Working Group Session - 04/20/20

Table of Contents

Video Recording

Business Model Lab 2020/04/20

Introduction

We started out by stating our main goal for the group in question form:

How do we create an economy in the Blockstack / Stacks ecosystem?

As well as asking our weekly question:

Is there anybody making money on Blockstack yet?

While there were no shares on the call this week, there were two items from Jenny’s 4/17 “This Week in Blockstack” blog post that we wanted to share with the group.

Recent Wins

  1. The Blocksurvey team closed a 3 year deal with an enterprise client. Big congratulations to @wilsonbright @HariniRajan and team!

  2. The Pravica team closed a pre-seed investment round with more details coming in an official announcement. Big congratulations to @mabdou.id and team!

Testnet Focus

This week is all about the testnet with the launch of the first phase scheduled in two days (2020/04/22)! With that in mind we wanted to share a few resources related to that:

4/17 Forum post from Diwaker: “Stacks 2.0 testnet launch update”

Phase 1: Neon

  • Focus: native STX mining (proof of burn), peer network, send/receive STX
  • Target date: April 22nd
  • Nodes connect to one shared public Bitcoin node running in regtest mode
  • NOTE: we plan to launch Neon with a single miner node for the first few days, to isolate non sortition related issues. We expect that mining on testnet will be open to anyone < 1 week after this.

Project Board for Neon: Stacks 2.0 Testnet Phase 1

2020/04/09: 11 Todo, 7 In progress, 23 Done
2020/04/20: 4 Todo, 15 In progress, 35 Done

This has been a large focus for the community and the core team at PBC, and I think we are all excited to put theories into action, test out ideas, and move on to next steps.

Educational Resources

More educational material is something we keep touching on in each meeting, so we would like to share a few resources that have recently surfaced in Discord:

Clarity Hackathon

Following up on our action items two weeks ago around the Mini Tutorial Creation Hackathon, Louise presented some notes about the upcoming Clarity hackathon and the structure of the awards for the first phase. The second phase will focus on tooling.

  • Level 0: commonly used / entry level smart contracts, e.g. access restriction, withdrawal
  • Level 1: next level, similar to what @friedger presented, e.g. escrow transaction, simple marketplace, lottery sample
  • Level 2: super heavy, require a definite understanding of levels 0/1, e.g. atomic swaps, app chains, stacking

Louise will share the planning document with the group in Discord, and create a forum post for general feedback. The goal is to create different levels to allow for beginners to join, try to experiment, and write simple examples. An expert developer would want more challenges.

Phillip: just come across “live tutorials”, making mining publications, probably can think of publishing all the mining through this publication because they broadcast a lot, and a new type of publication, you go to something, they have a way to guide you, a way to go through a “quest”, e.g. around COVID-19, analysts, and data, to solve one specific problem. They compete but they focus on teaching, that could be another thing that’s a very good approach.

Louise: definitely if you can share the broad description of the event that’d be great, send me the link!

Business Models Opportunity

Louise described an upcoming opportunity with a group in Amsterdam that would like Blockstack to act as a client for their course in token economics, and we reached a rough consensus on the call that this would be great for the group moving forward, especially with the upcoming Business Models competition.

More information can be found below:

InHolland Social Design Tokenomics Course

The Business Models Working Group will be a speaker, mentor and judge for the InHolland Social Design Tokenomics Course Participation. Their overall course goal is to design token-based business models.
We would give an introduction on the 1st day explaining Blockstack and some possible business models within our ecosystem.
Then 5 weeks later we can return as the students will present their proposals. We can give feedback and stimulate them to try more on Blockstack.
After their presentation, they have a week to finish off. Depending on our time/investment capacity we can participate in both sessions or only during the introduction session.

  • Introduction Session, 2020/04/30, morning
  • Student Presentations, 2020/05/20, morning

Notes from the Call

Louise: The intro session is on 4/30 in Central European Time, would need someone to give an overview of Blockstack, explain what’s possible, then there will be a student presentation on 5/20, and that’s it.

Gina: that sounds exciting! in terms of next steps, are we looking for consensus, have folks available at these times? what are you proposing?

Louise: I would like to see if any of our good speakers, and some of our core team, could team up and address the group, and can act as a mentor and judge, can give timetable for next coming months and weeks. would like to jump in for the opportunity.

Peter: can we post the info online? somewhere we can read more?

Louise: yes, I’ll DM it to you

Jason: I will post the details in the forum post for our group as well.

Phillip: let’s do it! we need more people to join us, limited resources, stacks mining, testnets, need people to test out those tutorials, made a list that - thought best way was to put all challenges together and show the community what we want to achieve.

Action Items

If you are interested in helping out with the event above, please fill out this survey and let us know! We need speakers, mentors, and judges.