Ergo AMA Wrap-Up, December 10

This week’s Ergo AMA provided the community with numerous updates about ongoing business activities as well as in-depth discussions on the developer team’s work. The episode also paid tribute to a dear friend of Dan’s who had recently passed away. In memory of him, Dan will be organizing a collaborative community initiative to plant Ginkgo trees in every country where the Ergo and Cardano ecosystems operate. 

In his address to the community, Dan provided updates on efforts to increase wider adoption of Ergo and elaborated on the ongoing work with Emurgo. The work with Emurgo is a high priority for the team as Ergo works towards ensuring the best possible user experience for all when using Yoroi. Additionally, Dan revealed that he is working closely with Armeanio on the negotiation of several partnerships for commercial, educational and research purposes. As Ergo works towards mass adoption, these sorts of partnerships will be integral for developing a wider global reach. Dan emphasized that he thinks Ergo is an incredible project and that it needs to be more broadly used - as adoption grows, the ecosystem becomes more robust.

With regards to exchanges, Dan informed the community that he is firmly committed to getting Ergo listed on Tier 1 exchanges and DEXes. He is constantly working on this issue and spoke with several major exchanges last week. The community can expect news on this work as soon as that information is available. 

Dan mentioned that he is in talks with several entities in the ecosystem about the development of Layer 2 use cases for Ergo. He explained that there is a lot of interest for this but it will take some work to build up the necessary tools. The main focus is to bring more awareness to Ergo and Layer 2 solutions are not that far away for the project.

At the conclusion of his opening remarks, Dan thanked the community for their support of the first episode of Ergo Pulse. The inaugural episode was released last week and it is currently the best performing video on Ergo’s YouTube channel. Ergonauts can expect new episodes to be released on the first Monday of each month and Dan has already spoken with several community members about future appearances on the show.

For his opening comments, Alex reminded the community about the ongoing discussions for a soft fork to readjust the emission schedule of Ergo. He talked about various platforms that host polls to vote on this discussion and that the mining community is being consulted in the process. Alex also informed viewers of another soft fork proposal for a new model for scripts which would allow for the execution of contracts to happen five times faster - the Ergo community can expect more details later this week.

Since the ecosystem is growing rapidly, Alex said it is important to continue to collect more information on any and all projects being built on Ergo. The team has implemented a new system for developers to submit project updates and Alex is hopeful this information pipeline will yield more dApp data for the community over time. Currently, teams have finalized and/or are working on:

• Solana bridge with testing scheduled within the next two weeks.
• Ergo Watch - a website that contains data on the current state of the Ergo blockchain (website is live now).
• NFT’s and Ergo Auction House.
• The dApp called Ergo Team. This project will create a tool for joint spending, offering both privacy and transparency mechanisms. This project will be a simpler tool than the current Zero Knowledge Treasury.
• Ergo Raffle's new UI went live last week. 
• iOS Ergo wallet. This new wallet is in beta testing and will be available soon.  
• Light clients. There is on-going work on the node side and Sigma Rust side - this will be important for security on mobile devices.
• Off-Chain Bank - the ability to execute simple and/or off-chain contracts .

Alex also offered some updates on ErgoDEX and how the DeFi space needs to keep growing. There was discussion about an additional stablecoin within ErgoDEX and with the updated Yoroi dApp connector, there is an expectation that liquidity will increase on the DEX.

With projects like Ergo Team and Ergo Raffle, Alex discussed adoption as he sees an obvious use case with these projects. As the ecosystem continues to grow and the dApps develop and fulfill their potential, the stage is set to grow wider mainstream adoption. 

AMA Questions and Summary

The following is a summary of questions posed by the audience during this AMA. Last week Dan and Alex answered questions on Ergo’s marketing strategies, government regulation/adoption and the future of DeFi. Dan also shows off his ‘fancy new mic and camera’ and professes his adoration for Ergonauts. To view the full AMA, please head over to Ergo’s Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOfa1fPrP8g 

Does ‘DeFi 2.0’ have its place in the future on Ergo with projects like Olympus DAO or the upcoming Graviton rebranding? And what are your thoughts on these types of projects?

Answered by Alex Chepurnoy

• Doesn’t know much about Olympus DAO but they are offering 7000% APY
• Not such a great scenario; APY that high is also a huge risk
• Not really sure what DeFi 2.0 is; sounds like a bit of a marketing buzz

Is marketing for Ergo a topic that increased in priority internally in the last few months? Also, have you checked what worked for other projects from a marketing perspective?

Answered by Dan Friedman

• Quick answer is yes and yes.
• Longer answer is that the team have been actively working at marketing
• You might have noticed it with more articles and content coming out
• Trying to reach a wider audience by publishing our news on Bloomberg and Yahoo and other prominent web based news outlets
• Beyond that, actively working on optimizing the brand; new website coming
• More organization coming to the content
• Important to make the content easily digestible
• Looking into actively marketing different parts of the Ergo ecosystem
• This is a very nuanced product
• Need to make sure that the audience you are reaching is the right audience
• Targeted advertising is key
• Education 
• Layer 2 solutions will be a very good thing to market
• Research that is coming from Ergo will be a good thing to market
• Bridges are another thing to look at marketing
• Executing marketing strategy is an ongoing effort 
• It takes time for these things to evolve
• Definitely have looked at what worked for the marketing of other projects
• Dan has been speaking to close colleagues from other projects and exploring how they marketed their product
• Ergo is working with a PR firm
• It is important to stay in the media
• “Press releases are good but I think that what works is a story or narrative.”
• Bring the audience in and keep them captivated

Kushti, how does it feel to have worked as hard and long as you have to create your vision and build a platform that people are coming and building real world use cases and applications on top of?

Answered by Alex Chepurnoy

• Started back in 2019
• Unsure of what could be done back then on the eUTXO model
• A lot of research was done in order to figure out how to overcome limitations
• In 2020, Emurgo got onboard with Ergo and new developers joined
• Started to convert research papers into real products
• Alex feels the same as 2 years ago - more work needs to be done to complete this project
• Mentioned next ErgoHack and that it will explore privacy and security

Will blockchain evolve to the extent to change the way the government operates?

Answered by Dan Friedman

• Believes government will have to change to adapt to this new global DeFi system
• Seeing push back from the old world - lawmakers trying to regulate something they don’t understand
• The system for creating laws needs to go through the process of doing so, so that bad laws can fail. That way the movement of building meaningful blockchain can fill in the gaps of the failed old world.

Answered by Alex Chepurnoy

• Feels like the industry has been waiting for government intervention since the beginning of crypto
• Regulation will always be possible
• Be prepared for some technical intervention

Why would governments opt to use the blockchains we see? (ETH, BTC, ERG, etc.) Why not something digital but far from decentralized?

Answered by Dan Friedman

• In his experience in dealing with governments and government adoption, notices that governments prefer a federated network over a decentralized network 
• They want to use blockchain but they want to have control over the network nodes and what happens to them
• There are some differences between countries
• Countries that don’t have the infrastructure or have the resources to run a network often opt to use decentralized blockchains
• Dan thinks there will be a mix: some governments will prefer to keep control and some will prefer to give people more control