It’s been a slow week, right?
WRONG.
I know I haven’t been vocal this past week, and I’m sorry if you’ve been bored. But, take it as a blessing. I’ve been so busy this last week I haven’t had a moment to think, and honestly, I envy you.
But, it’s all been for a good cause. I was seeing family, booking the wrong flight twice, making early preparations to quit my other project (training 4 people to take over all the stuff I’ve been doing as yet a single mere mortal), and, of course, strategizing for the next phase of our colony here on Mars.
The rest of the core team was doing the same, and after a productive sync, I have much to share with you.
Housekeeping
Let’s start with the standard list of green check marks. It’s not that long, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy. We’ve probably done more in the last week than we have before.
Development/Design
— We hired another backend dev.
— We continued refactoring and UI fixes, which should finish roughly wednesday.
— We finished the story and design of Missions v1. Mission rewards are to be discussed by you all this week.
— We began spec-mapping a Mars Colony NFT Marketplace, but there is no ETA on it yet. It’s not the highest priority, and the publicity we get from DOMINATING 3rd party marketplace volumes is nice to have in the meantime. That said, we’ve gotten started.
— We began structuring Voting v1, which will be used in mission rewards voting around the end of this week.
— The DEX is in final review by a third party. We hired them a little while ago for certain cross-pool swap mechanism bug squashes, but they have been delayed, and have finally gotten close to finishing, which is another reason the DEX is behind schedule. Once they give us the all-clear, we’ll finish our review by including their work, and launch.
Community
— A bizdev expert that [Father] and I once fought alongside has joined us. Her name is Lena (short e), and she’s incredible.
— @Rutherford organized an incredible Twitter Space event for the Harmony ecosystem. At the moment, we have Knights and Peasants, Cosmic Universe, Defira, Mars Colony, and Cerebral Gaming DAO participating in what will be a chill hangout finished by an AMA. The time is TBA, the date is tentatively Saturday, April 23rd.
— The three community focus groups have finished discussing their ideas and I am finalizing their mission rewards proposals soon.
Forward
Now you’re up to speed on what we’ve been doing, and you’re probably wondering what’s next.
Mission Rewards
First, we need to come to an agreement on what rewards we’ll earn from doing missions. The core team has a proposal, as do each of the three community focus groups led by some of our hard-working and patient mediators @AkaSparkyy, @shittykitty95, and @Rutherford.
I will be posting all four proposals in the next day or two, hopefully.
At the bottom of each proposal will be a simple poll:
“Do you support this idea? Yes/No.”
Then, you can debate the merits, clarify, ask questions, and make suggestions in reply to each post.
The posts with the most “yes” votes will go to official voting, likely an on-chain method that involves both landowners and avatars.
This was initially intended to just be landowners, but now that avatars are on Mars, and the topic of discussion specifically involves them, we’ll want them to vote.
Voting will begin at the end of this week/weekend, most likely.
Missions
Once voting has finished and the most-supported reward model has been decided, it will be built into the missions codebase and missions will launch.
Missions will be simple at first, a click-and-claim sort of interaction.
Then, we’ll begin developing Missions v2 and beyond, in which we explain more about the history of Mars Colony, the main plot, and hint at the future.
Interchain
One such hint is about the interchain colonies. Once the DEX and Missions v1 have launched, the core colonization framework will be in place and it will be time to launch interchainchain.
We’ve already spoken with the Polygon team, and everything is in order. I’ll describe just a little bit here, but you can expect a post with more details about why we’re going interchain and what that will look like (and how it will benefit Harmony) later this week or next.
The first 7,000 lands on Polygon will be reserved for whitelisted Harmony martians (more on that later), and we’re weaving a lot of cool lore and gameplay into it.
I’m sure by now we’re past it, but just in case you have any doubts: Harmony will always be a priority. We’re Harmony users first and forever.
As Eugene so aptly put it,
“Harmony is our baby, how could we ever leave?”
So, get ready to welcome your younger sister Polly with open arms. She’ll need you as a guide, just like I’ve been for you so far.
Core team update
As many of you know, we have a relatively even mix of Ukrainians and Russians on our team. The war is ongoing, but most of us aren’t in-country. On top of that, many of us started Mars while still obligated to build out other projects, so they don’t suffer when we leave them.
We’ve slowly been leaving our other projects to go full-time on Mars, and we’re about 1/3 of the way there. The last 2/3 will be complete in a couple months, after the Polygon launch.
In the meantime, we’re also hiring, but the true strength of the Mars core team won’t be felt until we’re all full-time. I don’t want to get too self-congratulatory, but if we’ve managed to do this much as a scattered, war-afflicted, part-time team, just imagine what we can do when we’re 100% focused here.
I can’t wait.
It also needs to be noted that how far we’ve come isn’t all because we’re some legendary core team.
It’s so cliche, but you are all the reason this is working so extraordinarily well.
You care about what we’re doing here, you’ve been patient and supportive, willing to throw down and discuss ideas and share your art and music, shitpost in chats, reply to posts, tweet about Mars, and be real people online.
This society doesn’t work if we don’t have people like you being how you’ve been. It’s vague because everyone’s also so different, and that’s for the best. This hasn’t just been some homogeneous hype community that kisses ass.
It’s been funny, stressful, thoughtful, tense, warm, electric, it’s been everything.
It’s also been quiet as hell this past week.
And to be honest, I’ve loved every part of it.
Let’s keep moving forward. I can’t wait for you to see what’s next.
— brother
