Ergo- A Community-Driven Ecosystem
There has been a fair amount of drama today around a tweet from ErgoDex. I wanted to draft a quick release to address this and provide clarity to the community as there seems to be some confusion that needs to be addressed.
The first aspect of Ergo to understand is that it is an open ecosystem launched with no ICO, no private funding, and no Premine. A group of developers and users have grown around the network in a grassroots effort to build a system that offers tooling and use cases.
The Ergo Foundation was initially set up to handle centralized points of business that are required to drive market adoption. A simple DAO with a multi-sig voting mechanism to manage funds and spending.
We are currently in the process of formally incorporating the Ergo Foundation as a non-profit in Singapore. Incorporating comes with additional responsibilities; however, it is the best way to fulfill the intended role.
Ergo- A Growing Ecosystem
As we grow, we see community developers who have been contributing to the network for a prolonged period start teams to build dApps on top of the Ergo network.
One example is MHS_Sam, who has contributed to the Stratum Server that the mining community uses. He also has a team that has worked to produce Raffle and the Ergo Faucet.
Ilya, the lead developer of the ErgoDex, has contributed a significant amount of time and resources to developing the Ergo Explorer. He is still supporting the development of the explorer. He has also formed a team that is putting together ErgoDex.
I imagine as developers join and contribute to the ecosystem, they will grow beyond working on more core aspects of the ecosystem and start contributing/building on top of the network. To me, this represents organic growth that is community-driven. That is what Ergo is all about.
In some respect, this may create confusion. Throughout the crypto markets, we are seeing companies building on top of different blockchain projects that are siloed. Some projects are modeled after a traditional company making a conventional product. In some cases, we see market actors shifting away from the open code/open software license standard that created this industry. Closed code and software licensing did not lead to the creation of Bitcoin. I guess from some competitive defensive perspective, this can make sense…??
One thing that I appreciate within the developer community of our ecosystem is collaboration. That is what Ergo is about.
When there is a commitment to open-source code, there is usually a community auditing process that dApps go through. This process not only increases the oversight and security of what we are building but acts to grow the collective mindshare of our developers.
Due to this, the “line” between team, community, and core can get a little blurry for newer users.
Ergo was built in a way that is contrary to most projects, there has been open code and smart contract frameworks on the Ergo Forum before the ecosystem was able to support their implementation.
Ergo’s reference client is in the process of moving towards node V5 which will bring additional tooling and optimization that will increase what our network can support.
ErgoDex- An Overview
Ilya has been leading development on ErgoDex for a while at this point. You can read about the ErgoDex team at the following link. https://ergodex.io
This team is going to oversee the development, product implementation, and marketing of ErgoDex.
If you want to visualize Ergodex and Ergo, you can imagine Uniswap and Ethereum. One is a dApp, and one is a network. Do they work together, and contribute in a mutually beneficial way, absolutely.
The ErgoDex team will continue to interact with the community-driven development ecosystem that Ergo is building. ErgoDex is committed to contributing open-code, and working with the community to advance the use of the Ergo network and extended UTXO.
ErgoDex- To tokenize or not to tokenize, that is the question…
This is something that is asked repeatedly, so I will give my understanding and perception to provide clarity to the community. Below is my personal understanding of the current situation.
One aspect of crypto markets that have created a great deal of uncertainty this year is potential action from the SEC. There is a great deal of speculation surrounding the possible classification of “certain crypto-assets” as securities.
Given a lack of market guidance in this situation, the ErgoDex team decided to focus on other aspects of development first. The majority of the focus at this point is the initial development toolkit, the smart contracts, and the UI. I believe that needs to be done first anyway, so tokenization and governance implementation is on hold.
Launching an ICO with this potential future liability is something that I know that the ErgoDex team has been watching and internally discussing. The other aspect that is being weighed internally is the desire to launch in a way that creates fair distribution and creating a system of governance that is effective.
Will these be addressed? Absolutely, but at this particular point, it is not the focus of the team. At this point, they are building. Again we find an example of the Ergo ecosystem operating in a funny way. Build a product first, then focus on tokenization, market adoption, and marketing.
Conclusion
Many complain that Ergo and its ecosystem lack marketing and there is validity to this claim. As the Ergo Foundation incorporates we will try to build the marketing team, and educational efforts.
There is a lot of emphasis on marketing in the crypto ecosystem, sometimes selling things without even having a product behind the marketing…
I hope that as an ecosystem we improve in marketing while remaining true to the principles of community-driven development, open code, and built on solid tech.
