January: Monthly Newsletter
Greetings Supporters!
One hundred and twenty years ago, on a hill near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright made the first sustained flight of a motor-powered airplane. The Wright Flyer, as the aircraft was called, was the result of years of experimentation and more than a few setbacks (and crashes!). The Wright Brothers faced enormous challenges — better capitalized rivals, uncertainty over how to generate sufficient lift, and questions about how to solve the three-axis-control problem of a fixed-wing aircraft. But they achieved the impossible through problem solving and perseverance.
Like the Wright Brothers, we’ve faced some unexpected challenges and setbacks. But we rolled up our sleeves, made improvements, and problem solved with our community. Through open beta, our team worked closely with the community to design a new guild management system, refine payout economics, and optimize all aspects of the platform. As a result, our Web 3.0 crowdwork platform is faster, more reliable, and better than ever. We’re almost ready to take off. Fasten your seatbelts, because in 2023, we’re going to soar!
Announcements
- Istanbul Hacker House: Members of our engineering team are currently in Istanbul for the Solana Hacker House, where they are attending workshops and networking with Solana Labs engineers and other developers.
Developer Updates
- Workspace submitted to Solana: The engineering team submitted the first MVP build of Workspace (our mobile App) to the Solana Mobile team for approval for their dApp store. The submission met our milestone for the Solana Mobile Stack grant we were awarded in the fall.
- Workspace Testing: Workspace is undergoing intensive testing with our internal team as well as testers from our Discord community. The Train2Earn web application is now fully integrated into the Workspace mobile app. It has undergone a redesign to match the new Lo-Fi theme of Synesis One.
- Kanon Exchange redesign: As we announced in our November newsletter, the Kanon Exchange upgrade and redesign is about to go live. It took a bit longer than expected, as we decided to integrate a guild management system for our guild leaders (who run our builder teams).
- SRI feature: A key feature of the Kanon Exchange, the SRI (Synesis Relevancy Index) is nearing completion. SRI ranks all 10,000 Kanon NFTs by usage. Once SRI is deployed, Kanon NFT holders will start earning passive income.
Train2Earn Open Beta
- Peopleware: Our train2earn platform is not just software, but also ‘peopleware,’ including the community of builders and validators who complete the microtasks that power our ecosystem. We’ve been working closely with our community to improve all aspects of our train2earn platform. Together we’re trying to protect the ecosystem and reward contributors for the value they create.
- Guilds: During the open beta, we saw the emergence of community leaders in the USA, Africa, India, and SE Asia. These leaders work to recruit and train new builders and validators, much like managers in Axie Infinity. We decided to support them by building a ‘guild’ management system. This system wasn’t part of our initial design but watching our community we realized these tools would help them to self-organize. The guild system allows Kanon NFT holders to lease out their Kanon to builders (through a smart contract) in exchange for a share of the revenue generated by the builder. The builder gets access to train2earn and the Kanon Holder generates a return.
- Synesis Academy: We’re about to launch Synesis Academy, a series of training modules on Gitbook designed to teach new builders and validators how to train artificial intelligence (AI) through the Synesis One platform. We also teach non-crypto natives how to set up a wallet, send and receive tokens, use digital currency exchanges, and build digital wealth through liquidity pools. We will expand the number of training modules as our ecosystem grows.
- Tiered Rewards: Open beta taught us a lot about payout economics. We’ve introduced a tiered reward structure, to protect the ecosystem and discourage ‘utterance spammers’ from submitting poor quality utterances. Utterance spam reduces the number of submissions available to other builders and costs us money to reject in the validation process. The new tiered model builds in financial penalties to discourage this behavior.
- Ontology Creation: Over the past two months, we’ve significantly scaled our Train2earn workforce and are now churning out thousands of ontologies for the Mind Expression engine. We have builders who have quit their jobs to do DYF full time. One of our validators is using his earnings to pay for his MBA. We’re connecting people eager to work with microtasks they can perform from home — without all the barriers to entry of Amazon Mechanical Turk or Clickworker. It’s working!
The Road Ahead
We are 100% focused on commercial launch in Q1 2023. In March, the team will gather in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam for our quarterly ‘Grok’ session, to map out platform improvements, new features, and how we scale. This is going to be a momentous year.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
Our platform consists of software and peopleware. The two need to mesh perfectly for train2earn to run smoothly. That is no easy task. We need to combine software engineering and people engineering. Code and psychology. Getting it right entails honest debate, problem-solving, and trust between our team and community. We’re dedicated to building the ultimate Web 3.0 crowdwork platform and can’t wait for launch!
Onward!
The Synesis One team