The FreeMyVunk Movement RoadMap
I want to start off by saying Thank You, to all the people who have signed up and are actively contributing to the Slack and on Twitter. With the first month after launch now behind us, I am so appreciative of the support we have felt from early community members. We recognize that while we lay the foundation of this movement there are numerous things that are either inconvenient, or downright frustrating. So thank you for your patience and support.
One change which we would like to announce is that we are officially changing the name of our community reward token from VUNK to VNK. The discussion around this was started by the community and there were many great ideas shared. The reason for the change was that people were getting confused between vunk (the generic term for all virtual junk/assets) and VUNK (a specialized community reward token generated by the FreeMyVunk Movement). When attempting to create a brand new word, it is best to keep things simple and straightforward, so we accepted the feedback and began asking how we could improve the naming convention for our reward token. Despite a variety of interesting and well thought out opinions, the core team converged on VNK. This takes the standard acronym approach of standard currency abbreviations while still preserving the branding around vunk. In written form, this should simplify things greatly. We anticipate that people may pronounce VNK as VUNK, but this can easily be clarified by following it with the word tokens/coin/etc., or pronouncing the letters, V.N.K. Most importantly, VNK will be intuitively connected to the FreeMyVunk Movement without needing an explanation. Thank you to everyone who participated in the conversation and please rally behind the term VNK and make it a success.
Critical to the success of any movement, members need to be empowered with three fundamental things: 1) clarity of purpose, 2) general roadmap of direction, and 3) group identity. The rest of this blog post will attempt to shed some light on these.
Purpose
The goal of the FreeMyVunk Movement is to build the economic infrastructure of the metaverse (the collection of all virtual worlds). We will do this one token at a time and one video game/virtual environment at a time. When we speak of the vast potential of vunk, it is important to understand that Rome wasn’t built in a day. In fact, the analogy with the Roman empire is a good one. Rome built its vast empire and maintained it through a system of simple engineering solutions, aka. roads, bridges, aqueducts, amphitheaters, etc. Each stone laid in the creation of a road or bridge served a critical purpose. By combining large numbers of properly fitting stones, the Roman infrastructure gave rise to an explosion of trade and culture. We believe that in a similar way, by “tokenizing” virtual assets, we will pave the roads which will lead to an explosion of new interactions between people in the metaverse. Each sword, magic potion, space craft, or digital card, will act as another stone in a bridge between different virtual worlds. We will enable virtual world developers to issue each asset as its own unique set of tokens. The number of different vunk tokens may one day become more numerous than all the stones which comprised the vast Roman Empire.
General Roadmap
The amazing thing about many of the world’s engineering wonders, is that they were built using very simple tools. This is also true in our case. The most challenging and difficult piece of the solution has already been created. The blockchain, or more specifically, the Ethereum Network will serve as the structural support for the metaverse economy. The importance of a third party neutral platform for value transaction and storage can not be overstated. I won’t take the time here to explain the wonders made possible through this technology, but it should be recognized how important it is to our project.
The first tool we are using to build this community is the VNK token. I’ve described many of my ideas about why a community token is important in various places on the website, but I want to focus on one particular use case here. We believe that if we are to gain main stream adoption by gamers it is imperative that we abstract as much of the blockchain away from the user as possible. One of the key things which will act as a barrier to adoption is the need to acquire Ether to pay for transactions. Asking new users to go set up an account at an exchange, link their bank accounts and finally purchase Ether, just so they can send a transaction is a show stopper. So we’ve created an alternative. Part of the functionality being coded into the VNK token smart contract is the ability to recognize accounts created within VunkWallet and allow them to pay the transaction fees in VNK rather than Ether. This involves a proxy account which checks that the conditions are met and pays the gas costs (in Ether) for these transactions. The implementation of this concept is really the brain child of Anthony Eufemio, the lead developer for Digix, and we are so grateful for his help. But it means that we can now provide all the essential needs for new users to immediately start using the platform. No more waiting 5-7 days for that ACH Bank transfer to clear.
The second tool we are working on is VunkWallet. This will be the main entry point for on-boarding new users. VunkWallet will begin as a web wallet. It uses the Digix wallet system and follows a blockchain.info type model for managing account private keys. We are also building VunkWallet into our Unity plugins (game development software) through a system of APIs. The result will be a seamless integration of your wallet between the web and within the games. And as I mentioned above, anyone who uses VunkWallet will be able to pay for all their transactions using VNK instead of Ether. Another great integration was just announced last week, the integration of Uport, the Consensus identity platform, into the Digix wallet system.
Finally, the third tool is the marketplace. This is where everything really comes together. The full scope of the marketplace design is still in the conceptual phase. We envision users accessing this marketplace from a variety of environments. Gamers will be able to open a browser and navigate to a web page to post a trade/sale (ebay style), but just as easily they might create a query to look for all sale offers of a particular asset from within their in-game VunkWallet through the plugins. Eventually we hope that other businesses will utilize the marketplace through our APIs and therefore greatly expand its usefulness. The marketplace will also serve to increase the value of VNK. The system will reward VNK holders by providing two basic functions in exchange for VNK: transactions and marketplace trades. All sales/trades conducted through the marketplace will require a small VNK fee. This acts as a form of spam filter, but also as a reward to our community. As the volume of commerce grows, so should the value of VNK. The distribution of VNK rewards for a given activity will diminish as more and more users sign up. And one day when we reach our 10 millionth account signed up through VunkWallet, VNK distribution will completely cease altogether.
Identity
There are many facets to the identity question. In the crypto-space we’ve seen a multitude of small communities spring up around tokens, each with their own identity and culture. So as we begin this journey together we should ask, “What kind of a community do we aspire to be?” Fortunately, we have the power to decide this.
This biog post has been delayed repeatedly due to unforeseen distractions, so the question of identity will be the subject of the following blog post The FreeMyVunk Roadmap Part 2. I hope that the question of community identity will generate a lot of discussion. Please come join us on the slack to share your opinions.
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