kostas (also known as Made in Chernobyl) will be the new community manager.
Konstantinos is a computer engineer from Greece. He believes that blockchain technology will have a huge impact in the future, so he tries to learn more about it every day. He came across Lethean (although it was IntenseCoin at the time) in January of 2018 while researching anonymous coins. During the attack on our blockchain, he saw the high level of support that the team provided to users and decided to contribute as much as he could. This way, he earned a spot on the moderator team. A few months have passed, and now he has now been promoted to a new position as community manager. He believes that with the help of our community the project can achieve its potential, so his goals are to make the community feel like part of the project, to promote more communication, and to welcome everyone new who wants to share with us the vision of a more private Internet.
We also have two new moderators on our team being introduced: nick1492 and CrypticDolphin. In addition to being part of the moderation team, both Nick and CrypticDolphin will be assisting in graphic design relating to our content and marketing efforts. We feel that they will be a great addition to the moderator team!
Exchange reachout efforts
We are in the process of reaching out to exchanges and gauging their interest with regards to listing us on their platforms. We have reached out to approximately five exchanges, and we are working with those that have responded to us to see if it is possible to get Lethean listed on them. We will continue to update the community as more information becomes available to us. New exchange listings will be determined by us once we have received an offer from a given exchange and evaluated the costs and benefits of being added to the exchange that has reached out to us.
New store items
Don’t forget to visit our shop as well! There are some new items added from the last update that you may be interested in purchasing. Proceeds from the store go towards helping us fund more marketing campaigns.
Social media links
As always, you may keep in touch with Lethean via any of the social networks listed below.
