What's up, Block? - December 17, 2021 to January 5, 2022

Welcome to the first edition of “What’s up, block?” 2022, our update aggregation for partners and friends.

It has been about two weeks since we published our updates. The two weeks were productive ⚡️

Good:

• Our devnet launch target for the protocol was January 4, 2022. We were able to deploy the program with most functionality on January 5, 2022. This is a major win as it enables us to start signing up partner NFT projects. Srinivas (our blockchain lead) led the efforts and delivered on time 💪🏼
• We have created a website for projects to signup and create their own Universe on our protocol. This is not ready for public consumption yet, but you can check it out at https://universes.metablocks.world. This site will act as an admin panel for Universe creators to control their profile and get stats.
• Our art foundation for the 3moji universe is going well. Pablo (lead 3d artist) was able to develop a system to augment 3d models, i.e. to be able to drop accessories at a later stage.
• Dr. Khurana (aka Sarthak) did some magic and arranged a Twitter Space with Degen Ape Academy, Jungle Cats and 8 other NFT projects in the Solana eco. This will serve as a launchpad for our protocol. We hope to start integrating with projects after this Space 🤞🏼

• Dr. Khurana also designed a campaign with a series of blog posts to capture the Search traffic for the "Metaverse" and "NFT Utility".
• We have a new logo in the making ✨
• Our company handbook and protocol documentation is slowly taking shape. We will start hiring again for engineering and community roles. Our hypothesis is that having an open process will attract better talent.

Not Good:

• We realised that having a protocol is not enough, and we also need a sample project in order for others to review. We are building this sample project now. This has become a source of delay. But we are trying to finish it before the Twitter Space.
• Our growth on Discord has stalled a bit. We are about 1500 strong across channels (last time, we were at 1000). We have observed that the social metrics explode, then stabilise over time.
• Dr. Khurana is not really a Doctor. He doesn't even have a Bachelor's degree.

Our most immediate hurdle is to build a sample app to allow other NFT projects to integrate with the protocol. And to streamline our partnership onboarding workflow.

Ideally, we want the partnership to be self-signup, ie. an NFT project or a game should be able onboard itself, just by reading our documentation.

That's all for this episode of "What's up, Block?". See you next time.

🔮☮️🤙