Really appreciate the thoughts, I think this makes a ton of sense and glad to see someone so knowledgeable join the convos here
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Thanks to everyone for their questions and feedback this week. I really appreciate the many public and private notes of support along with fresh interest in joining the team to help build something incredible with us.
In light of some of the feedback, for the sake of ongoing transparency, weāve decided to create a live dashboard as part of the Creator Services and Games platform. It will show attributable user growth metrics and relevant economics at least at a macro level. Weāll publish a link to it here once itās live, and in the Rally Discord as well.
For those who donāt do Discord or attend our Town Halls, weāll publish periodic quarterly updates here on the forums for a couple years or so. Weāll try to include some āsoftā metrics around ecosystem growth as well to show things like number of new developers brought into the fold! In this way, clear metrics to determine both specific and inferred ROI will be available.
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In full support of the proposal, awesome to see the initiative to speed up developments that will enable more Creator / Fan usecases.
Saw the proposal in āpendingā status on Snapshot: Snapshot Weāll be able to vote in a few hours from now!
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I know this is a bit late, but congrats! Awesome to see the community come together to support this proposal 
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It was awesome! So excited 
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HT to you @HowardMarin. As we thought about the decentralization structure, we are proposing a loan structure for SuperLayer (with interest!) such that the community treasury earns a return for a portion of the budget
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Grant update!
Hi folks! I wanted to give an update on where all the projects stand that were proposed as part of this grant.
*Project: Creator Coin Game Jam
Status: Complete
This project was SO MUCH FUN, and brought some new developers into the community. We started with the Pitch Contest, did updates for the projects as they were built, and then went on to the build phase. A few of the teams stayed on to help build games for the Creator Coin Game Platform!
Pitch Contest: https://youtu.be/apLWzj9gvQM
Contest Review: https://youtu.be/cZcZ1xVkUmo
Contest Results: https://youtu.be/DddFB-dS6m0
*Project: Creator Auctions
Web-based auction system using Creator Coin. Similar to old-school eBay. Creators can designate sellers for their coin, an auction runs to completion, and a post-auction process captures the auction fee, buyer payment, and delivery instructions.
Status: MVP Complete. Available now for Creators to create their own auctions and test!
https://auction.creator.services
We have a creator about to run a multi-seller event shortly, and this platform will continue to receive upgrades as we needed.
*Project: VOD Gating
Coingated transcoding and delivery system for VOD (video-on-demand) and live-stream videos with Creator Coin or Creator Coin NFTs as tickets for live events.
Status: MVP Nearing Completion.
Encoding/DRM/Player/Stream Piping all done and WORKING, going up for testing next week. We will be handling initial upload requests manually as the encoding costs are non-trivial, so a catalog full of āoopsā would get expensive fast! Catalog management UI coming hot on the heels of that.
*Project: RallyBook v2
Status: In Progress. Infrastructure and API upgrades to latest Rally implementations/endpoints complete (except for rewards). Updated dashboards designed and undergoing implementation.
*Project: Creator Coin Game Platform
In-App-Purchase, web-based arcade, audience interaction, Creator customizations, coin-specific leaderboards, and fraud prevention.
Status: MVP Complete
This is available right now for all Creators to use in their communities. https://theplayarcade.com
This platform is now a truly unique offering in the space as it effectively hosts many different Creator Communities and gives them each a dedicated gaming presence to relax, exercise their economy, compete, and have fun. Itās easy to see what kinds of amazing things can be built now for both inter-and cross-Creator meta-awesomeness.
Each Creator has their own dedicated page for community-specific game lineup and leaderboards, integrated with Creator Discords for a nice stream of competitive messages! New Creators are added automatically, within an hour of going live on Rally. Several games can be customized by Creators just by using the web UI. It takes about 60 seconds to sign up, unlock a Creator Community, create a Discord channel for messages, go share the page in your Discord. Could be driving thousands of $ in transactions per week very shortly for each Creator. IAP offerings will expand very shortly to capture the desire/capability for higher-end purchases.
Last weekend we ran the first weekly Creator Payout job to send Creators the revenue they earned from the launch week. Creators are keeping 60% of revenue at the moment, with the other portion going back to pay project royalties, feed the P2E and rewards pool, and run operations. PlayArcade will employ a strategy of locking up RLY in the system by not liquidating Creator Coin unless certain overflows occur.
One Creator is running a high score competition in their community this week. How-to videos coming VERY soon. Unity Plugin and Integration Docs successfully utilized several times already.
Games: We used a rapid prototype and template modification approach to produce several games which are launching with the platform. We have 7 games Live, 2 games In-Testing, and 3 more in early development. ALL of the live games can be used by EVERY creator and customized where supported. Creators can choose which games are featured on their page.
What didnāt make it in? Audience Interaction Features. While we prototyped this in the spring, we didnāt yet make it easy for devs to use and integrate into the games.
Next Steps:
Weāre going to lean HARD into the Creator Coin Game Platform. We have several requests from game devs to launch games on it already, and for other non-Rally tokens to be part of it as well. Not sure how we will handle that yet. Our focus is going to be to add high utility features and work on HEAVY consumer focus to bring in new users.
We are putting together a budget/funding proposal for the next phase now! Thereās so much awesome stuff to build to be able to offer things like P2E. Weād also like to begin offering utility/games for NFT projects minted on Rally, and will be working hard to add those features EARLY. Giving those projects extra utility is of high value to the community.
High notes on proposed feature upgrades:
- Community Features (Challenges/Taunts/Powerups both in and cross-Community)
- Community, Global, and Game-Specific Play to Earn (P2E) Infrastructure
- Expanded NFT Features
- Tournaments and Payouts
- Player Persistence Layer
- Personal Profile Pages
- Expand IAP Offerings
- Consumer-as-Publisher Features
- Interactive Audience Features
- UI/Customization Upgrades
- Infra Scaling
In addition, weāre drawing up budget for 3 Proof of Concept Game Projects to include in the next phase:
- P2E NFT Game Project 1 (Consumer Focus)
- NFT Utility Game Project 2 (Cross-Creator Focus)
- Multi-Creator Game Project 1 (Rally Creator Focus)
We are starting to look into what it may entail to move to a v2-ish curve in order to do some things like P2E and a large consumer outreach, which would make use of a larger economy.
Thanks so much for voting to pass this grant. With most of the projects complete, I hope we are now able to begin generating that value within the community in large multiples!
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If itās interesting to anyone, what was it like to receive and utilize a large RLY grant? Iāll tell you! We got tranches of it from Finance, and tried to keep a nice even keel of prioritization and progress to hit milestones. We STRETCHED that amazing dev grant like peanut butter on toast. We had up to 21 people on the team at one point this summer. That number has shrunk a bit now.
When we proposed the grant mid-summer, RLY was one price, and we knew itād fluctuate. Sometimes when RLY was higher, it was tremendous and we had more than we had planned. On the other hand, when it dipped lower, it wasā¦ less tremendous and we had less than planned. Several of the team were paid in $USD while maybe over half were paid in $PLAY. So we did put a large portion of the grant directly into $PLAY. This did hurt a couple times with some large unexpected exits (OUCH) but overall felt great to do it like that as it was being deployed directly into the community.
One thing that hurt was that one of our main superstar full-stack devs took an offer he couldnāt refuse on a great full time job, which pushed VOD back a bit. Itās a complex stack so pretty hard to find talent for. Heās been great at still giving time and moving forward on it, and Iām happy itās going to see the light of day soon!
In retrospect, Iād say we also needed to plan/budget for marketing/release prep a bit more, as we hit a high % of operability a while ago but itās taking another long period to iron out a ton of little details in order to release. These projects are all at the āembarrassing but functionalā level for me personally. Overall I feel really good about what we were able to accomplish, and excited to do more.
Itās been a great pleasure figuring out how to navigate the challenges of running a Creator Coin that leverages its community pool of engineers, artists, and operational folks. Some days I think weāre a business, other days it feels like a Community. A little of both? Love it here
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