Happy 2022! We come with a bunch of updates

2021 is gone finally and we're happy to reveal all that we've been doing its last months about the project.

Once again, it has been a long time. And we don't have any excuses to save us, other than "its been tough".

These last months have been a rollercoaster. People joining and leaving the project. Little advancement made for weeks, then strange days of sudden progress. Regulatory news coming up, crypto markets going down... And COVID hunting us all. But we're finally here.

The progress of these last months

Since we started implementing the project, we've give around 3000 DEVP to the DAO members for their collaboration in building it. We're still just starting, but we're proud already. With little resources we've started to put some real things in place and, when looking back, the road we walked is huge, and it is awesome.

So, to all the DAO members, and everyone that has helped DevLand in one way or another to thrive, thank you!

Now, what have we been doing?

SNIPPET, the new token

When we created DEVP we though that locking the issuer account was a good idea. It adds trust, we ensure we can't issue more tokens. Ok, but what happens if we really need to? Adding new stages and features to the roadmap we realised we were going to run into some trobule if we try power up everything with a locked token that only has 1M supply.

So we split the functionality in different tokens.

DEVP is going to be kept for the important stuff:

• Reward DAO members
• Allow DAO members to vote
• Serve as quota (kinda gas) to be spent by the users on the services coming up from the final stage of the project, DevLand WorkEngine

On the other side, all the social and content interaction will be covered by SNIPPET:

• Serve as quota to interact with the platform
• Serve as currency for content monetization
• Serve as payment method for premium features

Development of internal tools

Another thing we've been working on is internal tools. To be able to handle the SNIPPET distribution process (still an ongoing issue) we noticed we need some extra tools to properly query the blockchain, create complex transactions and work around it.

So we've started creating like our own framework, to work around Stellar, built on top of StellarSDK. We're just working on the snapshotting and the asset handling, but we want it to end up with these features:

• CLI to allow quick operations and setting up every needed resource in Stellar (PUBLIC or TESTNET) when starting a project
• Support for complex queries
• Snapshot rebuilding
• Services for assets easy handling: issuing, locking, querying...
• Services for trading easy handling: orders and path payments
• Services for liquidity pool easy hanlding
• Specific service for Asset distribution
• Support for assets as NFTs
• TSS support

Also we're planning on running our own Horizon server to allow this framework really shine because the public Horizon server limits the requests rate, making complex queries slower.

Setup of the DAO voting system using InstantDAO

After exploring the few Stellar voting applications that are around we decided to give it a go to InstantDAO. Their project is in alpha stage, so some things are still not fully working but it is a good project. We're doing some research and development on snapshots too so we're looking forward to learn from them on the topic and help them too if required.

Legal research

Legal compliance for a DAO (or any other blockchain related project) IS HARD!

Legislation is not ready in most of the countries (specially for DAOs) and lawyers have to navigate the existing laws, work around them and try to apply to the blockchain world and interpret the outcome. Most of the legal services in Spain aren't ready either. We have members in many countries, so we could try to set it up in another country too, but that something that would need further more research and consultancy.

DAOs aren't a thing in Spain yet. Or mostly any other country. Some countries, and states in the US have setup legal processes to allow DAOs to exists as entities, but nothing around here yet. However, we can start working on it and come up with a company structure that's still legal and satisfies the DAO needs at the same time.

We finally found some clearence looking for any existing success cases in Spain for token issuance and blockchain-driven governance, and a few law firms that are getting experienced in the topic. We currently getting in contact with them for advice and quotes.

Other stuff we did

• Fix frontend bugs
• Research of Stellar ecosystem (libraries, tools, services, TSS...)
• Research of alternative blockchains

What's to come next

Fresh content on the website

We're going to start publishing IT and blockchain content on, at least, a weekly basis. Even before having DevLand Network fully operational to post content as users, we want to start creating quality content and publishing it as Staff so our users can start learning how to leverage the blockchain and other technologies.

Articles about blockchain concepts and about how each blockchain works, zero-to-hero courses on how to build different kinds of apps, frameworks reviews... We've projected a lot of content so anytime our devs run out of coding tasks, they can participate by creating content and get rewarded with DEVP.

Vitalization of Discord server

Our discord server has been quite calmed recently, except for all the new users joining in.

We are going to make it a bit more alive by encouraging user interaction, posting regular updates, creating live events, starting some workshops on different technologies and creating more contests and rewards.

Also we are aware that having Spanish as the main language of the discord server isn't maybe the best idea. We're going to turn our main categories and channels to english language, create a category for Spanish with channels for spanish speakers and keep the International category with different channels for each language.

Integration with Albedo, Freighter and Rabet

The first new step on actual coding tasks is going to be the integration of different signature handling systems. Also we're extending our own localstorage-encripted-private-key powered one to support every operation these browser extension support (and grant the same user experience for mobile users) and adding a wallet page to make users able to see their balances and history.

Customizable user profile

Then we start with the social features. The customizable public user profile will allow users to show others a short bio along with the social metadata like follows, and a few more other details for now. This page will also show the user posts that they decide by configuration and some professional/CV details.

Recovery systems

We know that some web3 concepts and practices can be hard to embrace for the main public for now. Keeping your own private keys (and being accountable for them), not being able to just call support and ask for a password reset. So we're going to set up a few mechanisms to prevent this situations.

First is email recovery and OTP. We don't want to force users to use an email to authenticate as long as we can avoid it, but we want to offer them the chance to provide one for recovery actions over the centralized content and data. For sure we won't be able to recover your Stellar private key, but we can verify you are you and asign the account to another public key.

We're going to also add a recovery file feature for the private key, being able to choose between both options: encrypted and unencrypted, so users can just import that file to restore their accounts.

If you want someone else to keep safe your Stellar account, you can also find some third party services that offer recovery service by multisignature.

DevLand Coffee

Finally, as a little toy project inside DevLand Network, we're building the first feature that actually relays in the blockchain and tokens to operate. It is going to be a little section here in DevLand Network, for authenticated users, with a global microblogging feed in plain text. Users will be able to broadcast their messages while sharing a coffee (or just hanging around). Also, users will be able to tip other users in SNIPPET for their global microposts.

We'll start releasing this changes by the end of January if everything goes well. That's it for now, feel free to contact us in discord for any doubts.

Have a nice start of 2022! See you around!