July Community Call and Roundup
Another month closes out, and we have some awesome developments we’re so excited to share!
A lot has happened since our last community call on June 27th. We hope you’ll join our Discord for the next one on August 24th!
-The Witnet Ecosystem-
For starters… the Witnet oracle grew by 35% to 197 data feeds being used. At this moment, these are all price feeds and they are all being subsidized and granted by the Witnet Foundation to foster development on our supported chains. Speaking of supported chains, since our last community call we’ve welcomed a few new chains; Hoo Smart Chain, Cube Chain, and Meter. We have around 6 new chains in the immediate future we expect to be integrated on and subsidizing price feeds for a short period of time.
Meter is a great team, and they even sponsored Witty Creatures at Ethereum Community Conference in Paris (more on EthCC below). Furthermore, there is a lot of development happening in the Meter ecosystem so we are so excited to be integrated with them. Hoo Smart Chain has had some issues operating effectively as the parent company of HSC and Hoo Exchange are facing a liquidity crisis so we don’t know where this development will be in the future.
The second centralized exchange to list the WIT coin, strengthening the cryptoeconomic incentive of the network. Not only is this great for miners, but it increases community liquidity and allows for new listings in the future. MEXC has been voted the top exchange in Asia and has provided Witnet with a slew of future opportunities.
-The Community-
Our Discord saw a modest 3.8% growth in new users since our last roundup, about 55 new members; welcome! Telegram saw 30 new members in the last month, equating to a 2.1% bump with a 60% increase in member engagement. Twitter, a harder metric to track because there are less analytic tools nevertheless saw 142,000 total impressions, 101,000 profile visits, and 342 new followers since the start of May.
The Witnet team sponsored both ETHBarcelona and EthCC. We had a vastly different approach for both conferences. ETHBarcelona was rather subtle and we focused on business development, making dozens of connections that have already transpired to be oracle use cases. EthCC saw version 3 of Witty Creatures, an NFT game that ran on the Witnet randomness oracle that required users to interact with other conference-goers in order to get their egg incubated. The more incubations, the more rare the NFT.
Witty Creatures had a total of 752 players that incubated over 6,600 times. This is pretty incredible since EthCC had 2000 in attendance. Almost half the conference was using Witnet technology!
-Updates and Developments-
This month saw some pretty lucrative updates both on business development and technology. On the more technical side, scripting is still a work in progress. We have some PoC for multisigs and atomic swaps. With that being said, the biggest improvement regarding the scripting in the last weeks is the usability improvement. Now it’s easier to create a script from the terminal using the CLI.
The Witnet Foundation also gave out its first grant to a group out of Uganda that is passionate about blockchain and cryptocurrency. They used the money to host an event in Kampala to help students learn more about smart contracts, decentralized apps, and Witnet’s role. Read more about the grant here.
We are busy restructuring our grant and advocate program. The former will feature a few specific concepts that allows us to give grants to those who are building on our chain integrations. There will be a monthly budget allocated to the program, and we will specifically seek out chains where we want to see more development. The latter program will follow a tried and true approach but will be specific to what the Witnet community needs at any given time. Anyone can apply and based on your contribution to the community you will be given tiered incentives paid in the WIT coin. Both of the programs will launch in early September.
We will also be pursuing the bug bounty program set forth by
a while back as there is a large allocation of WIT available for developers who are interested in furthering the Witnet network and being rewarded for their efforts.-Some other important bits and pieces-
One of our community members put together a Witnet themed store that has hoodies, shirts, etc.
Now that Witty Creatures and all the conferences are over, we are shifting our focus to the decentralized bridge, the litewallet, and some upcoming WIPs.
Witnet is calling on the community to help shape the future of the network. There are a few discussions to be had about some proposals that are in the pipeline. Witnet wants to hear from you, so please leave a thoughtful discussion here, so that we can clearly understand your thoughts on things like increasing UTXO age for collateralization, burning slashed collateral, and fixing block rewards.
This has been a busy month of July, and we can’t wait for August!
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