It’s certainly been a thrilling semester since we published the recap of 2019 just eight months ago in January the 22nd of 2020.
That article paints with great color POAP’s spirit so if you haven’t seen it yet, it’s better if you do before reading the H1 2020 recap 👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻
So in early 2020 we said that our plan for the year was to increase adoption by going to more events, solving people’s problems by building new dapps and having lots of fun. And that’s actually what we did, all three of them.
POAP had the objective for 2020 of being a part of all of the year’s top tier Ethereum events, and we were right on track until the pandemic hit. We had very exciting participations on ETHDenver, ETHGlobal’s ETHLondon and Ethereum France’s EthCC. The outlook of a global lockdown was saddening, especially knowing that we were missing ConsenSys Ethereal in New York, alongside the ChainLink Smart Contract summit and the rest of a packed pipeline of events in our calendar.
With despair about reaching our target growth metrics, we started using POAP for virtual events, as a way to remain relevant and oh boy ask if we did.
We started with the Backstop Syndicate (https://backstopsyndicate.com/faq/) POAP as shown here and quickly figured that people loved the idea of getting an NFT to identify important milestones on their online-life.
With the boom of virtual events we on boarded tens of different organizers from all around the world. A full list can be seen in: http://poap.xyz/admin/events
Until the beginning of June we were still covering all the mining fees to give the collector a streamline experience. When it was clear that gas prices weren’t coming down anytime soon we faced the challenge and decided to re-design the redemption process. A couple weeks after we came up with a new flow where the recipient of the NFT pays his own mining fee (and can set and bump gas prices arbitrarily).
We were back on track again, having fun with great partners like Alessio Delmonti (PieDAO), Ryan Sean Adams (Bankless), Mariano Di Pietrantonio, Lenka Hudakova, maria magenes (MakerDAO), Martin, Sebastián Aldasoro (Ethereum Buenos Aires), DeFi Dude (Reality Cards) and the great guys at Decentraland.
The excitement didn’t last long until we encountered our next roadblock.
Although collectors were getting the POAPs and playing with them in dapps like www.poap.vote and www.poap.chat, the gas prices kept coming up to a point that getting a POAP was unaffordable for many (+$5).
All of us dapp developers on the Ethereum Ecosystem knew that we were going to need to use L2 in the future, and this is curious because most of us believed that blockchain were going to be a cornerstone of societies in the future, well it seems that the future took us by storm.
It’s honoring to have top minds in the industry helping us on our scaling needs.
Mainnet POAPs are not dead
Some events are so important that they are worth the $5 mining fees.
Superphiz, Lamboshi Nakaghini and Butta.eth as organizers of the /r/ethstaker community and discord (http://invite.gg/ethstaker) were an instrumental factor of growth for POAP.
Firstly by using POAP in every community call and then organizing the Medalla Testnet POAP campaign (link below, kindly hosted by Bitfly).
Coming up with a way to give a POAP to every person that participated in the genesis validator set of the Medalla Testnet was harder than expected but with the generous help of Danny Ryan we found a way by asking validators to paste an encoded string on the graffiti field of their client software.
The mechanism for collecting the addresses was finished, now we needed a way to deliver the POAPs to their rightful owners.
Enter www.poap.delivery
POAP.delivery is a new dapp of the POAP ecosystem that enables anyone to create a POAP issuance that is merkle dropped to eligible parties using a very efficient mechanism designed by the great RicMoo and explained here.
POAP.delivery requires the token issuer to provide a list of all the eligible addresses that qualify for getting the airdrop. That list is computed using a nice algorithm and creates a data structure that can be simplified and loaded into a smart contract.
Long story short, if you were part of the historic event that has a commemorative POAP, you just visit http://poap.delivery
While we were hard at work trying to resuscitate Medalla, we started getting mentions like these:
And then immediately starting thinking… why not?
So by using open source tools put together by passionate participants of the www.yam.finance experiment we got the list of addresses for adding them to www.poap.delivery.
How to claim $YAM and Medalla testnet POAPs ?
The development of of www.poap.delivery has been executed at record speed, and as it’s trend these days, it hasn’t been audited; so we expect people to be patient and bear with us if something doesn’t work.
To claim the tokens you just visit www.poap.delivery and follow the process. If you get stuck, just ask for help in our discord:
As if H1 2020 wasn’t intense enough, and we also soft-launched POAP.fun
www.poap.fun is a website for anyone to be able to create raffles based on POAP token holdings.
Anyone can create a raffle with several gamified configurations for participants to join and have fun with it. The dapp works nicely although it needs some TLC work that’s been postponed because of pressing needs in the Layer 2 and www.poap.delivery projects.
Closing remarks and acknowledgements
This first half of 2020 could only be this productive thanks to the consistent support of www.xivis.com, the dapp development studio that’s been in charge of the POAP codebase since May ‘19.
Tens of friendly community members have helped POAP all along this year, your efforts are highly appreciated and we look forward to keep buidling with you.
The team working on Devcon six has opened a forum and POAP posted a proposal for our dapps to be used during the event in 2021:
We are looking for volunteers to lead the initiative because devcon is an event with thousands of attendees and deserves full attention. Reach out to hello@poap.xyz to apply.
And this is the end. Endless gratitude to everyone that took part.
