15 Oct Symbol blockchain news update – 15/10/21
Good morning world! It’s Friday and I am taking at least one day off this weekend so no work and probably no blog post tomorrow. We don’t have a huge amount to cover today as Twitter has been pretty quiet over the last few days. Sure that this is either the calm before the storm or I have been a bit slack keeping up with the news. There are a couple of interesting tweets that I picked up on though so it warrants a Friday post 😊
NGL nodes and voting
Sorry guys, I completely missed this tweet earlier in the week! It seems that all NGL nodes stopped harvesting on the 9th October and non-voting nodes are being turned off (maybe they have been already, I haven’t checked).
As you will notice from @Jaguar0625‘s tweet all NGL voting nodes are still online and still voting (but not harvesting). It seems from the wording that this is temporary and that all NGL nodes will disappear in the future. At present I guess there are too few non-NGL voting nodes to support finalisation otherwise they would be gone already.
Please, if you can, make sure that you enable voting on your node. I assume that you still need to have a balance of over 3M XYM which definitely counts me out. Perhaps the threshold for voting could be reduced? It would have to be reduced massively for me to be able to vote but I am sure that many more nodes would get involved even if the requirements were reduced to say 1M. That’s a pretty significant stake still, maybe I will get there one day. Just need a lottery win first.
EDIT: I am all about the edits today!
It seems that the team are thinking of allowing funds to be pooled to allow a node to vote. I am assuming(?) that it would be the total node balance rather than the balance of the main account on the node that would be considered in this case? I was wondering if this could be done myself a few weeks ago but thought that total balances of nodes can fluctuate quite dramatically when harvesters leave and join so maybe the plan is something else entirely. I am excited to find out though! 😁
Onwards and downwards? History will decide..
This looks like a juicy story but I don’t know all of the details and don’t want to point any fingers without knowing the full facts.
What I can say for sure is that the ex-MD of NEM Software Mike Sotirakos has a new business venture “History Makr“. Well good for him! What is it? A new NFT platform! Built on Symbol right? Well no, it’s an Ethereum based platform and it seems that many of the ex-NGL team are involved in the project too.
Hatchet provides a really nice investigation in this thread which you should read for yourselves. She obviously knows a lot more about this potentially sordid story but as she points out in the thread contractraly she is not allowed to reveal any of the past goings on at NGL. It didn’t stop her from talking about what is in the public domain and happened after NGL was dissolved though and it is pretty interesting. So interesting in fact that it earned her a Twitter blocking from one of the parties involved Feel Good NFT 😂
What does Feel Good NFT have to do with History Makr? Milo Croton Limited, a new company set up in July this year, around the same time as NGL was shut down.
Mike Sotirakos and Ben Brophy appear to be company directors and Ben is the ex-Head of Sales at NEM Software. He probably needs to update his LinkedIn account as he no longer works there.
As Hatchet points out in her Twitter thread, it seems that Milo Croton Limited are linked to Drops Lab Limited (website here) and they share a director Sabri Dane Gazail who you might recognise from the History Makr website:
In fact the Drops Lab website has some old presentations that were uploaded in May of this year whilst NGL were still active. Hatchet provides a link in her thread to the documents but I have also included them here and here since they are in the public domain and I like to share. You will notice that they are stating there is a new partnership between NEM and Drop Labs and how Symbol “offers many technical improvements and new possibilities compared to other chains”.
You will also notice in the document Sabri Gazail is the contact person and that he also worked for NEM software back in May. The other NEM software contact is Peter Howell who is now on the board of directors for Milo Croton Limited and again is featured on the History Makr website.
I was also wondering what happened to this football NFT partnership made back in May 2021! Would seem likely that NEM’s partner Drops Lab would be involved but maybe they partnered with another independent company for this rather than profiting directly themselves whilst working at NGL?
I like the fact that Mike Sotirakos provides a quote in the blog post above singing the praises of Symbol and this new partnership that was supposed to launch in July 2021.
As Mike Sotirakos, Managing Director of NEM Software has commented, “With hundreds of millions of fans globally, Symbol provides the ability for athletes to share their stories directly through a next-generation collectible platform. Blockchain technology enables us to bring creators and consumers closer together with the goal of promoting access and inclusion to an entirely new tokenized economy – and we’re excited for NEM to be at the forefront of that.”
He obviously had a change of heart since then as he went with Ethereum for their new venture 😆
What does this mean?
Hatchet poses some interesting questions in this tweet:
EDIT: I forgot to include this important point! I believe Project Kairos has now been shelved but it was an NFT market that NEM Software were actively working on. Coincidentally, apparently it is very similar to History Makr. Nice to have a ready made idea/product straight out of the gate when you are setting up a new company. Also nice to take all of the developers with you, even better if you don’t have to pay for the R&D – helps you hit the ground running. The link in Hatchet’s tweet to the GitHub page gives a 404 for me but maybe if the details of the project are not confidential the community will be able to make the comparison for themselves.
It would be great to know more, perhaps someone out there can do some digging and let us know. It does seem a little strange that the directors of these new businesses were all set up by ex NEM Software members and that Drops Lab were about to announce a partnership with NEM back in May of 2021, the same month as the new football NFT project was announced. I obviously can’t comment on how similar this new business History Makr is to projects that were under development in (and paid for by) NEM Software, who knows.. Well Hatchet does but she had to sign something to say that she wouldn’t divulge it! 😁 I will wish these guys good luck but I personally would not touch their products with a barge pole (British slang for I will stay well away from it) smells very fishy to me.
Job available
Argh, I meant to include this too so I am updating today’s post. Opening Line is looking for a blockchain engineer. I know that the majority of Symbol Blog readers are from Japan so please spread the word! 😊
Thanks!
Thanks, as always(!) for reading. We will be back again soon with another update. Hope you enjoy your weekend! 😁
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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