08 Feb Symbol blockchain news update – 08/02/22
Hi everyone, I am back with a short update after listening in to the Twitter Spaces broadcast so I thought I would cover some of the highlights below. I apologise in advance as I was trying to multitask and work as well as listen in so I will have missed a lot and forgotten most of the rest! 😆
Valkyrie / Hatchet AMA
I’m now 90 minutes into what my calendar said would be an hour-long AMA with Hatchet and Valkyrie on Twitter Spaces. It has been an interesting listen though! It looks like this will be a regular occurrence and I think it is a great idea. Really nice to see so many of the community attend (and stay up really late in the case of our Japanese friends). I think all of the audio was recorded so if you didn’t make it to the live event then you should be catch up later and I think that replies to community questions will be written up and put online somewhere – Symbol Blog would be happy to format and publish if you’re reading Hatchet!
The Valkyrie discussion
It was nice to get an introduction from Valkyrie and hear a bit about their team’s previous experience – don’t worry guys they are more than qualified for the job 😊
From the discussion, I picked up that the Valkyrie partnership was desperately needed after issues with previous financial management. We needed better governance, better accountability and most of all transparency. They were also able to set up a legal contract with a set of pseudoanonymous developers which was a first in the crypto space. The contract looked awesome too:
Valkyrie will be able to guide the developers through any future regulatory changes and take care of treasury management and auditing. They also build the credibility of Symbol and NEM and will provide additional visibility within the sector.
It seemed that the Valkyrie team appreciated the passion of the community and all of the cool artwork and products being created, especially the Gran Turismo car designs 😁 They are also open to input from the community and want to know what we want to see from the partnership. We will also see more members of the Valkyrie team joining us on the XYM City Discord server soon.
Hiring
We learned that art and illustration is our marketing therefore we need a strong team of designers and I think we will be seeing some new faces joining the crew. Having all artwork under a CC0 license has enabled us as a community to let our imaginations run wild and that’s why we see all of the cool designs and branded goods. It’s a win win, we benefit as we can sell cool merchandise or NFTs with Symbol branding and the project wins through free advertising!
We also found out that the product team will be expanding to make improvements to the explorer, wallet and pick up the Garush project which has stalled recently due to some departures. NEM needs some Java developers so we will probably see some new team members here too.
Hatchet confirmed that there will be no huge expansions in staff numbers, we will just hire the talent and skills sets that we need. The team will be small but they will be the best. We only hire rockstars apparently so the bar is high – if you’re not better than the core devs then you’re not getting in 😁
All expenditure including salary costs will be made public and if we the community don’t agree then we will be able to speak up about it. If nothing is done still and we are not listened to then we have the nuclear option of a hard fork – the code to do this is now available. I don’t think that this will ever happen but the option is there.
Why Symbol and NEM?
With so much competition out there what makes us think we will succeed? What will make us different? Well subChains were mentioned here along with some background to the problem and limitations of current technologies. It sounds like this is an incredibly complex issue to solve and that research is still ongoing. Don’t expect to see NEM and Symbol 2.0 for a while but when it comes it will be an advancement not just for us but to the wider crypto space.
Exchanges
You want exchange listings? Well you will need to be more vocal. Exchanges want to know that there is a demand from the community. Makes sense – if nobody trades your coin then the exchange won’t make any money. I am guessing this is why we see a bias towards listings in Japan where the user base is super strong. In Europe and the US the demand is weaker but it will come. Apparently the only barrier to a Coinbase listing is integration into Rosetta which is being worked on in the background between everything else that has been going on – I have a feeling that the captains are spreading themselves too thinly so we need to get the hiring underway ASAP.
Hatchet also mentioned that exchange listings are really important for POS (and in our case variants of POS) coins so start shouting – I will try to do the same 😊
Entities
As we know already there will be three separate entities set up, one in the US, one in Switzerland and one in Bermuda all with different functions and a different reason for being based where they are. I should have taken notes as I have already forgotten most of the details but I do recall that quadratic funding will be based out of the Bermuda entity so until this is set up QF will be on hold.
Probing questions
There were also some difficult questions posed to Hatchet on Twitter 😂
That’s it from memory – tons more was discussed and I am sure that this will be made available for download or reading at a later date.
EDIT: Hatchet just sent me the link – you can listen to the whole AMA here
The crazy world of on-chain NFTs
I still don’t really get NFTs. Apparently this guy is a famous comedian in Japan and he has listed a short audio clip of him speaking as an NFT on the Symbol chain. Amazingly the bidding is up to 77,777.7777 XYM! That’s roughly $14,500 at current prices – insane! 😁 What do I know know though? Might be the smartest buy the eventual winner ever made. Love that we are seeing celebrities using the COMSA platform though!
Oh I missed the follow up tweet from the seller – thank you Jag for pointing it out!
Looks like @tamukenchaaaaa I will make a thank-you video for the winner on Twitter and invite them to an all-you-can-eat and all-you-can-drink BBQ dinner for up to 4 people! This seems a like better deal – dinner and drinks with a celebrity, He looks like an interesting guy, should be a night to remember! 😁
Epic fail
Remember HistoryMakr the new project set up by a group of ex-NGL clowns team members? If not then see this post and also this one for some background. Unfortunately it seems that after only a couple of months they have been consigned to history and the project has failed. There is a breakdown of what happened on their Discord channel but it seems that there was some kind of hack(?) that they don’t understand that meant that all of their funds were mysteriously drained and they have all given up and moved on.
I am not sure what this means to their community but hopefully nobody got too badly stung. The fact that they don’t know how the funds were stolen makes me think that they probably shouldn’t be playing around with smart contracts and be trusted with large sums of money. Wonder what new ventures they will be starting next, I will be steering well clear of them that’s for sure 😁
Thanks
Thanks as always for reading. If you are a regular reader then please consider delegating to my node xymharvesting.net 😊 I’ll be back again soon with another Symbol Blog update!
I’m a Symbol and NEM enthusiast and run this blog to try to grow awareness of the platform in the English-speaking world. If you have any Symbol news you would like me to report on or you have an article that you would like to publish then please let me know!
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