Reviewing Our Roadmap From June

In June, we published a roadmap update, highlighting the achievements of the prior months, and looking at our goals for the future. With the recent announcement about token transfers being enabled on November 29th, let’s take a look back at the three topics highlighted in our June update, along with some other significant achievements that we have accomplished over the past few months. Within the next few weeks, we will also be publishing a longer post for Subsocial’s 2024 roadmap.

Token Transfers

A few months ago, an HRMP channel was opened between Subsocial and Moonbeam Network, which would allow for tokens to be transferred between Subsocial and Moonbeam network, once the channel was activated. At the time, we left it disabled, as token transfers were still disabled.

Ultimately, we decided to partner with HydraDX, a parachain on Polkadot designed for DeFi. Work on that began at the beginning of November, with our developer teams coordinating to make sure everything worked on the testnet.

As recently announced, this channel has been opened, and token transfers will be enabled on November 29th, allowing tokens to be transferred between Subsocial and HydraDX.

At the time of writing, around 500M tokens, or 50% of the initial total supply, is circulating, as the protocol treasury or Subsocial Foundation allocations are not considered circulating (the treasury has not actually been created yet, but will be soon, once on-chain governance is set up).

With the token now transferrable and available to the public, the Subsocial community can now start its real growth, as new creators are onboarded to Creator Staking, and the social graph expands!

The Spacers NFT Collection

Following the sale of the Spacer Pods one year ago, the Spacer NFT collection was finally minted on Moonbeam in July of this year, following some delays with the RMRK technology, which powers the awesome modularity of the Spacers. The community got to see some awesome Spacers, as people mixed and matched different items to create truly unique looks!

Regrettably, the collection has not received as much care since then as it should have. However, the team believes that in order for the Spacers to shine, Subsocial must be successful, and has been 100% focused on getting Subsocial to the point where it starts growing virally and organically, bringing in new users who may one day want a Spacer.

We have not forgotten about the Spacers, and look forward to the day when developing them further will be in the best interest of the whole community. Subsocial’s success is the Spacer’s success!

Grill.chat Integrations

Following the integration of Grill.chat into both Sub.ID and Zeitgeist’s prediction market application, there have been a number of exciting updates related to Grill integrations since June.

Polkassembly added Grill.chat to provide access to the Polkadot and Kusama Gov channels, letting users discuss the general state of governance or specific proposals right on Polkassembly.

The integration on Sub.ID was overhauled, taking it from a pop-up Grill window to a full side panel, dedicated to the Polkadot chat to increase visibility and traffic, which has worked out great so far!

PolkaVerse integrated Grill.chat as well, using it to replace the old comments section with the goal of improving the user experience.

The team partnered with ITC.ua, an IT news site that receives ~7 million views per month, to test Grill.chat with Web2 users. The experiment proved a great success, showing that Web2 users can use blockchain tech with ease, if the proper UX solutions are in place, and provided lots of helpful feedback on Grill’s moderation system.

Grill.chat also now supports Polkadot wallets, bringing a variety of Polkadot identity options into Grill, such as Subsocial Usernames, Polkadot on-chain identity, or web3names from KILT Protocol!

Protocol Upgrades

The Subsocial protocol has also received a number of cool upgrades recently. With the DataHub release, Subsocial unlocked the ability to have off-chain and/or optimistic posting, allowing real-time interaction while still backing things up to the blockchain for censorship resistance and content permanence. Off-chain posting allows applications to lower their operating costs, and both options enable smoother user experiences, on par with what we know in Web2.

Finally, EVM addresses can now be linked, allowing users of Subsocial apps to import things like ENS usernames and sign in with Metamask, opening the doors for a huge number of crypto-native users to onboard to Subsocial with ease!

Creator Staking

Launched in beta on October 26th, Creator Staking has gotten off to a great start, along with an uptick in network activity and social mentions since the release!

The Creator Staking system allows SUB holders to stake towards creators of applications, content, and communities, and earn rewards. Creators also earn rewards, based on how many tokens are staked towards them, incentivizing creators to produce great work that benefits the Subsocial network. In this manner, Creator Staking helps the network to curate itself, provides users with an increased involvement in the success of their favorite creators, and gives both users and creators more stake in the success of the network.

So far, over 28 million SUB has been staked by 1050+ stakers to the initial 10 creators that were onboarded. We will be adding more creators soon, and in the future will likely open the onboarding process up to on-chain governance in some form.

The upcoming 2024 roadmap will include more details about the bright future of the Creator Staking system. The team has multiple awesome ideas on how to improve the design, making it even more productive at boosting network growth! If you have any suggestions or insights, make sure to send us a message, and start staking your SUB to the best creators. In the meantime, we’ll see you on-chain!