Sigil: Crowdfund with Upvotes
Welcome to Sigil! This is our first article under the new team. If you’ve been following us for a while and are familiar with everything then that’s fantastic and we appreciate your support. If you’re new let me catch you up on to what we’ve been up to the past couple months.
So What Is Sigil?
Currently, Sigil is a unique cryptocurrency built on its own blockchain that utilizes hybrid Proof of Stake and Proof of Work. The current Sigil cryptocurrency is great for facilitating transactions, but does not have easy extensibility for creating new features such as smart contracts. To make it easier to create the best possible decentralized apps, we have decided to swap to an Ethereum based token. We’re in the process of developing the new coin and will keep the community updated on future details of the coin swap.
New Direction?
The Sigil team consists of Alex Williams, Jared Downing, and Kane Thomas. Sigil has gone through a few iterations in the past six months. A couple months ago, the Sigil team was building a crowdfunding platform that allowed for raising of funds for startups through Sigil, sort of like Kickstarter but with crypto. While this was a good direction, we believe the crowdfunding space in cryptos has become over saturated. There are a ton of cryptos that are trying to enter the decentralized crowdfunding space. With this in mind we knew that we had create a truly unique product for our first Sigil Platform product. This is what led us to the creation of Sigil Give.
Sigil Give is a platform that is purely meant for donation based campaigns, kind of like GoFundMe. Unlike the previous crowdfunding app, Sigil Give was focused completely on decentralized crowdfunding for donation campaigns for people in need. Using a model similar to Steemit, Sigil Give uses upvotes to award campaigns with newly minted Sigil as well as allow direct donations in Sigil with 0 fees. However, there are a few issues with this being our first Sigil Platform product. The value of Sigil will initially be volatile, as is the case with most cryptocurrencies. In situations where individuals need money for necessities, the value of Sigil being volatile could be detrimental to these individuals. Additionally, the individuals who post on platforms like GoFundMe are probably comfortable enough with cryptocurrencies to understand the benefit. We love the idea of Sigil Give, and one day it will be a part of the suite of Sigil Platform apps, but for right now we have decided to focus our attention on a different initial application for Sigil that we’re really excited about.
Product Hunt + Steemit = Sigil Launch
Sigil Launch can best be described as a mashup between Steemit and Product Hunt. If you’re not familiar with Product Hunt, it’s a platform where new products/startups can post their newly launched products and users can upvote the products that they like the most. Sigil Launch provides the same functionality, except that top products are rewarded with newly minted Sigil to help them grow their startups. How cool is that? The entire platform will be built as a decentralized app with all user and product data stored on the blockchain. But unlike traditional Ethereum based dApps, Sigil Launch won’t require the use of browser tools like Mist or MetaMask to interact with the platform, meaning you don’t have to pay Ethereum gas every time you want to upvote a product. This is possible thanks to the team at LoomX, whose making it easy for developers to build efficient sidechains into Ethereum dApps. We believe this will create a unique niche for us in the crowdfunding market as it allows for products to get exposure as well as a little bit of funding.
The Future of Sigil
Sigil Launch is just the beginning. We want to launch an entire series of apps that will utilize Sigil in new and innovative ways. Sigil is a project to keep your eyes on. We have big plans for the future. Keep following us for updates on what we’re doing.
