Farewell, 2022: Reflecting on the Year That Was
As the year comes to a close, it’s a great time to reflect on the network achievements and progress that has been made over the past 12 months. At Effect Network, we have a lot to be proud of.
We started the year by hosting our first-ever hackathon in tandem with the EffectDAO. Albeit a smaller event, it was very successful. We had a diverse group of participants from various backgrounds and skill levels, which made for a dynamic and collaborative atmosphere. The hackathon was structured with a mix of workshops, presentations, and hack time, which kept everyone engaged and motivated. This event truly accelerated the movement of dApps building on our mainnet release of the network and expanded the offerings in the Effect Ecosystem.
The successful launch of our new platform was one of the most important things we did this year. This has been a major project for us, and we’re thrilled to have it up and running. With a truly decentralized and open-source microtasking platform, the Effect Network opens up a world of possibilities and allows anyone to harness the power of the crowd to accomplish any task. With Effect Force completely decentralized, it allows for the EffectDAO to ultimately be in complete control of the platform.
The debut of the mainnet release was also in tandem with the overhaul of our branding and website design. The new design is more intuitive and centers around providing a clean interface, allowing visitors to easily obtain information about our organization and connect directly with the Effect Network platform.
We’ve also spent the year maturing the mainnet release and making significant improvements to our existing offerings, which included releasing the SDK. This means that any developer can build on top of the complex smart contract stack we’ve made. We’ve onboarded dApps to the ecosystem, improved scalability features, and performed quite a bit of bug fixing. All of these efforts have been geared towards improving the overall experience of our users, and we’re happy to see that they’ve been well received.
Hand-in-hand with the release of the SDK, we also debuted the Effect Ecosystem. This ecosystem displays the dApps created by anyone and deployed to the Effect Network mainnet. With a simple pull request to our repo, any developer who creates and launches their dApp on our platform can showcase their dApp in the ecosystem. They can add an image, a short description, and links to their website, community channels, or documentation pages.
We implemented a much-needed proxy pattern functionality that allows a task to be purchased directly through a dApp. This allows for seamless integration of a developer’s front end with the Effect Network on the backend. This is possible because of EOS’ comprehensive permission system. When the right permissions are configured, any user can call a method within a smart contract. So, here, users can upload their data through an Effect Network dApp and create a task that will be uploaded to Effect Force and an Effect Network user will complete it. Afterward, it is uploaded back to the dApp, where you can view the results of the task. All of this happened without ever registering with the Effect Network. It’s a powerful mechanism that will help guide how the Effect Network is built in the future.
In addition to improving our platform, we also took big steps toward making the network more decentralized and stronger by automating the collection and payment of network fees to the EffectDAO. These fees are collected from the requestor when they post tasks on the Effect Network. When the worker claims their task rewards, the network fee gets transferred to the feepool.efx blockchain account. These fees get distributed every cycle (as per the network distribution strategy the DAO set forth) to every DAO member who voted during that cycle.
Another major accomplishment for us this year was the addition of Decentralized Qualifications to Effect Force. Requesters can create and assign custom qualifications to workers on Effect Force and utilize them in their campaigns and batches of tasks. This is essential not only for the decentralization of the microtasking platform, but also as a tool for requesters to be able to curate a custom, on-demand workforce tailored specifically to their needs.
Since we already had the Effect Socials dApp, we thought it was about time to show off another dApp and add it to the Effect Ecosystem. Effect Labeler was created and launched as a service for the greater good. We identified a need for image labeling and instance annotation and delivered the dApp on the network as a service to those who needed these annotations. Now, anyone who needs to annotate images quickly can skip the steps of creating a requester account and designing a template to publish tasks. All they need to do is upload their images to Effect Labeler and watch the work be completed in record time on Effect Force.
The library of documentation and guides about the network, the platform, and the ecosystem has grown noticeably over the past year. With it being an ongoing project, this is a good sign that we’re always building, growing, and enhancing what the network can offer.
We also set up a developer bounty board as a way to build out the network in a more decentralized way. When we identify items that require building or fixing, we post them to a developer bounty board in our GitHub repository. Any developer is able to take on these jobs and get paid for them in our native token. Many of the items on the bounty board come from suggestions within our community and our DAO. You can see this in action (and join in!) here: https://github.com/orgs/effectai/projects/6
Perhaps one of the most exciting things to debut this year, especially in these final days of December, is the debut of Arbitrary Transaction Proposals (ATP). These proposals have an embedded EOS transaction that will get a signature from the DAO when the proposal gets executed. Jesse, who in part designed and implemented them, wrote a detailed explanation of how this works in our Discord server here. For the most simple explanation, these ATPs allow the DAO to be very powerful over changes to the Effect Network on a smart contract level. This development is one of the most exciting updates for the network, and Laurens is especially excited about ATPs as well.
“I feel like Effect Force is both decentralized enough and has enough tools and open-source libraries that people can build upon Effect Network without needing to have detailed knowledge about blockchain development. Both ATPs and Effect Force dApps excite me very much!” -Laurens Verspeek
Overall, it’s been a rewarding year for us at Effect Network. While there have been challenges, we’ve also seen a lot of growth and success. We’re grateful for the support of our community and look forward to building and developing even more for the Effect Network in the coming year. So, we’re ending this year on a high note and are excited to see what the future holds.
Stay tuned for our next blog post, where we fill you in on what’s to come for 2023!
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