Ecosystem AMA — March 23rd, 2022
Hosted by Eoghan. Featuring Seraphim, CEO @ Cherry Labs & John @ Cherish
The following is a transcript of the “Ask Me Anything” session that took place in the Cherry Discord channel on Wednesday, March 23rd, 2022
Intro
by Eoghan, AMA host:
In today’s AMA, we’re going to talk about the very exciting things that are happening in preparation for the mainnet launch. These AMAs are quite important because you can get news straight from the newsmakers themselves. Our community can get a taste of exactly what’s happening at the very forefront of our core efforts, and receive updates from our various ecosystem projects.
As we mentioned last week, we are getting very serious about ramping up all activities in advance of the mainnet launch. The development team has made impressive progress on the tech side: Cherry is first and foremost a tech project. Cherry’s business and marketing teams are now dedicated to getting Cherry’s technologies in the hands of partners, developers, and community members passionate about our vision.
The team is overall focused on ramping up for the mainnet will launch which will be the biggest watershed moment in the Cherry project so far.
I. Core Updates
Technology
by Herman Jacobs (Seraphim)
We aim to release the mainnet in the second week of April. Some time closer to then we will provide a 3 to 5 day range when our community can expect the release. We will not set a specific date and time. We did that with the launch of the testnet and it was quite stressful and frankly unnecessary. We don’t really expect anything essential to happen within minutes of the launch so setting a time in stone is more of a burden than of any help at all.
The 5 validators have already been selected so you don’t have to rush for that either. We won’t add more validator spots for about a month. After that we will scale the validator pool to between 13 and 17 depending on demand and usage. Again, this will be reiterated and explained thoroughly in our release notes and documentation which is constantly being improved.
We are planning to introduce staking one week after the mainnet. Once again, nobody needs to rush, there will be no benefit to switching on your staking and start earning interest before others. Our aim is to make this transition as fair and accessible as possible.
We’ve been working on the blockchain UI; you can always see a fairly updated state of our UI progress on the website cherry.place: it boasts an explorer, and a bunch of other features including account administration, governance, and you can even generate your own vanity address. The team is working on improving this element to make validating, staking, and a variety of other network interactions as seamless as possible. The past few days were spent adapting technologies developed for Polkadot to our specific implementation. This includes our protocols determining how governance is conducted and how the DAO’s treasury is distributed. On that note, there may be an opportunity to participate in the voting of the disbursement of the treasury on the treasury in the next two weeks. We’ll try to involve ambassadors in a mock governance trial.
Lastly, another update we are currently working on is a bridge. To people asking how do I get my tokens on Cherry Chain? Look no further. You all currently have $CHER on Polygon or Binance Smartchain, these tokens are exchangeable 1:1 for the real coins on the Cherry Network blockchain. We’ll release our own bridge that will allow you to do just that in a matter of days. $CHER on other chains will such as Binance Smartchain, Polygon etc. will continue to be active. They will continue existing as interoperability tokens, allowing dApps and users on these chains to interface with Cherry Chain natively from within these better-known general-purpose networks.
Again, the exact description as to how that interaction will occur will be describe that later. Just know that we will continue support for these tokens. We will maintain the exchange venues and the PancakeSwap liquidity pool and this will go on for the foreseeable future.
Marketing
by Eoghan
We have converged on a plan for the next few weeks, which I will be happy to share with you now from a business and marketing perspective. We have an interesting marketing mix that encompasses both what we have done already, the things that the community and the wider crypto sphere seem to appreciate such as this AMA itself, where we discuss in detail what we’re doing.
Cherry doesn’t need to be too “buzz” and gimmick-oriented because Cherry is a layer one blockchain. Cherry has a lot of industry support from some of the most renowned and well-seasoned investors in the industry, and we don’t need to focus on the gimmick meme coin stuff because we’re trying to build something real. We will rather be talking an awful lot about the actual technical side of the Cherry Chain. And alongside this, we’re going to be talking about our community because that’s the other pillar of the project, including our ambassador program.
The ambassador program is something that has been talked about for a great many weeks now so we are excited to finally start ramping things up. We’ve identified community leaders who will be leading these ambassador groups and forming squads of highly motivated members who are willing to put some time aside to help the project forward.
You’ll see a number of high-profile articles in lots of different outlets over the next few weeks. We’re not just going to be listing all our farfetched plans that we have for the future, we’re going to be talking about what the Cherry Chain does, how it benefits people right now, and who we have onboard already. We’re going to release a couple of explainer videos, and we’re going to be releasing a variety of interactive and conversational forms of media such as podcasts, more in-depth AMAs, Twitter Spaces with other crypto influencers, and key opinion leaders like we did with great success around Christmas 2021.
In addition to these new strategies, we will continue pursuing our long-term commitment to publishing high-quality long-form content on a weekly bases including information on technical aspects or updates of the Cherry Network, as well as news about our Ecosystem and our bustling community. We also renew our commitment to maintaining Cherry Network’s Research Centre, a repository with the commented research material directly from our research and engineering teams.
II. Ecosystem & Community Updates
by Seraphim
We focused on a few high quality projects in our initial incubation efforts. We’re now going to scale up much more. As you’re all well aware we have dozens and dozens of projects looking to launch within the Cherry ecosystem within months already on the pipeline; most already are at a fairly advanced stage. We started off with Seedling, a very obvious and intuitive core element of the web3 ecosystem we are trying to built. It allows projects to access capital and distribute their tokens to an engaged community. Cherish showcases how files can be stored and accessed in a distributed trustless way. Unigate is another one that falls quite squarely within this high-quality description. Over the next few weeks you’ll see many more and more varied projects launching within and around Cherry. We are very excited about Original Factory and Orchard in particular. Other worthy mentions are Bunkrs and Artistry.
Unigate
by Seraphim
Last week we mentioned that next Friday, so this coming Friday, we should onboard the first clients onto Unigate. I confirm that seems to be the case, the team is now more or less complete. The CEO of Unigate is a really experienced and effective guy; he was the Chief Compliance Officer of one of the largest banks in the world called EFG. I’m quite excited that the Unigate team is now complete. I expect this project to scale rapidly and achieve great things.
People here may be wondering how’s the token sale going: the Unigate team is speaking with notable VCs the likes of Pantera Capital, Bluezilla, Polychain Capital. Their growing stakeholder list now includes Protocol Ventures, Coral Capital, Shima Capital, Luben Capital, and a bunch of others. I believe that they will soon be extending out to the public token sale which will mark their final conversion to a web3 organization. I believe that their final launch date is around the first week of May.
Cherish
by John, Cherish Staff
I’ve been leading our outreach program along with some of our great ambassadors. Instead of just sending thousands of generic messages, we’ve decided to conduct a more intimate and direct, one-on-one marketing campaign, with the aim to build personal connections with the creators we reach out to. Not only because they constitute the backbone and pillar of our platform and we really appreciate them and the value they bring, but also because we feel this approach just better represents the essence of what Cherish is trying to do.
Prior to launch, we were hoping to get a few dozen top-tier, high-quality creators onboard, but the response so far has been phenomenal and has far surpassed any of the expectations we had.
We’re really getting the feeling that we’re on to something here. I believe that Cherish is uniquely positioned to move into this gap and provide creators with full control over how they create and monetize their content. And because of the decentralized nature of the platform, we aren’t going to be telling them what to do, censoring them, or trying to control their creative decisions, we really want to give them the space their creativity needs to flourish, which is really what Cherish is all about.
We are also working with a bunch of amazing community collaborators and ambassadors. Here are a few words from our shining example, Bobby.
I’m one of the very first ambassadors in the program. From the first day I heard about Cherish, I knew it was something that I’d love to be a part of. I’m a very creative person, so I was naturally drawn to what Cherish is doing. I’m working very closely with John and the Cherish team on the outreach program and I’m sure you all will be very pleased to see the fruits of our labor very soon!
— Bobby, Cherish Ambassador
III. Questions and answers
Q: Does someone need to be running a node to take part in staking?
No, you don’t have to be online to stake. That’s the purpose of nominating, you delegate your stake to a validator to make decisions on the state of the chain (for which they have to be online) on your behalf — Seraphim
Q: Can we use the mainnet straight away when it drops using the polkadot.js extension?
You currently can interact with our user interface using the polkadot.js extension. You just download the extension, create an account that is injected into the blockchain UI: you’re now able to sign transactions and conduct all sorts of operations with that. Just as you can do it now on the Testnet, you’ll be able to do it the exact same way on the mainnet. We are also working on a proprietary extension and web wallet that are still probably about 3 months out — Seraphim
Q: What was the issue with the chain from earlier today?
What happened today was more of a dev-ops problem rather than a chain problem. I mean the code is not wrong, nothing is wrong about it, but the way that we deployed the web app messed around with the validators keys. Someone called the “rotate keys” RPC function that messed with the order of the keys in the Chain’s validator set.
It’s not a problem with the chain, it’s just a problem with the way that the web app is deployed. So that is fixed now but unfortunately we’re going to have to restart the node and probably disable the regular nodes from running. You’re going to be able to run a validator node, you’re going to be able to nominate just as you used to but not on a regular node — Liompis, Senior Developer @ Cherry Network
Get involved!
There are many ways to get involved with the Cherry Community, whether you’re a large or small investor, a developer or a creator who wishes to join the Cherry Ecosystem.
As we ready our mainnet for launch, many innovators are getting in touch to leverage the unique capabilities of the Cherry infrastructure. Potential partners who are interested in a trustless, business-ready interface to decentralized file systems can get in touch via our social channels or hello@cherry.network to learn more. Among the available opportunities is a spot in our Cherry Labs program, where we incubate innovative startups who build on the Cherry stack.
Join the Cherry Community
If the Cherry mission of providing a truly trustless distributed file storage for decentralized applications speaks to you, then get in touch! Cherry’s technical overview can be explored by checking out the Cherry Lightpaper.
We’ve brought together a community of technologists, artists, and creators, and we want you to get involved. If this speaks to you, we invite you to join our growing community.
Follow the official Cherry social media accounts, stay up-to-date with all our news and announcements, and subscribe to the Cherry newsletter.
To learn more about Cherry, visit Cherry.Network
