Table of Contents
Video Recording
Intro
In reviewing the agenda and discussion items from past meetings, we touched on a question from the very first meeting relevant to our overall mission.
How do we create an economy in the Blockstack / Stacks ecosystem?
When thinking about this question, I wanted to share a link from the stakeholder interviews in Governance (which are worth a read, by the way!), outlining the “vocabulary for the distributed economic networks of the next economy”.
I thought there was some really cool information in here at a glance, and it aligns well with what we are doing right now.
We also revisited our core question for the group:
Is there anybody making money on Blockstack yet?
@proe shared that they are in the position to integrate the economic side of smart contracts for Paradigma Crosscheck, models for working with customers, and generating revenue. This stage is preparing and testing for the launch of testnet and mainnet.
Funding
On the topic of money, let’s talk about putting money to good use. Blockstack PBC is ready to fund projects, tools, resources that would support business models on Stacks 2.0.
With that in mind, we as the community need to give some direction on where we want that money to go.
- we’ve talked about smart contracts and interesting ideas around clarity, from proof of hodl login to a certification registry
- we’ve talked about app tokens and how they can relate to a user staking model, where a user’s focus determines the success of an app.
- we’ve talked about app chains and the Inception-like ability to go a level deeper, whether that be with stacking, delegation, storage, or other operations.
The big question is: which should be prioritize in terms of funding, either as a hackathon prize or a bounty/grant?
@proe supports the ideas above and expressed some difficulty in working with smart contracts at this time. We need better tools to let us play and build.
@Trudko made the point that we should focus on ways to earn money now by coming up with useful products, and that getting paid is easier afterward. He would focus on needs of existing token holders, with DeFi and financial tools being one area to work in.
@Patrick expressed that from a 30ft view of the ecosystem there are free-riders in any blockchain, people who hold the token but do nothing else. They are not “activated”. We need to create a closed loop that turns passive STX HODLERS into active STX HODLERS.
Target Market
Following that conversation, we discussed how to get from concept to action, specifically with STX HODLERS as the target market. Smart contracts handle transactions, fees, exchanges. DeFi and Financial Tools - so which ones do we need to tackle now?
@proe made a good point that we need to know our target market better. We know they invested because they saw opportunity or believed in the vision, but we don’t know enough about them to develop for them.
@Trudko proposed a simple three step process: 1) Pick customer / niche 2) talk to them, find a problem 3) solve it (the tricker part in practice).
@proe continued that a simple approach to the market is normal business, not thinking of the cryptocurrency crowd, not focusing on token holders, but instead focusing on everyday users. We agree we want to impact token holders though and this is a good challenge.
@whoabuddy made the point that we need to identify blockers, or core building blocks to making ourselves successful. Take the example of a wallet, we should look into a SDK that allows others to create a wallet as part of their app, so that their app can easily send/receive STX tokens. The concept of taking an idea and abstracting it out one layer further.
@proe Reitereated that we need to get know our token holders, we need to know our “ideal customer” so we can help solve their problems.
Action Items
Overall there were some great discussions and I definitely encourage everyone to view the recording for more detail than what is in the notes here.
Out of those discussions, we want to identify some simple line items for people to move forward on, and how to develop these ideas into concepts that we can put money/funding behind.
Please volunteer to help with the following or tag Blockstackers you think could be helpful with any of the following:
- Looking back at our Mini Tutorial Creation Hackathon, what jumps out as the top 3 to work on starting today?
- Looking at the wallet SDK proposal, what is a shared tool that we should develop today, and what is it worth?
- Looking at our educational materials, what do we need more content around, and what is it worth?
This is our chance as a community to identify what we need. If you want to have fun with it, make a WANTED poster!
this is bible