Ecosystem AMA — April 13th, 2022
Hosted by Eoghan. Featuring Herman, CEO @ Cherry Labs; Marvin, Project Lead at Cherish
The following is a write-up of the “Ask Me Anything” session that took place in the Cherry Telegram channel on Wednesday, April 13th, 2022
Introduction
by Herman, CEO
In this AMA we’ll discuss the rescheduling of the mainnet launch which was announced yesterday, plus all the other happenings at the project.
I: Core Updates
Mainnet Scheduling
by Herman
The first point I’d like to make is that we do sympathise with you guys, we’re very thankful for the passion that has been shown, both in the disappointment but also in the support that we’ve received since our announcement.
We know that many people are heavily invested either personally or financially in the success of Cherry and we don’t see that wavering or changing in any terms.
Nonetheless, while this is a small step back, it does give us a chance to really review the passion, the interest, the solidarity within this community, the fact that people were so disappointed is frankly a signal that they care deeply for Cherry.
And likewise, we do too — we the team also share your passions, your hopes and aspirations for Cherry. Everybody in Cherry is dedicated to the success of their project.
Next, I’d like to say something a bit more abstract. Something that I hold very dear in Cherry that grants it an edge over a lot of other initiatives is that Cherry aims and aspires to be a decentralized collaborative effort. The object of cryptocurrency and blockchain is to distribute trust and the reliance of developers on computational systems to a network of people around the world who collaborate, who share certain principles such as the rules governing the blockchain, towards a broader goal.
With that, I’d like to address a few points and questions that I found throughout the past 8 hours since the announcement. I’ll start off with one regarding transparency. People have asked, “why didn’t they announce this sooner?” Maybe the timing could’ve been better, I agree, I understand in cases of innovation, of people interacting in this very complex and high-level manner, the more information the better. We should’ve announced things sooner and made decisions sooner. Nobody was really informed, it wasn’t some conspiracy or market manipulation. Again, our objective is the success of the project, we’ve weighed every single aspect and concluded that at the moment, over the past 4 days, the best decision was to delay.
We decided that we should release at the next big network upgrade, the next large step in the building of Cherry, which will occur in late May/early June. I stated in the blog that it’s tentative, but I’m pretty sure that we’ll hit that at the very least because the plans in the interim haven’t really changed. Tooling-wise, this new mainnet date will allow us to have a pretty mature ecosystem at launch; we’ll have a bridge, we’ll have stablecoin, we’ll have a variety of other functionality essential to a layer one. All that is currently being worked on.
We are expecting to launch a bridge pretty soon, we’re expecting a bunch of new upgrades, a great new blockchain UI that will improve people’s ability to interact with the chain. And so, having that as well as this next step, we decided that would be a good date, although it may be sooner.
While you guys share a similar level of ownership over the project as anyone else, as I do, I do have certain information that’s privileged, about when exchanges are going to be listed or when certain things are going to happen. I’m a manager at Cherry Labs and there are a lot of ecosystem things that I filter through every single day. It’d be my pleasure to share that with you in a controlled but rigorous and more transparent way. A few weeks ago, I stated my intention to create a dynamic reporting system, a state of the project kind of thing. We start off by doing AMAs like these and I think they are a great platform for people to discover more about what’s going on with Cherry. To make the DAO ideal work, more information should be communicated so people can take informed actions.
Two smaller points:
Does this affect any timeline changes in general? It doesn’t. It’s just pushing back the mainnet release from one update date to the next, all the interim updates such as the bridge and others will happen on schedule, giving us a much stronger product at release. Exchanges will also not be delayed.
I’ll finish with a point about price because people seem very exasperated about it. I have no knowledge about markets, I don’t think anybody has a special means of discerning the market, but what I do firmly believe as a general principle in efficient markets is that where there is value, price will follow. We are aiming to build something of real value and all decisions are taken in the interest of Cherry, thus expanding the value, thus expanding the price.
Business & Marketing
by Eoghan
I’m going to recap what we’ve said in the Medium article and what Herman said today, to fill in the gaps with the state of affairs at the moment.
There are a few reasons for the mainnet delay, which I’ve listed in the slide deck. The most important thing is that it allows us to deliver a more complete, comprehensive and functional mainnet in a few weeks instead of a less expansive and less polished mainnet now. As Herman said, you only get one opportunity to release the mainnet, it’s very important that when you do that you’re able to capitalize on all of the momentum accrued by the release. It’s a very important, defining moment in the history of the project and we want to ensure that the product we deliver is as complete as possible. The dev work has gone to plan but we’ve decided to roll in more features that were planned for further in the future past the mainnet release, and this necessitates the delay of a few weeks.
It also gives us a chance to expand the ecosystem projects, projects like Cherish and Unigate will now be more mature upon release, we can create more of a firm business footing for those to be launched around the mainnet release.
Finally, as you’ve all seen, we’ve been expanding a lot, we have our office space set up in Dubai, we have a huge hiring drive ongoing for the past few months and we now have more time to properly onboard and get these people working in the meantime. It gives us an opportunity to streamline how we do everything because when the mainnet launches, things are going to be very busy. We’ll be more prepared and operating at a much better rate once the mainnet is launched.
In regards to marketing, first of all, people should remember there is a big picture to take into account: the major roadmap milestones are still in place more or less or in place relative to the mainnet being updated, the progress from the business and dev perspectives have been encouraging, we haven’t rescheduled the whole thing very much, we originally intended to release everything at the end of March and it’s going to be the end of May or soon after, that’s not a huge delay in the grand scheme of things and all that rescheduling has been done for good reasons.
And also, you should remember that the team is very positive, sometimes we may seem impatient, apologies for that, but we’re very enthusiastic about the next few days, weeks and months. We’re very upbeat about things so just hold on and over the next while you’ll start to see things fall into place.
To recap, staking will be launched a week after mainnet launch. For ecosystem rollouts: Unigate will continue to implement its business strategy for example, that’s not too affected right now by the delay, they can still keep working and progressing. It’s the same with Cherish. Herman discussed the audit, that’s totally independent of mainnet rescheduling. As are listings.
My last point of business, to get to the marketing plan. Looking back on the IDO and IEO period before Christmas, we’ve recontacted all those partners and we’re bringing all that back onboard and now with a bit more slack in our schedule which makes it even better. So you’ll see the same kind of marketing you did in the run up to Christmas, which generated a lot of positive buzz in the community. We’re confident that will work again. We’ll also be introducing a few interesting things to our marketing mix which I’m sure you guys will enjoy as well.
Now is a good time for me to announce that given we have an extra few weeks in our back pocket to launch everything well, we’re going to look back into the topic of hosting events for Cherry and Cherish and potentially other ecosystem initiatives. With Cherry, we’ve been thinking about two broad forms of events that could happen near you in the near future. What we have in mind is first of all professional events where we’d run dev meetups or events where we’ll try to explain and enlist interns or graduates to join Cherry on a cooperative basis. Second of all, there are community events which are much more fun: basically book a venue and invite our community members to join in, pick a convenient major city and have some things to give away, some refreshments and music and stuff like that.
II: Ecosystem Updates
Seedling
Eoghan: Seedling is still going to steam ahead and make a lot of progress in the near future; I can answer this question because I was speaking to the Seedling lead a short time ago. Although I’m not sure I can announce the project that will be listing on Seedling shortly…
Herman: Let’s not announce it. I’ll just briefly mention the three upcoming updates. Today the new system will be in place, complete and functional. By Friday, Margaret is hoping to have everything done in the UI so people will be able to interact with it and stake their coins. On Monday, we expect there’ll be a new listing but we’ll delegate that announcement to the Seedling team.
Eoghan: Very good. On top of that, Diego will be announcing the new listing on the 18th of April. I’ve looked at the project and it looks very promising and interesting.
Cherish
by Marv, Project Lead at Cherish
For Cherish, we’re part of the ecosystem so delays affect us as well, I can only promise this will have a positive effect on Cherish. We plan to launch together with the Cherry mainnet. Initially we had just enough time to integrate the key functionalities of the platform, now we have greater advantage and launch is looking even brighter.
We’ll integrate more features that were on the roadmap and we have more time to prepare for the launch of the platform, giving us a bit more leeway and taking some pressure off the devs, making sure their work is complete and well rounded, so it’s shaping up to be very exciting for us.
On the other side, this gives us more time for onboarding and outreach, we want the best creators on the platform, these creators need to be reached and educated about the platform, and we’re absolutely fighting to get as many high-quality creators on board as we can — we have a great team working on that. It’s going smoothly, we’ve updated our tactics; how we can best approach people and serve them as a platform. All in all, it’s looking pretty great for us.
III: Questions and answers
Q: Are there any updates regarding a native wallet?
Herman: The blockchain UI which I mentioned in the post does have a wallet, you connect with it through polkadot.js, you can see your balance, you can see your governance token balance as well as interact with the chain etc. It is more technical, it is integrated in this broader, more complex and less user-friendly platform. I think people will have to make do with that for the next few months in the short term at least.
A standalone wallet is in the works but it’s really not a priority right now. We’ll start off with an extension, something a bit like metamask that will allow us to carry forward more functionality that polkadot.js does not allow, but that will be done in the order of weeks to months. And then after that, if another ecosystem project hasn’t swept in and filled that gap, we are working with external teams who maintain web wallets for their blockchains. We’ll spend some time building our own wallets, exclusively web wallets at first and later app-based wallets, sometime in late Q3.
Q: How does the project protect against insider trading?
Eoghan: If anybody leaked information with the intention of committing insider trading, they would first of all be fired straight away (we have legal structures in place with regards to disclosure and everyone signs an NDA). Obviously deliberately leaking business info with a view to manipulating the price of the token is a breach of NDA so I believe that anyone who did engage in insider trading would be fired and sued. The best way to address these problems is through transparency and trust. If we hire the right people we can trust and if we keep everything transparent internally and externally, that prevents insider trading (which doesn’t happen at Cherry and never will).
Q: Do you have anything to share with people now regarding the audit?
Herman: People tend to over-inflate the idea of an audit; audits apply in immutable smart contracts and those smart contracts that have functionality that hasn’t already been used thousands of times. The things that do occur in smart contracts such as elements of the bridge, such as wrap tokens that are now represented on the Binance chain, Polygon and others, they just adopt ERC-20 standards, they are tried and tested, there’s nothing new and nothing really where vulnerabilities may occur.
That said, for those who want an audit, it is in the works, that’s all I’ll say.
Q: What is the timeframe now of staking and Cherry Farm?
Herman: Staking is a function of network consensus. As the network progresses, validators are required to stake or bond some tokens in guarantee of the truth that they propose to the network. There is no staking if we don’t have a mainnet, so let me once again assure you, staking by this definition will happen within a week of mainnet, which will be by the last week of May and the first two weeks of June.
Speaking of farming, it’s not something core to Cherry. It’s an ecosystem project, the people in charge have since changed it, they’re now trying to make it broader, not just restricted to Cherry, I may have mentioned this before, this project called Orchard that you’ll soon see information about was originally conceived as DeFi for Cherry, it’s now expanding to DeFi cross-chain, I think this is a very positive change and taking the time to make it work is fully reasonable. I hope to be able to discuss this and others such as Unigate etc. in more detail as we get news coming up to launch.
Q: Will staking be locked?
Herman: I’ll review this and give a more detailed answer but staking, in short, will not be locked.
Get involved!
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