The Golden Horde Monthly Update — October 2018
October has passed us and a whole host of events have ended but fear not, we’re hear to recap over everything we got up to this month so buckle up and strap in!
We saw another turbulent month in the top 51 with various shuffling going on as we welcomed the return of ArkLand not only back into the community but back into being a forging delegate! We were pretty stoked about this as we know Munich well and he’ll be doing some great things for this community in the future.
As a first announcement however, if any voter is reading this who owns the address: AexEA5P256mKXpT4YAq7tX5zs7JuTfZrAk then please get in touch as you won our voter raffle and we need to send you some art!
Generally October was another busy time for us as we planned to have ‘The Arkening’ play out at the end of October so needed to get all the assets ready for that and get in touch with those in the community we wanted to collaborate with. On top of that we launched several initiative programs that we had up our sleeves which we’ll digress later in this article.
Arkvatar
Our main creme de la creme this month was of course Arkvatar, a unique character based avatar system which links to your cryptocurrency wallet. This comes with a scannable QR for easy look up of the wallet and since each character is generated from 27,000,000 combinations there are plenty of great looks, allowing you a really easily identifiable avatar.
We’re working hard to get Arkvatar integrated into various platforms such as explorers, wallets, third party websites and other applications. Many thanks to those who have already integrated Arkvatar such as Brian aka Arkx who implemented the system into his website. Here’s what our delegate arkvatar looks like on his system!
To celebrate launching Arkvatar we held a caption contest where the best submitted captions to our TGH_Society Twitter would win a bunch of Ark! We had three winners:
- 1st Place — @MisesCrypto
- 2nd/3rd Place — @trentdues & @jonono_2
If you’d like to check out more about Arkvatar then you can read this article here and of course make sure to make your own Arkvatar over at:
Partnering With Cam’s Yellow Jacket
October was also the month that saw us partner with Cam’s Yellow Jacket, providing them with an exclusive design line, “Ark The Movie” which has three original designs with day and night variations to choose from! They’re available for those who participate in helping to fund CYJ videos which will be an amazing addition to the resources available on Ark.
We wanted to partner with CYJ for various reasons, particularly we understand just how important video content in this day and age, with it being the most binged and streamed form of media. When a person discovers Ark, videos will be the first place they look for information so if we the community have a comprehensive library of videos explaining Ark’s systems then this will increase our engagement and retention of new users by ten fold. Combine this previous fact with the notion of how experienced CYJ are at delivering videos then it was to us a no brainer to help them as we will see many benefits in the future from their work.
TGH Delegate Website Changes
We’ve also reflected on feedback we were given on our website and have incorporated several changes including accessibility updates, refining the dashboard system and more. On top of this our most requested feature was a night mode so we’ve gone ahead and slung that into the changes so now you can access our dashboard and work your away around in a crisp dark theme.
Finally we’ve added tool tips to our dashboard menu after realising that each icon wasn’t so easy to understand, this should make navigating the system much easier for everyone.
Ark Heroes Telegram Stickers
We launched the Ark Heroes Telegram Stickers which has been received by the community much better than we anticipated! They’re available to grab here:
We included some spooky stickers to fit the Halloween occasion as well as some of our Blockchain Heroes set which we’ve modified to work with Telegram. We’ll be adding further unique stickers in the future as well as emotion based stickers that work better with emojis like 👍 👌 and so forth.
The Arkening 2018
As our first major event, we were proud to present The Arkening which was a spooky, prize giving event that had a multitude of competitions and even a surprise guest from Reynauld The Grave Digger. Not only did we have the telegram stickers but we also have a bunch of spooky codes to give out which in partnership with ArkStickers.com gets you some sweet physical stickers which we gave out as prizes for The Arkening. The main guide of course as mentioned was Reynauld who contacted us through articles and audio transcripts.
The major event for The Arkening was our Cipher Riddles that took about five days for some of the community to solve. It involved many riddles being encrypted and sent over the Ark Smartbridge which involved an Ark wallet BIP39 password. There was 200 Ark, wall art and stickers to be won.
As for the merch to be won, we gave out one or two exclusive halloween posters that will be locked away until next year.. however if you’re looking to grab one then you have one last chance… details are down at the end of this article!
Rounding up all our articles, we released 15 articles in the month of October which have a range of topics. We’ll dive into all of them and give you the links so you can check them out.
Ark Community Digest
ACD articles are our way of getting in touch with members in the community and sharing a glimpse into their life for all in the community to see. Since Ark has such an amazing community full of great people with a variety of backgrounds we usually get some awesome stories being told!
This month we had slightly less ACD articles due to our halloween event taking priority but we still managed to catch up with Cam from CYJ, CJ ‘Azek’ and Glenn ‘Skeuo’.
- Cam Told Us About How He’d Fix Your Private Jet When Ark Moons
- CJ Told Us About DevOpsDays KC Tech Conferences
- Glenn Told Us About His Love For Ramen
We’ll be looking to get more ACD articles out each week again like normal this month.
TGH Proposal Update & Voter Raffle
It was about time that we updated our proposal so we got around to it in October, with jam packed information on what we at The Golden Horde do for Ark aswell as why you should vote for us as your delegate. We updated the proposal both on the forum and on the Arkdelegates.io website created by delegate deadl0ck. You can check out the proposal article here.
We then launched a voter raffle in the same vein as the proposal, with 100 Ark and a wall art piece to be given away, this will occur every three months for our voters! Check the article here.
TGH Social Initiative
The social initiative system we have created in October allows any of the community to easily apply and receive wall art for their competitions, community meetups, hackathons, events and raffles. It’s a way to make your event go above and beyond with a sweet wall art prize for the winner. Every month we can give out four pieces, one for each event which resets at the beginning of the month. We’ve already had a variety of people interested in the system so please check it out if this is something that could help you! The article is available here.
The Arkening
As mentioned above our main event this month was The Arkening which was our first seasonal event, we had two articles based around it which gave clues and the necessary information for people to participate in the event:
Check them out if you’re interested in seeing what The Arkening involved! Remember to stay tuned for our next seasonal events at Christmas.
Wrapping Up Our October Competitions
Finally we also wrote a recent article just wrapping up all our competitions that we had in October as well as giving a better sense of all the things we had going on and still do have going on at TGH. You can check out that article below as it goes into more detail on some of our engagement programs.
French Articles
As always you can find some of our main articles translated into French via our FR TGH Blog. In October we covered Arkvatar and our September update so check that out if you fancy!
In our What’s Next segment we give you a heads up on what you can expect from us in the coming months. In November we’ll be having a slower month than usual as some of us are travelling and we’re also getting this ready as we anticipate another busy month in December with our Christmas event, hopefully our merch store and other awesome things we’re keeping behind wraps for now.
Some things you can expect from us in November includes our Ark Community Digest articles, regular Tweets and other engaging things and of course the end of our Ten Year Anniversary of Bitcoin competition where we are giving away a Limited Edition White Paper Ledger + Exclusive “From The Heavens” wall art design from our Crypto Mythos design line, so this is still up for grabs!
Financials
Website Hosting & Server Infrastructure
We spend around $400–500 per month on our node, relays and website with a further $100 to our external services such as Arkvatar. This breaks down to our cover with Digital Ocean, Vultr, Domain Name & Hosting overheads aswell as Certs.
Competitions & Community Initiatives
In October we saw an approximate use of around 600 Ark across our engagement systems and community competitions. This also includes our Reddit Engagement Program, Social Initiative Program and voter raffle.
Our Halloween Event used up around 450 Ark, with 200 Ark being used for the Cipher Riddle prize, 150 Ark for prizes for the Crossword & Podcast riddle. Finally 100 Ark covered our costs of generating physical stickers of our spooky design line to give out to community members. All in all this came to approximately, $1,000 for competitions this month.
End Of Halloween Monthly Report Giveaway
Want to win some of our Halloween wall art? Then we have one last chance before they get locked away until next year! There’s two designs, each with two colour variations to choose from titled, “Defending The Ark” & “Attacking The Ark” one features Michael Myers, staring you dead in the face whilst the other features our very own Mike from Ark attacking a zombie!
If you want to win, all you have to do is simply take a photo of a wall that you’d put the art on! We know that there are some walls out there that need a bit of TGH Love so share it with us on Twitter: @TGH_Society
We’ll pick out two winners randomly in a week’s time (12th November) so make sure to get snapping and let us know!
Conclusion
We hope you enjoyed reading through this monthly report and if you have any questions please let us know either via Twitter, Ark Slack, Reddit or Medium! We’ll be looking to continue getting articles out to you all over November as well as more cool things for the community to enjoy!
