February 2022

The month of February brought lots of developments within the Cyber Republic’s Elastos ecosystem.

As a grassroots project, Elabox has continued to build on improvements and execute the deliverables in their roadmap. The new CR Grant Program brings more opportunities to developers and project managers who want to build on top of the Elastos tech stack.

Marketing has been a big ask from the community and the Marketing Proposal with TLGG has shown a desire to give the project more exposure to a wider audience. Another marketing initiative has officially been executed with a popular Voskcoin video about Elastos and BTC merged mining.

As NFTs have come to the forefront of crypto-enthusiasts – the Pasar dApp on Feeds is continuing its development path swiftly. One of the groups that form the heart and soul of the Elastos community, the Elastos Guardians, have also made lots of progress with their community engagement initiatives.

Proposals in the public spotlight

Proposal #50 Elabox Launch Initiative

Elabox considers itself the most secure way to access the decentralized Web while keeping digital assets secure. Proposal #50 passed last July, giving Elabox room to bring the premier Web3 Elastos hardware device to life.

The Elabox team came out with their new progress report on their Medium page. User feedback and developer testing has led to a number of improvements to the ElaboxOS. The power controls added ‘reboot’ and ‘shutdown’ functions to the logout button and users can now add wallets via the Keystore, making wallet integration that much easier. Elabox has also now added integration to Elastos’ native DeFi hub – Glide Finance.

The biggest Web3 wallet in all of DeFi is unquestionably MetaMask, so this has also been integrated to the Elabox device. Other security enhancements and fixes have also been applied in order to provide a safer and more user-friendly experience.

The development roadmap includes DID integration for an Elabox License purchase, system authentication via DID, Elabox dApp store v1, integration of DID, and Essentials wallet support. The latter two additions will allow users to purchase an ElaboxOS license and install it on their own Raspberry Pi or single-board computers (SBC).

Elabox has teamed with ela.city, a unique destination to mint and sell NFTs in the Elastos ecosystem. Both parties have agreed to participate in a Community Grant Fund application for developers. Read their suggestion for more details on the Fund, like it too, and leave a comment to support their efforts.

Proposal #60 Improving the accessibility of ESC and bootstrapping liquidity (Revised)

Glide Finance is a project that has the goal of fuelling the Elastos DeFi ecosystem. In order to get the liquidity to execute such a task, the team needed to garner funds from CRC.  Proposal #60 was passed in September of last year to make Glide Finance’s dream a reality. The 100,000 ELA budget was allocated for a few things: subsidizing bridge fees, supplying gas to new users, providing liquidity to Glide pools, and a promotion fund.

Glide Finance has been up and running, working smoothly, and doing its part as the centerpiece of the DeFi ecosystem on Elastos Smart Chain. A Binance Smart Chain bridge has been built with two farms currently active for BSC-bridged assets (BNB and BUSD). A caveat in the Proposal was that CR itself would earn GLIDE tokens for the liquidity being provided. Thus far CR has earned 260,000 Glide tokens.

Proposal #64 CR Grant Program

CRC is an elegant consensus mechanism that allows the community to vote for leaders in order to pass proposals to further the Elastos ecosystem. There are times, however, when CRC does not come to an agreement to pass proposals that have community support. In efforts to fund projects that don’t meet the CRC acceptance threshold, Proposal #64- CR Grant Program was born. This program will fund projects that want to build using Elastos technologies.

The specifics of the CR Grant Program were published in February. The voting progress of Grant Fund applications will be decided by the Elastos community using DID.

How does one apply for one of these grants? 

Interested parties need to create a suggestion on the Cyber Republic website following an e-Lab proposal on the e-Lab website. All projects can apply for up to 10,000 ELA. Once the proposal is processed by the e-Lab team then the community will vote for the project. Both the users and teams will need to pass a KYC on https://kyc-me.io/ in order to ensure authentication and security for the process. The first community vote is planned for March. Community voting will be monthly, with the winners announced each month. For further details on the program please refer to the e-Lab documentation. DID KYC requirement solutions are underway to ensure this is available as quickly as possible.

Proposal #65-66 Contract Tier 1 Marketing Agency, TLGG Omnicom to Create and Execute a 12-month Marketing and Communication Strategy

Last November, Elation Studios helped draft a comprehensive proposal to drive Elastos’ Marketing and Communication strategy to another level. TLGG Omnicon is a Tier 1 Marketing Agency that Elation selected to draw up a targeted plan. TLGG will now be tasked to execute a 1 year marketing and communication strategy to position Elastos as a leader in the crypto Web3 space. Other initiatives will be to approach big exchanges and get ELA listed on such platforms.

TLGG came out with very detailed reports on how Elastos can grow and thrive in the crypto environment. The marketing firm will be focusing on Twitter, Reddit and Youtube as the main Social Media platforms to engage potential users/community members. KPI goals will be set for engagement and goal traffic for these outlets.

Another report was created by TLGG to shed light on three main areas: Brand Awareness, Core Value Proposition and Marketing tactics. The team broke it down into two types of audiences that Elastos must penetrate: Community members and developers. Specifically TLGG wants to prioritize four types of users: Experienced Web 3 developers, Novice Developers, Early Web 3/ Crypto adopters and Mainstream users.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant is the method TLGG used in order to derive best practices for Elastos. In this exercise, Elastos was compared to a plethora of projects like Ethereum, Solana, Polkadot, Tezos, Dfinity, amongst others. They determined that Elastos has a strong and complex vision but is not yet competitive with other projects. Improving the technical, informative and cultural channels will allow Elastos to increase engagement within the crypto community. Another paramount task to be executed is improving partnerships and collaborations in order to branch out and increase awareness in other communities.

TLGG also wants to build on Elastos’ Core Value proposition. They believe that focusing on Elastos as the gateway to your data or digital identity is very promising and with a lot of substance. Taglines like “Your data, your identity, your internet”, “The Road to Web 3 begins here” and “Building Tomorrow’s Internet” seem to resonate with Elastos’ mission. A marketing campaign will be built with a map of a core audience group to reach out to and engage with.

Proposal #67 Proposal to Develop a Dedicated Pasar Web App

The Feeds dApp has been a very popular vehicle for Elastos community members to buy/sell and mint NFTs in the Elastos ecosystem via the extension, Pasar. Whether it was apes, elephants or some other safari animal, Elastos community members were enjoying the native NFTs. Based on the popularity of Pasar, a proposal was passed in November in order to build a standalone dApp for Pasar. Some goals of the proposal are to make Pasar the go-to NFT destination on Elastos Smart Chain. The team also plans to create a sustainable marketplace in order to buy/sell NFTS easily and seamlessly. Other tasks of the proposal is to cater to mobile users and create bridges to Essentials wallet and other outlets.

Thus far the Technical Advisor has properly reviewed the Phase 2 features that were supposed to be implemented. These features have been properly tested and are working very smoothly. The main features of the web dApp is the integration of DIDs. Currently the team is working on V2 contracts (Phase 3) which will support auctions, batch minting, collection, multiple ERC-20 (ESC) tokens and more.

Proposal #68 [REVISED] Funds for Strategic Marketing: Influencer Relationships and Social Media Campaigns

Proposal #68 was drawn up in efforts to continue building brand awareness via the popular Youtube channel, Voskcoin, which has 579,000 subscribers. The Voskcoin video has officially been released and has achieved over 18,000 views. Voskcoin is a very big Bitcoin miner and the video featured Elastos’ elegant merged mining consensus mechanism. He gave an educated viewpoint regarding how to merge mine ELA while mining Bitcoin. He also shed some light on the Elastos Smart Chain and how many features it provides. Engaging almost 600,000 crypto enthusiasts is a huge step in the right direction for Elastos and soon lots of Bitcoin fans and users will be open to joining the Elastos ecosystem.

Proposal #75 [REVISED] Elastos Guardians and Discord migration

For the last couple of years, a special group of people named the Guardians have been shepherding the Elastos community while being excellent resources for information and guidance. In January of this year, Proposal #75 was executed in order to properly compensate the Guardians and give them a budget to better engage with the community.

There are several updates that have been accomplished by the Guardians thus far. They are working hand in hand with e-Lab in order to vet and evaluate prospective projects through the CR Grant Program. Our Guardians now have an official Twitter account. The first two weeks of their Twitter competitions have finished, and now they are challenging community members to participate in graphical productions. These competitions reward community help with ELA prizes. The full Elastos Community Program is live now so you can see the opportunities using the special type “!Program” function on the Elastos Discord Server.

Conclusion

Those who have been a part of CR and Elastos as a contributor or a community member know one reality about Elastos: It’s a very ambitious and complicated project that has multiple layers to it. CRC has done a great job in addressing multiple issues in building more brand awareness through marketing campaigns, and assigning funds to attract more users and developers. Groups like the Guardians have the passion and the will to educate and recruit more people into the ecosystem. 

Projects like Elabox, Glide Finance, Elacity and Pasar are forming the building blocks of the ecosystem to make it a safe and ideal place to explore a data-ownership-centric DeFi and Web3 experience. Stay tuned for next month’s update as we see the burgeoning Elastos ecosystem get stronger and better.