ACT project update
As you’ll see on the new ACT website we have invited feedback and discussion about how the project should advance. In summary:
- Option A: As part of the open source community
- Option B: By seeking grants and support from philanthropy
- Option C: By creating a return on investment model that would allow impact investors to the project.
ACT pivoted last summer to develop two high-potential ideas that leveraged the technical and platform design in order to inject new funding into the core technology. Principally due to the complete collapse of crypto project funding neither spinoff fully materialised. The ACT platform itself was live on the Rinkeby test network with a significant stumbling block: the gas cost for proposal curators to draw down rewards for their curation effort was too high, which undermined the utility of the platform. We could not deploy it to the Ethereum main network without resolving this issue. This was, in fact, after completely redesigning the code three times to try to circumvent Ethereum’s limitations and scaling issues. As Peepeth has since demonstrated, these challenge might not be insurmountable but much has still to be done.
One of the new projects — called TOKEN — sought to democratise investment and solve the “initial coin offerings” main challenges. TOKEN (presale.market) gathered significant momentum with dozens of leading blockchain industry experts dubbed d’experts become engaged. In this ecosystem, the gas cost relative to the size of transactions was marginal and therefore it was not a hindrance. But, as the December update for TOKEN describes, three questions preoccupied the search for a way forward:
- How could it be financed in such a denuded market?
- Would it’s target market value decentralisation enough to make it viable and ensure that it would scale?
- Is it realistic (or would the market consider it realistic) to decentralise the assessment function of crypto projects considering the ease with which teams without bone fides can run an ICO?
Actually, TOKEN’s demo video is the best artefact we have demonstrating our smart contracts functioning on Rinkeby:
We have retrenched to focus mainly on ACT and what it set out to achieve. But, in many ways, similar questions apply to ACT’s platform as to TOKEN. Fundamentally, for a platform that funds impact (principally aiming to finance civil movements) does paying with crypto rather than credit card appeal to donators? Does receiving ETH appeal to causes? These are questions about web3 adoption; lack of web3 adoption is the greatest stymie to our plans and progress without any doubt.
We could have joined a growing number of “blockchain crowdfunding platforms” displaying a few live proposals looking for funding with crypto. But most don’t have any real growth or transformational business model, or USP, in our opinion. This basic transfer of an existing model to “blockchain” was never our idea. We want to transform “giving” completely by decentralising the curation process curing the non-profit sector of bureaucracy, lack of transparency and lack of speed. And we believe we still can.
Entering 2019, the crypto and blockchain world is unrecognisable from what it looked like a year ago. For ACT what is interesting is the authentic layer of talent and collaboration that remains among those buidling meaningful solutions together with emerging revolutionary ideas such as token bonding curves. It is probable that ACT could stand on the shoulders of giants to plug the gaps and fix the problems that it does not have the resources to do alone. Of course, it does not come to this community empty handed — what it has developed thanks to its supporters is useful, valuable and in many places groundbreaking. We have made one of our 12 repos public so interested collaborators can freely explore some of what the team developed (see “act fund”).
It is this backdrop of slow web3 adoption, platform issues (principally scaling and transaction costs), and lacklustre blockchain funding environment that greets ACT in 2019. On the plus side there is a vibrant Ethereum buidling community. Our goals are clear, and our team committed. We have a huge mailing list (over 10000 people) through which we will primarily relay developments. We also want to thank all our supporters and reassure them that CE7 remains central of all our plans and designs. We plan to present clear future plans about the project and the ACT platform by March 2019.
