iota-news.com
After 2 years of planning, development, and operation we are proud to announce a major milestone in the history of the Soonaverse, making the platform open source and opening the door to a new stage of growth and inclusion.
As a follower of this project, you know that the Soonaverse was the first iteration of a team working to build and deploy logic to execute additional types of functions that weren’t available on the base Shimmer protocol. It’s as simple as that. Well, we delivered on that “simple” goal and wound up bringing DAOs, NFTs, Tokens, Rewards, Staking, and MOAR to the IOTA community and in the process created ecosystem value, engagement, and prosperity that we had never seen before on-tangle.
Now, that the Soonaverse is open source we can continue to deliver on our strategy of delivering explosive growth through an expansion of features and functions, by increasing the capacity of the platform, becoming more decentralized, incentivizing new contributors, and showcasing the potential of our enterprise platform BUILD.5 and its groundbreaking APIs.
BUILDing a Broader Vision with BUILD.5
We are regularly asked how BUILD.5 and the Soonaverse will co-exist and operate. Simply put, as new BUILD.5 APIs are built, the Soonaverse will build around it becoming a testbed of innovation for the BUILD.5 technology and the enterprise partners that leverage its innovative capabilities, all deployed on the Shimmer network. However, the Soonaverse will also foster the growth of its own native communities, builders that are enticed through rewards and a desire to operate on a bleeding edge platform. We will then incentivize all of the builders, both Shimmer natives and BUILD.5 converts through our Treasury and now that we’ve open sourced the Soonaverse, it’ll be easier than ever to contribute!
But before we delve deeper into the mechanics of that, it’s important for us as a project to clearly communicate the broader vision of the Soonaverse platform and how open-sourcing aligns with the goal of becoming a true DAO.
Continually Becoming More Decentralized
The Soonaverse has been on a mission since day one to continually become more and more decentralized. As the Shimmer protocol enabled cool new features like native tokens and NFTs, we adapted and offloaded digital assets on our proprietary system onto the Tangle. We’ve done this with nearly everything on the platform.
Even though the technology has been on a clear path to decentralization, the organizations that drive the development have not. That’s why on top of open sourcing all of the Soonaverse, we’re also placing a new focus on distributing decision-making and contributions across a wider spectrum of participants.
This open sourcing event is a big moment and we want to make sure all developers and enthusiasts out there know that they can now, easier than ever before, contribute and be part of a growing and impactful community!
The development process won’t be dictated by a small group of people. Now that the code is open sourced, our mission is to have as many people as possible make tweaks and enhancements to the system and be justly rewarded for doing so. The health of the Soonaverse will no longer be reliant on a small community of contributors, but instead will thrive in a massive interconnected ecosystem of people looking to add value to the system!
Introducing More Contributors
If we want to bring in more people then it’s important to provide a comprehensive guide for developers on how they can contribute to the Soonaverse project. This will ensure consistency and clarity for newcomers.
The new contribute guide can be found here: https://github.com/soonaverse/app/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
If anybody has suggestions on how we can improve this guide then feel free to reach out via the Dev channel on our Discord and we can work together to make developing on the Soonaverse easier than any other crypto project out there!
For those of you who don’t want to view the full contribution guide on GitHub, here’s a quick recap of the reward system:
Category 1 (up to 1000 SOON):
- Requires one approval on PR by code review COMMITTEE members.
Category 2 (up to 5000 SOON):
- Requires one approval on PR by code review COMMITTEE members.
- Requires majority SOON COMMITTEE approval.
Category 3 (unrestricted):
- Requires one approval on PR by code review COMMITTEE members.
- Requires majority SOON COMMITTEE approval.
- Requires SOON vote through Soonaverse on-chain voting.
We really want to encourage community members to actively participate in the development process. The Soonaverse is driven by its community! Contributions from developers and users are highly valued and we’re going to reward and reinforce that.
There will be plenty of opportunities in the future. After the liquidity mining program begins, the Soonaverse may have one of the largest liquid treasuries in the IOTA sphere. The SOON COMMITTEE will leverage this and actively look for 3rd party service modules and other projects to join the ecosystem and collaborate with the Soonaverse platform.
And in true SOON fashion, there won’t be a bunch of red tape around rewarding contributors.The Soonaverse, as always, will remain agile and reward people just as fast as they contribute.
Expanding Our Reach Through Community Task Forces
To help drive the expansion into open source we will also be expanding the SOON COMMITTEE with additional members. In addition, we are forming Task Forces, collaborative work groups with established members of our community:
- Developer Engagement: This group will help formulate recruitment best practices, engaging with new developers as they come into the ecosystem and provide constant input on how to optimize the process to keep it fluid and effective. Adam_Unchained is the COMMITTEE lead for this group. Current community members STiJO, Lord_SciFi, Moose, and Anders have answered the call to join the initiative.
- Community Outreach: This group will work with COMMITTEE members to expand the Soonaverse’s reach into other chains, NFT projects, and service providers. This group of bubble busters are tasked with creating a stronger outreach to the larger cryptosphere. Shonuff and Iotaben will be spearheading this group, along with D3r_schosch, Digidus, and Zephyr who have all stepped up to play a part.
- Platform Operations: An often under-recognized function that is key to the proper maintenance and stability of the Soonaverse. This group will work with our Devs and Admins to maintain policies and procedures that keep the platform functioning smoothly by keeping the lights on and our users happy. Daverl and Shonuff will be the COMMITTEE leads, but you’ll see some familiar names in 58Wast and Bananu as part of this committee.
- DAO Governance: As governance is a function that requires the entire community to engage in the act of rule building, SOON COMMITTEE members TangleAccountant and Garrett will be spearheading this group and growing it with interested community members as we move towards our open governance model.
Alignment into the Future
The Soonaverse project is an ever-changing organism that will continue to grow and evolve. As the IOTA Foundation releases new technology, the Soonaverse will adopt it. Our goals are aligned with IOTA’s goals and we’re both on a journey towards full decentralization.
As new building blocks and technologies are released on top of IOTA, we hope all of our new contributors will come up with new and innovative use cases to expand and enhance the platform using new BUILD.5 APIs.
Not only do we want to align on a technological level, but also in our communication and community engagement. We will continue to keep everybody informed about progress of the project and upcoming developments. Especially as new features are built from new development teams and contributors!
The Soonaverse platform’s success will depend on the collective efforts of the community, and by incentivizing contributions and embracing collaboration, we hope to pave the way for a thriving and decentralized ecosystem. The benefits of open sourcing are clear, now it’s time to execute. Welcome to the open source era of the Soonaverse. Let’s GO!