November 2022

November was an ominous month in the history of cryptocurrency. Massive fraud has occurred within the FTX exchange. FTX’s fall from grace has ensnared and damaged multiple projects including such entities as BlockFi and Genesis, impacting thousands of investors across the globe. While times are tough for crypto projects, Elastos and its Cyber Republic continue to build out their Web3 infrastructure. 

Kairon Labs provided an update on the ELA markets and, given the turmoil in the markets, demonstrating their careful and considered market-making liquidity management. The Guardians, a collection of longtime Elastos advocates, are wrapping up their first term of organizing and maintaining our community. Social media dApp Feeds released an update regarding its web-based app progress. Elavation, the newly formed BD team for Elastos, hosted a Town Hall meeting in efforts to familiarize the community with their team and overall goals. 

Proposal 75 – Guardian Community Management

In the beginning of 2022, Proposal #75 was passed in efforts to arrange a well-suited group of Elastos evangelists and supports to manage community efforts. The Guardians have made a grand effort in sharing news and posts on Elastos and CR while arranging different contests and events for the community.

A brief overview of the Guardians first term:

In February and May, the Guardians created Social Networking Twitter competitions. ELA rewards were distributed based on creating an Infographic that best illustrated the Elastos Ecosystem and also sponsored a Social Media Engagement challenge. The Guardians were also instrumental in coordinating the suggestions and proposals for the CR Grant Program platform e-Lab. Although E-Lab didn’t flourish as hoped, there were still a few projects, like Elabox and BunnyPunk, that were able to gather funding for their respective development. They are still building and growing today.

In March, the “Server Discovery” function was enabled, allowing the Elastos Discord to be searchable by other Public servers with the keywords “web3”, “decentralized internet”, “smartweb”, “blockchain”, amongst other related terms.

At multiple times throughout 2022, Red Packets containing ELA rewards were tweeted and disbursed to community members. A video competition was launched to the community with the top prize being 50 ELA. In May and June, the Elastos Guardians successfully promoted the annual CRC Elections and completed tasks such as compiling questions from the community for the candidates. 

The Secretariat approved the last payment of Proposal #75 and unspent ELA will return to the CR Treasury. The Guardian team submitted a new Suggestion #202: Elastos Guardians 2023 Term (now promoted to a proposal). In summation, the Guardians would reduce its members to three, with an official Guardian Lead assigned to head the community management on Discord, and possibly other outlets. MButcho, the elected leader of the Guardians, would assume the role of Lead. MButcho would be responsible for creating a budget for team funding, manage the community program, trigger a Guardian election for the community to vote on regarding the final two team members, communicate with the Elastos BD team, and undertake platform and service maintenance.

The final two elected Guardian members will perform platform moderation, basic technical support on core products such as Essentials and Feeds, spread awareness for Elastos on Social media, and handle the Guardians Twitter account. Ultimately, the requirements for additional Guardian members are to provide support to community members within 1 hour and encourage/motivate members to help others in the community. Prospective Elastos Guardians have to be long-term community members and supporters who pass an internal evaluation by the Guardians team.

Proposal 80 – Contract Kairon Labs to Perform Market Making Services for Elastos 

In May of 2022, CRC passed Proposal #80 contracting Kairon Labs to be the de facto market maker for the Elastos project. Since being tasked with the proposal, Kairon Labs has been instrumental in getting ELA listed on Gate.io while also performing valuable market making services and extending its network to the Elastos project.

Kairon Labs produced a report for November. Unfortunately last month there was a lot of chaos and controversy in the crypto industry. Investors were stricken by the fraud and collapse of the FTX exchange. These circumstances caused ELA and most other coins/tokens  to experience downward sell pressure in the markets until finally holding critical support. 

Kairon Labs is focusing attention on providing strong liquidity to safe and trusted exchanges in order to maintain a healthy market for ELA. Price has continued to be properly aligned throughout exchanges while maintaining tight spreads to make sure there’s price stability across the market. Kairon Labs has facilitated just under $1 million in volume across Kucoin, Huobi, Coinbase, and Gate.io in November. 

Proposal 86 – Feeds Web App Development Proposal

In August, Elastos Project Lead, Shaba, crafted Proposal #86 with the main goal of creating a web-based version of the Feeds dApp to aid its mission of combating censorship and social media control by centralized providers. Feeds is an ideal platform for social media due to decentralized management, ownership of private data, and guaranteed freedom of expression without threat of censorship.

Danial Asralf provided an update to the CR Secretariat. All features described in the first phase are implemented. However, the team is having issues with slow loading and synchronization of data. Tang Zhilong is personally working with the developers to solve this issue as soon as possible.

Users are able to login to Feeds with DID via Essentials and access their data from Hive. Existing mobile users can also access their channels and data from the web version.

Feeds now allows people to create channels and publish them to the “Explore” section as NFT channels (described in Phase 2). Users can create posts, leave comments, and like posts. Furthermore, Profile, a feature not currently available in the mobile version and supposed to be delivered in Phase 2, is now implemented. This Profile function allows users to express and differentiate themselves even more on the platform.

Town Hall with Elavation

In September, Elation Studios passed a handful of proposals to create a new BD team that would focus on duties such as Ecosystem awareness, attracting new users, driving new products and investments into Elastos, amongst other initiatives. This month, the Elavation team conducted their very own Town Hall for the Elastos community. Prior to the event, Elastos Info published an article detailing Elavation’s mission statement along with individual profiles for each team member.

In the beginning of the Town Hall each team member gave their introductions and allowed anyone attending to provide any ideas, complaints, suggestions and reflections on their Elastos journey thus far. Community members mentioned a few different areas of confusion with the project. The whole concept of “owning your own data ” seems hard to understand to the common person. It would be ideal for Elastos to tell their mission statement in a more cohesive fashion. There is also some disconnect on the different token types of Elastos regarding the main chain, Smart Chain and Ethereum Chain versions. 

Essentials is seen as one of the jewels of the Elastos project. Participants in the Town Hall believe that the popular dApp should be one of the centerpieces of the ecosystem. Its improved V3 with simplified UX lends itself to be marketed as akin to the “Apple of Web3”. Simple. Accessible. Attractive.

Feeds is another popular dApp amongst people in the Elastos community. Integrating Feeds into Essentials was presented as an ideal fit which would make Elastos as a true Web3 social solution that expands the crypto space. Someone mentioned that DID addresses such an averagejoe.ela would be much more accessible and usable by non-tech types, a feature that was covered by Proposal #76.

The Elastos block explorer was mentioned as needing an upgrade, with hopes of similar usability to Ethereum’s Etherscan. Finally, some members mentioned that marketing needs to be enhanced across the board. A few suggestions are to focus on one website for the whole ecosystem; the multiple Elastos web presence is rather fragmented. Another idea is to have a marketing channel that specifically funnels content that community members can promote and push via their respective social media accounts. 

Members of the Elastos Foundation, like Elastos Founder Rong Chen and the Elation Team, had some follow-up commentary regarding some of the suggestions and complaints regarding the project. A community member described Carrier 2.0 as a product but Rong clarified this statement and stated that it’s more like the “plumbing and under-the-hood” work done to make the communication and network run smoothly. He acknowledged that educating the community and greater crypto community on Carrier and other Elastos technology is paramount. 

Another point of contention was the fact that Elastos has been labeled as a “Chinese project” which was mooted as troublesome with regards to data privacy. The Elavation team explained that the Cyber Republic DAO and Elastos Foundation are registered in Delaware and Singapore respectively. Based on these facts, the Elastos and Cyber Republic project should be considered a global project.

Conclusion

The overall theme for Cyber Republic in the past month has been community, marketing and code building. The Guardians are a passionate group of people that want to show others what Web3 should be about and how Elastos is their ticket to get there. Their mission of community building and spreading the word is commendable and necessary to grow the project. 

Having Kairon Labs as a market maker during these unstable times in the market has served as a life saver for ELA. Their presence ensures price consistency and stability across all markets. They have thereby provided a lot of value and peace of mind. The Feeds team is delivering ahead of schedule providing fixes and updates with many features of their web-based version of the dApp. Finally, Elavation is a group of leaders and business professionals that has a clear vision and openness to make the Elastos ecosystem stronger and more vibrant to people in and out of the cryptosphere.

The work continues no matter what macro conditions are going on in the geopolitical world and financial markets. Cyber Republic is moving forward with its mission to be a staple of Web3.