October Update: A Catalyst Winner!

Before diving into everything, an update on our donations to 500 Rising and the Third Option Foundation. (Captive Audience is taking ADA donations, so they are not affected.) As everyone knows, the price of ADA has been pretty low. We’ve been holding our cash donations in hopes that the price rebounds a bit (at least $.60 would be nice). No matter the price, we will make a donation from the earmarked ADA before the end of the year.

Now, on to all the things that have been happening!

ADA Bug Bounty Website

The big announcement is that our ADA Bug Bounty Website Catalyst proposal was ACCEPTED with ~72.4 million votes! This was our first Catalyst proposal we ever wrote. The idea was floated around in the Cardano Tech Twitter space a few times and after thinking about it, I knew that there was something there. Bounties are used by many large corporations like Intel, Microsoft, Citigroup, Amazon, American Express, and many, many more. The bounties are usually security related, but not always.

The idea behind the ADA Bug Bounty Website is that any project or individual developer could post a bounty for some kind of work to be done. Individuals can then filter and search these bounties to find something that matches up with their skill set. If they successfully complete the bounty, then they can get paid for it!

There are a lot of developers out there, but they can’t always commit a lot of time to a single project. This will help them contribute to the ecosystem without having to dedicate themselves to any single project.

We’re really excited about building this site and we’re looking forward to seeing the impact it can have!

Rare Bloom

We attended Rare Bloom at the Gaylord Rockies in Colorado a couple weeks ago. This was our first Cardano/Crypto conference and we weren’t entirely sure what to expect. Suffice to say, it was a fantastic experience! We finally got to met a number of people that we’ve been working with over this past year. It was a great opportunity to meet new people as well. Not only that, but seeing everything that people are building for the ecosystem truly gives me what I need to believe that Cardano will continue to thrive and grow.

Some of the people we’ve worked with and finally got to meet include: BlockJock (FreeLoaderz/Mehen/CoC), Matt and Jillian Plomin (Mehen), Hosky (Hosky.. of course! and Mehen), Vegas (Mehen), Eddie (Mehen), Darlington and Stephanie (LidoNation), TCT (CoC), and Matt (from Meld). There were a lot more people we met from Twitter spaces and Discord as well. Truly too many to name them all! I really am looking forward to the next one, however I do have one request… bring the T-Shirt Cannon again Blockjock!

Mehen USDM Stablecoin

We have started our development for Mehen. There is quite a bit of work to do, but so far, so good. All the time we took to lay out the CONOPS, System Requirements, Architecture, and other pieces laid a strong foundation for us to build upon. Our goal is to have an MVP product up on Preview (or whatever that becomes with this re-spin) early in the first quarter of ‘23. This time of the year can be challenging however with all of the holidays, but that is our goal!

Stay tuned to Mehen Offical and our own Twitter for updates!

SmartClaimz

SmartClaimz has been live for almost 2 months now. We’ve onboarded Hosky and Copper Seed Safe to our projects and there are 4 or 5 other projects that are being prepared to be onboarded. One thing that has been extremely clear is that we need to streamline our project onboarding (it’s actively being worked).

If you still aren’t familiar with SmartClaimz, Astroboysoup did a video on SmartClaimz that you can see here. You’ll see a couple of familiar faces on the video, however we weren’t able to make it for the interview. Our FreeLoaderz team did a great job with it, like always. Shout out to Pete (Astroboy) as well for taking the time to review SmartClaimz! We appreciate it!

FreeLoaderz PSPO

Our FreeLoaderz PSPO is still going on. If you aren’t delegated to a FreeLoaderz pool yet, why not?! Help support small pool operators who are actively working (for free!) to better the Cardano ecosystem.

The list of pools can be found on the SmartClaimz Delegation page.

Thank you once again to all of our delegates who help make this all possible!