Cambiatus Progress Report — 1Q 2020

First Quarter 2020

These have been months of lots of work, improvements to our webapp, new thinking around how Cambiatus should exist in the world, and also great surprises from our communities. Exciting times!

What you can find on this Progress Report:

1. Cambiatus Process: How we work with our network partners
2. Cambiatus Communities: News about our network partners and their communities in Costa Rica, Brazil and Spain.
3. Cambiatus Smart Contracts and Software Development: New features and processes implemented to improve our webapp
4. Cambiatus New Legal Structure: How Cambiatus is evolving into a DAO.
5. Cambiatus Content, Events and Media: How we are sharing our story.

Cambiatus is an open source platform to empower the creation of new organizations, through Social Currencies on Blockchain

CAMBIATUS PROCESS

This quarter we finally put together our Cambiatus Process, three easy steps that explain our solution, something we have been crafting and testing with our partners since 2018. This is an iterative process that helps our network partners in their path to Mindset change, prepares them to Co-design their social currency on blockchain and use our software to Implement it.

CAMBIATUS COMMUNITIES

This is a general overview of our current communities and their stage:

We have now 3 active communities: PULS, Muda and XES, MUDA being the revelation of the quarter!

Muda Spotlight: Muda is growing organically and reached more than 400 users, with many offers on the shop and slowly increasing exchanges of products and services between members.

The main reason for this is an online project created to support the artist community during the actual COVID19 context. Every live performance got cancelled, so MUDA initiator’s created an online show called Picadeiro Digital (Online Circus). The weekly live show invites artists to do online performances, paying them with both Reais (Brazilian official currency) and MUDA. Artists can use MUDA to purchase organic food for themselves and vouch 5 other fellows. The 8th Picadeiro Digital live show is scheduled for June 1st.

Thanks to the success of this initiative, Saúva, the philanthropic association financing the Muda network, decided to grant organic food baskets to be available in Muda’s shop. So far 340 organic food baskets have been redeemed, and 35 artists have been rewarded by their online performances. This movement started in Rio de Janeiro, expanded to Belo Horizonte and now there are other artist communities willing to join in different Brazilian states.

Muda is currently having conversations with partners like Volunteer Vacations, to reward volunteers with 100 MUDA’s for doing online volunteer work. Also, we’re co-designing with Museu do Amanhã and a Waldorf School, a mechanism to reward crowdfunding campaign contributors with refunds in MUDA.

Some other great news from our partner networks during this quarter:

XES: Barcelona is activating! Our partners of XES Terrassa have created the first XES coins, distributing them to the businesses that are part of their network according to their commitment to accept the social currency.

Natuscoin: We have now a clear methodology to create Natus Units and a agreement with a local partner who is starting the process of applying it to RPPNs (private natural reserves) in Brazil. We signed 3 new RPPNs to the pilot phase, for a total of 5. We’re studying each persona (conservation unit owner, tourist/visitor, impact investor) in the network, to build a better mobile UX/UI experience.

ecoins: ecoins is the newest community on board and the most successful Costa Rican social currency with more than 60.000 users and expanding to other countries in Latam. We are designing a pilot experience in collaboration with the local government of Montes de Oca in San José, to start testing ecoins transition to Cambiatus Technology.

PULS + ecoins: these two Costa Rican partners are joining forces to co-design a Covid19 Emergency Currency for Costa Rica (more news on this coming soon!). It is exciting to see our network partners working together and creating even more opportunities to transform how people understand money and social currencies and their potential to tackle our biggest challenges as society.

CAMBIATUS SMART CONTRACTS AND SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

It has been an exciting quarter for the dev team. Not only have we added two new fullstack devs to the team (Rodrigo from Brazil and Andrey from Russia), but we also have added a lot of improvements and new screens into the platform, specially for our shop, dashboard and community page.

Learn more about the Software we are using here.

Smart Contract Features. Our Smart contracts are getting stable and most of what we have done this year has been to improve their robustness. We modified them so that now we can handle updating things such as community objectives and actions much easier. We also tweaked our invitation process to allow special accounts such as community creators to invite new users in the community behalf.

Improved Login/Register interface and screen flow. Private key, 12 words, PIN and Username are now easier to understand for our users. In our case, considering that most of our users are non-techie people, this is one of the most crucial flows.

Our onboarding is now easier to use. Users are now able to login quickly, save their 12 words safely and re-download their PDF if needed from their profile. This is generated only on the browser to ensure security and that there is no possible way for us or anyone to know their most important security mechanism.

Explore this on Github.

New dashboard is live! Now our dashboard shows only the information from one community at a time, and allows users to switch between communities if needed, in a similar manner than you can jump from one Slack workspace to another. This greatly improves the Dashboard experience and the information we are able to show.

Explore this on Github.

Actions and claims are improved. We are working on the action/claim flow. Last quarter we changed how community admins could create and edit actions, and now we are focusing on delivering a more clear view for the action validations. Validators can now see all their previous votes, all claims pending and all the other votes. All with top performance, filters and pagination. Making information available is key.

New profile. We have a new profile page, so users can get to know each other

Explore this on Github

Volunteer Developers. In this past quarter we had new volunteer developers contributing with our project. The main reason for joining is to get to know more about the tech we use. Volunteers helped with input validation, responsive improvements for mobile, bug fixing, UI improvements, UX improvements, accessibility improvements and finally, power users features.

Contributing to Cambiatus: explore the new onboarding for our backend project here. It will be expanded to more repositories in the future.

Bugs 🐞. Bugs are part of every digital tool. We put a lot of effort and time into clearing some long standing bugs like an intermittent authentication issue where users would be signed out when trying to sign a transaction. We also identified a few bugs during the action/claim flow. Our users at Muda were having a lot of trouble while trying to approve actions. Although bugs are no fun, it showed us lots of crucial improvements when it comes to reporting the status of the analysis of actions to all of the community. The UX-UI Design team has already started working on a version 3 with more transparency and ease of use.

Hard to come by, but bugs are an important tool to identify pain points. Bugs that no one cares about show that the malfunctioning part is not essential, but the ones everyone complaints about show important focus points in the application.

UX-UI design. We are applying Design Thinking to improve how we deal with new features, including Usability tests, User interviews and other cool tools.

Mobile first: This was the quarter in which our design and development process became fully mobile-first, a crucial change considering that most of our users are interacting with Cambiatus through their mobile phones.

Simulator for Social Currencies. This past quarter we developed a simplified simulator which allows us to test detailed scenarios of how complementary currency is used in the community and what its benefits are. Work on this is ongoing, you can find more details of this version here.

CAMBIATUS NEW LEGAL STRUCTURE

One of our biggest projects now is to create and implement a new legal structure and governance that will allow Cambiatus to move to the next level. We have been working with our friends at 7CC Blockchain Investments and we are now officially incorporated as Cambiatus Foundation and Cambiatus OPC in Cayman Islands! 🎉🎉 We are developing now the governance structure to manage and support these new entities.

This will allow us to move forward with our Expansion Plan towards transforming Cambiatus into Cambiatus DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization). The first step is this legal incorporation, then we are transforming our partners into members and creating the Cambiatus Foundation Board, with representation of our founding members, investors and communities. This incorporation is also a key piece in our fundraising efforts for the following months.

CAMBIATUS CONTENT, EVENTS AND MEDIA

New Website. We published our brand new website this quarter, with a dedicated page for each of our Communities. Our effort focused on mobile optimization, showcasing more details and impact about communities and their progress. It includes a new FAQ and onboarding forms. Enjoy!

Social Media. This was the first quarter of our Instagram profile (launched officially in mid February).

Events. We love been invited to talk about Cambiatus and our work, this is an overview of the events we were part of during this quarter.

• February 18th (COSTA RICA): Karla participated in a Panel discussion at the launch of Specialization Program on Social and Solidarity Economy at Instituto Tecnológico (TEC), INICIA Project.
• April 26th (BRAZIL): Luiz and Karla were invited to MUDA Picadeiro Digital. Talk on Social Currencies and Cambiatus, video available here (starts in 17:17)
• May 7th (LATAM): Karla was invited to Blockchain for Humanity B4H Virtual Gathering with Grassroots Economics, on social currencies. Video available here.
• May 7th (UC Berkeley, USA) Diana participated in a series of Discussions with UC Berkeley Blockchain Initiatives, she spoke about resilience.
• May 14th (Monterrey, USA). Diana was invited to a panel on digital transformation and Covid19 at EGADE Business School
• May 21st (USA-LATAM). Karla was invited by ecoins to join them for Rethink Plastics MIT Solve Sessions, with The Blockchain Challenge founder, Silvana López.

Want to get to know our team? Here we are.

Cambiatus on the News. We had impactful media coverage this quarter, including the following:

1. “Four Ticas (Costa Rican female entrepreneurs) stand out internationally as leaders in technology companies” (January 7) in La República.
2. “Local Cryptocurrencies looking to avoid problems of its global sisters” (January 28): One of the major media in Costa Rica, El Financiero, a weekly publication on business and finance, covered our story as one of the main blockchain based projects in the country, explaining in deep manner the social nature of Cambiatus. PULS made the front cover!
3. “Of Pulperías and Blockchain” (February 27) Podcast with “Próxima Frontera” host, Karla Chaves (ecoins Director), Published in delfino.cr
4. “Changing the Money Paradigm” (March 10) Delfino.cr
5. “10 Costa Rican women making history”(May 2020). Alas Magazine #16, page 21.

THAT’S ALL FOR NOW!

We are grateful that all our team members are safe, taking care of their families at home and that we all are being able to focus our energies on a project like Cambiatus, specially in these challenging Covid19 times.

Being a completely remote team was a huge advantage for us, having the support of our amazing Network Partners and the funding from Shuttleworth Foundation is a privilege that keep us committed to create the best Cambiatus solutions we are capable of.

This was an exciting quarter indeed! What is coming for the next quarter? A lot of magic for sure… subscribe and stay tuned!