NFT support, DEX and wallets integration, airdrop, launch of new products, and more.
by Phoebe (0:36)
INFRASTRUCTURE
Chain Upgrade in 2022
The first step in our upgrade plan was a significant infrastructure overhaul. At the close of 2021, LikeCoin underwent a chain upgrade. In 2022, we implemented the StarFerry NFT module as part of a major update to the platform. This addition paved the way for a plethora of new applications within the LikeCoin ecosystem. We experienced a seamless upgrade process thanks to our use of Cosmovisor. This experience also helped us lay the groundwork for future chain upgrades, including a more streamlined solution with some updates to the Cosmos SDK. As planned, we successfully completed the upgrade in June of this year.
More Wallets and Block Explorer choices
In addition to our chain upgrade, we established several infrastructure partnerships in 2022. We worked to expand wallet support, anticipating advancements among Cosmos wallet providers. We are delighted to have successfully integrated Cosmostation into our mobile wallet offering. Cosmostation also supports us on their widely used block explorer, Mintscan, which is known for its stability. Later in the year, we brought Leap Wallet on board to offer native support for LikeCoin, further enhancing the user experience in managing their assets.
Furthermore, Cosmostation allows LikeCoin DApps to be accessed within their app, with many more promising developments on the horizon. We are thrilled to have Cosmostation on board and are proud to have onboarded the LikeCoin chain as a validator in 2022.
DEX partnership and education to users
We have made significant progress in improving LikeCoin liquidity as a token by partnering with Osmosis, one of the largest Cosmos DEXs, to introduce LIKE pools and swapping pairs. This was our first time using incentive pools, and we were pleased to see Osmosis continuing to evolve throughout the year. Recently, we renewed our incentives and added external incentives to attract more liquidity providers to Osmosis. Moving forward, we plan to allocate more resources to decentralized exchanges in the upcoming year.
The fall of FTX highlighted issues with centralized exchanges, and our early adoption of Osmosis positioned us well in the market. We have also been focused on educating our users on how to use DEXs for swapping between tokens. This is just one of the many initiatives we have undertaken in 2022 to improve the LikeCoin ecosystem.
Ranked Top 10 in technical Improvements!
We are also doing a lot of great technical improvements in the infrastructure layer, not just chain upgrade but also on application layer that we will cover on this update today, but we are very glad that we are actually standing among a lot of Cosmos projects that actively provide updates and growing our technical stack and activity in 2022. Just picked one of the screenshots provided by the other parties of us ranking among different projects but guess that we are actually in one of the top 10 in the past year so would like to thank our validators also the team that has been working really hard on technical updates for LikeCoin.
In summary, the basic publishing stack that we have in LikeCoin is quite complete in 2022 including the ISCN and NFT module and in combined we can finally build upon more applications in the LikeCoin decentralized publishing stack. The more complete products stack right now that can bring in a lot of different uses and include media partners and even bloggers. We’ll spend a lot more effort in doing business development and launch use cases in terms of the whole stack and all the application that we build within Liker Land.
Showing Product demo (6:21)
Currently the stack actually includes several layers, we have been spending a lot of time to make sure the infrastructure layer is actually ready for a lot more different layers built on top of it. You can see we are now almost done with the whole stack that can provide for publishers and we have been pushing really hard in the last Q this year to find along use cases on the sales layer and also the publishing layer.
Combined, this is what we call the depub stack that we have been discussing for the past few years. It includes a monetization layer, a registry layer (which we had on ISCN), and Liker Land is currently building on top of it with tools that can onboard users more easily, such as the WordPress plugin, NFT Portal, and open API that some of our partners have been using, like Matters.
There are also sales formats that we have been exploring with different partners and of course there are also different channels that we try to onboard to find our product Market feed in terms of what kind of users are actually bringing value and find our product useful to them.
In combined, this is the whole decentralized publishing stack Liker Land and Liker Land has been trying to deliver to the market and looking for an audience in 2022. This is the very beginning of the stack that is being brought into the market. Looking forward to 2023 when we are finally able to market this product and looking to onboard more people of what we built.
Ecosystem growth with international counterpart
In terms of the whole ecosystem growth this is the numbers that took us for today. We have impressive numbers right now in terms of the ecosystem, we have over 9,000 media sites that are loaded with our LikeCoin button, and some of them will eventually upgrade to our latest widget with NFT features. We also have been growing our Likers early on from this year on the airdrop campaign that we did in Cosmos to bring in more attention to the cosmos ecosystem outside of the traditional creators community.
We are also on board a lot more different creators from our Civic Liker campaign from the recent Writing NFT Campaign or even the NFT eBook campaign. We bring in a lot of different creative dynamics that we had. We also had different partnerships that using different products within the LikeCoin chain including the ISCN registry that we had the early partnership in June with Project Starling where they actually register their content with ISCN before submission to international criminal court so there are use cases like that that have been interacted with different part of the LikeCoin ecosystem and different tools that we have uh in general. This is the holistic view of what LikeCoin actually looks like right now and happily wrap this up by the end of this year.
Partnership and extend our presence outside of Hong Kong and Taiwan
In terms of our partner stack, we are also slowly boarding a lot more different validators as if you can remember early on we had some Genesis validators.
This year we spend more effort on onboard partners like Cosmostation, partners like different wallets in the ecosystem basically in Cosmos so that we can bring a more dynamic validated set and also bring our presence to the cosmos ecosystem.
In terms of community partners we also extend our presence outside of Hong Kong and Taiwan, we partner with Starling Lab, we also participate in some of the talks done by Protocol Lab etc, slowly expanding our presence outside of Southeast Asia.
APPLICATIONS
On Civic Track with content integrity and authenticity
We have been continuing our work on the Civic track with content integrity and authenticity in mind. As mentioned we work with Project Starling where we have been focusing on providing use cases around the globe. One of the most recent one is the war crime evidence in Ukraine to the international criminal court, it is a huge milestone for them, it is also one of the flagship product in Filecoin Foundation so we are very glad that we actually could have be one of the chain that would register with the use cases like this and this is on the Civic track on the LikeCoin chain aspect.
Newly revamped WordPress plugin
Secondly obviously we have revamped our WordPress plugin for writers and media. We still believe for WordPress represent a huge part of our ecosystem growth and the product market feed that we would like to explore is the WordPress community so the majority of our effort is to make sure we have this WordPress plugin updated with the latest features and also walk people through how they can use it especially during the recent Writing NFT campaign.
Metadata registry features for Writing NFT
We have revamped the metadata registry a little bit on the user experience and we also delivered the ISCN dashboard where you can actually see what the metadata looks like and the visual dashboard where you can easily find the metadata details of the content that registered on LikeCoin Chain.
Shortly in Q4 this year we launched the Writing NFT feature, which is a widget that can be displayed on any website and we have been whitelisting and talking to quite a lot of core users and this is something that we have delivered lately including the Liker land marketplace and portfolio.
by Edmond (16:07)
WRITING NFT
As we launched the beta version of Writing NFT on August 1st, we have been building this new product for the past four months. As this is the last Community call of the year, we would like to share a summary of what we have accomplished in the past few months.
The Writing NFT feature update in the past three months
Chinese localization of our UI: Development of Writing NFT has reached a stage where most of our users are Chinese writers and readers. We believe that our Chinese UI can provide a much better user experience.
Custom message upon transferring NFT & Creator message: We received feedback from our creators who wanted to have tools to interact with their readers. Now, users can leave a message when gifting a Writing NFT to the recipient. The message is recorded as a transaction memo on the chain and can be stacked during further transfers, forming a lot of that particular piece of Writing NFT.
Creator message: The Creator message is a special paragraph of a creator’s article written by the author. Unlike the transfer message, all the writing entities under the same collection share the same message and are stored on the NFT class data on chain. We have done this to enhance the tools for creators to interact with their readers and improve the UI.
List by price, time and much more: In terms of the UI, we believe that good visualization can add more value to the Writing NFTs. First of all, we have enhanced the UI by allowing listing by orders such as price, time, and ownership quantity.
Featured NFT: We have introduced a new feature to feature and hide your Writing NFT collection. You can choose to feature an NFT and it will be placed on top of the list, while hidden NFTs won’t be displayed in the public view.
Different NFT types: We support other NFT types on the LikeCoin chain, as illustrated by the recent project by kin ko, the NFT eBook Project.
NFT Gem: To better visualize NFT collections, we have deployed NFT gems so the values of writing entities are illustrated by gems of different colors and shapes.
Follow the creator: We have deployed a feature that allows readers to follow creators. Users can now follow a Creator by providing an email address. Whenever the creator publishes an NFT, followers will receive an email notification so they will never miss the best chance to collect.
Payment by credit card: We are now supporting payment by credit card. This is an attempt to lower the barrier of user conversions, especially for those users who are not familiar with crypto. They can now buy Writing NFTs by credit card.
Creator Description: For other points like allowing creators to add more description and enhancing the setting UI, please visit Liker Land and try it out.
Minting Flow: For the Creator’s side, we have not made many enhancements, but we have tried to improve the flow of minting Writing NFTs. We will continue to build on this later.
Insights: Total volume in the past four months is around 1 million LikeCoin
The number is still small. Currently, we have 320 lifetime buyers and around 150 MAU active buyers.
The total volume in the past four months is around 1 million LikeCoin, the team is still in the process of finding the product market fit and validating different ideas and we have quite clear insights that the needs of the readers is much more important now because we have to help the writers to grow the group by providing more incentives for readers to buy the Writing NFT so we have keep on building more features especially for adding values to the Writing NFTs. At this moment, although no significant growth trend is observed, we are still pushing different kinds of campaigns to validate the features so that we have a chance to find out a way for growth.
kin conducted an experiment which kin would call a decentralized publishing experiment with the help of LikeCoin as an infrastructure to sell the book (29:01).
The findings of the NFT eBook project
The target is to sell a thousand copies of the book at the price of 10 USD or, to be precise, 9.9 USD within a month, which is actually 35 days. We were able to meet the target with the final result of 1024 copies sold. Thanks for the support of 943 buyers.
These thousand or so people are from 18 territories. Other than the 1,024 copies that were sold, some others or some 200 or so copies were rewarded to people who have supported him, for example, by buying three related Writing NFTs, and some people used it to pay for subscribing to the newsletter for nothing, for no reward at all, in the past two years. So, borrowing this chance to reward all of them who have been supporting for no reason, no reward at all.
There are totally 1263 copies that are minted as NFT eBooks that are going to be sent to people from 18 territories. There are 30 channels, the main major one being on kin’s own blog. As it’s an experiment to show that other channels, including the traditional bookshops, especially independent bookshops, can participate, some channels have also been invited to participate.
The territory distribution of the buyers is as follows: Taiwan is the biggest territory which accounts for 43%, and Hong Kong follows, which is similar, and the rest are quite distributed to 16 other territories. This is the performance of one of the channels, which is the major one, kin’s own blog. So, imagine if you are also an independent blogger, and you have your own blog, especially WordPress, you can sell your book on your own site with the help of LikeCoin as a so-called decentralized stack and generate sales.
During the pre-sales period of October 27th to November 10th, 400 copies were sold, and after it was launched, it continued to sell for almost 400 copies. So, his own channel accounts for about 77% of all sales, and then the experiment is conducted in a manner that the content itself is opened and available freely, “Free as in Freedom.” So, you can obtain the book as an epub or pdf all free and freely. If you don’t have money to buy it, we can live with it. You just get a copy without paying. It’s okay. It’s not illegal. We also encourage people who can afford to buy the authentic copy, which in Cantonese or in Mandarin is 正版. By buying the NFT eBook itself, it means the file is stored on both IPFS and Arweave like what we did in Writing NFT, so the copy is hosted on both so-called web2 infrastructure and IPFS and Arweave, so as to make sure it wouldn’t be erased or altered even tempered with.
ISCN is used as the unique identifier of the book. Usually, in traditional books, the ISBN is printed on the last page on the back of the book. In the NFT eBook, instead of ISBN, ISCN is used, and you can scan this ISCN, and, of course, you can check out the on-chain data. So, it’s the very first time there’s probably easiest to understand why we’ve been calling this ISCN because it’s the same version of ISBN.
A thousand or so NFTs have just been minted and are being given out to buyers and previous supporters of kin. Each book has been personally signed with kin’s private key, not with a pen and paper, and will be displayed in the owner’s NFT Portfolio. You can click to see Cheung To’s portfolio; it will give you an idea of what your portfolio would look like if you purchased the book and provided kin with your wallet address. kin will be sending out the NFT eBooks one by one, which is a parallel to how he autographs his physical books for his readers. He’ll be doing this 1243 times to show his appreciation to all of you.
You don’t actually need to hold LIKE to participate in the LikeCoin ecosystem. This is one of the key learnings we have observed in onboarding new users. As you can see, writing NFTs, including payment with credit card, and Kin’s experiment with an easy and smooth checkout have also helped in this regard.
kin is currently drafting a full report on the experiment to share not just with our community, but with the publishing industry and creators as a whole. This will serve as a reference on how we did it, and others can use the same or an improved method to sell their book with the help of LikeCoin. We can expect more books to be published in this form, and more and more people will join the ecosystem because of this.
37% of the buyers are new users, which means around 200 of them created a wallet just to purchase the book. Kin is providing one-to-one customer service to help them hand in hand to ensure they can create a wallet and join the ecosystem.
by Phoebe (42:39)
EVENTS
2022 Events Presence
Some of the key events that we attended this year, so to speak, were quite low-key in terms of our presence. However, in Q3 and Q4, we have been spending much effort on branding, business development, and marketing around the community that we would like to target. As you can expect in 2023, you’ll see a lot more presence from us. If you know of any events that we should attend, please feel free to let us know. We are working to improve our marketing as well as our storytelling, and we would love to see more of you guys in our online presence.
Web3 Creator Ecosystem Meetup is in Taipei!
Next week, we will have an event during Taiwan blockchain week. If you’re in Taiwan and you would like to meet some of the partners who have been supporting us throughout this year, please do sign up. Seats are limited.
LikeLand will have written 2022 blog posts similar to what we covered, and kin mentioned that he will also have a report regarding the experiment that he did on the NFT eBook. Look forward to next month’s Community call, and thanks for sharing your time with us today. See you next month in 2023.