Utopian Presentation @SteemFest. Roadmap inside. Building a sustainable business on Steem.

The hot topic for dApps at this year’s @SteemFest was how to build a sustainable business on the Steem blockchain. Utopian has been focusing for the past year on creating a business that scales and can walk on its own two feets. Find out what we’ve learned.

Building a sustainable business is no easy game, and it becomes even harder for initiatives like ours, working on pioneering blockchain technologies. Utopian has gathered thousands of use cases, building Utopian V2 to meet the needs of open source projects and contributors.

Established a bit over a year ago, Utopian has been empowering open source projects on the Steem blockchain and beyond through continuous support. As Utopian was born on the Steem blockchain, our commitment to it is immense. We appreciate the positive feedback from the community, which has chosen us as one of the consensus witnesses.

Utopian, which began as a proof-of-concept fork of Busy.org, has proved to have the necessary ingredients to become a full-featured product.

The success of the Utopian POC is shown by the numbers: We’ve incentivised more than 65,000 contributions, embraced over 5,000 professionals and supported almost 9,000 open source projects.

Utopian is a data-driven project. Thanks to our POC, we have learned a lot. As in every learning process, challenges are inevitable.

Where monetary incentives are involved, abuse is always around the corner. Continuous audits are necessary to make sure the framework can mitigate them.

Retention is another challenge every dApp has faced. The volatility of the market, and especially the current bearish trends, make retention hard. It is critical to highlight long-term benefits and build incentives beyond the monetary ones.

You can never have enough security. It is critical to dedicate a great deal of attention to the topic. One must consider the weak points of both the infrastructure and the organisation.

Cost & sustainability is the biggest challenge a dApp on the blockchain faces. It is critical to consider the importance of balancing INs and OUTs. Specifically for the Steem blockchain, it is important to keep in mind the unreliability of delegated stake.

Monetary incentives are definitely not the only incentives Utopian can offer, and we believe the focus shouldn’t be fully on them. The right community is the one which sees the long-term benefits and contributes to the greater mission. This is where our full focus has been and will remain.

As the community is such a critical component, we have been very careful in on-boarding and supporting the right members. Our core team is indeed made up of some of the best community members. Through hard work and commitment, they have demonstrated the skills and will to make Utopian a reality. Utopian counts 11 core members and over 50 reviewers and community managers across the world, speaking almost 30 languages.

Overcoming our challenges wouldn’t have been possible without constantly learning from our partners. We are proud to support relevant open source initiatives on their journeys to build open source innovation.

The Utopian POC was born on Steem and we are forever grateful. Utopian has been working hard to support the growth of the Steem blockchain. We’ve been proactive as a witness, encouraged the development of the blockchain and dApps, as well as incentivising education for the community.

It’s about time to use the lessons we learnt to create a product aimed to solve effectively challenges and needs: Utopian V2.

Utopian v.2

The Social Platform for Collaboration and Collective Funding of Open Source Innovation. Such a fancy sentence to say a simple thing: we have been working hard over the last year to gather as much data as possible to come up with a solution that really works for our audience.

Open source projects are looking for spreading knowledge and awareness, building connections, and raising funds.

Utopian has supported sharing knowledge since day 1 and we believe this is an important component to attracting more professionals to the blockchain and to the open source ecosystem, enabling valuable content for a variety of categories such as tutorials, analyses, project updates and more.

To facilitate incentives for awesome content, Utopian V2 will enable you to send and receive liquid tips in a multitude of coins. Of those, STEEM will stand out, being super fast, featuring cost-free transactions, but most importantly being the only coin from which Utopian will get zero commissions.

If you have been following Utopian, you have probably noticed that we have been running a bounty-alike system on the Steem account @utopian.tasks. Working with our partners and project mantainers, we have learned much. It is crystal clear to us that the community wants to have a voice when it comes to proposing changes. This is the reason that Utopian V2 will feature a decentralized bounty exchange, enabling project owners, project collaborators, as well as external contributors to host bounties and load them up.

There’s a special sauce which makes the Utopian bounty exchange uniquely smart: Professional Quality Assurance. We have been supporting project owners and contributors in their decision making processes since the start. We have enabled them to make better and more informed decisions when distributing rewards. Utopian V2 will bring this powerful concept to the next level, as we have been gathering materials studies and industry standards to shift our quality assurance process and make it work for organisations of all sizes.

Utopian wants to be the place for professional open source contributors. We want to give them an identity. You will be able to create detailed profiles, showing your carreer, education, as well as your activity and reputation built during your journey on the platform.

As we want to build the bridge between contributors and projects, it makes sense to give these project a home. You will be able to create awesome pages for your open source projects, showing details, a personal blog and bounties pages.

To make sure we can facilitate the connection between contributors and project maintainers, Utopian will feature an on-site messaging and notification system. The foundation of the messaging app is already available, have a look at this contribution from @Tensor.

Utopian V2 is being built around two fundamental concepts: sustainability and mass adoption. The majority of the potential audience doesn’t know what the blockchain is, or is not confident enough to try and understand its complexities. This is why Utopian V2 gamifies users’ experience with the Steem blockchain and the other coins listed on the platform:

Receive tips on articles and donations for your bounty solutions even if you don’t have a Steem wallet.
Interact with Utopian by using standard, one-click, social oauth providers.
Have the ability to choose whether to post your contributions to the blockchain or not. This will determine your ability to access SP rewards.

As Steem remains the most important nexus for Utopian, we have made sure to highlight the benefits of using it compared to the other listed coins:

Pay zero commissions on Steem tips.
Access additional incentives thanks to the SP rewards capabilities.
Withdraw your Steem balance instantly and automatically as soon as your Steem account is synced. All other coins will require manual verification up to 72 hours.
A significant chunk of the commissions taken from all the coins, will be powered up to sustain the voting distribution and reviewers rewards, effectively growing the Steem ecosystem both directly and indirectly.

Utopian V2 Roadmap

You may have noticed we had to shift our deadline quite a few times. The reason for that is simple: We have collected almost 70K contributions, which to us represent 70K experiments and use cases. During our journey of building the platform, and as our partners have been growing, we have discovered functionalities we now view as critical for the success of our platform. We believe that we are at the point where we have gathered enough data to build a product that works.

We have also had our issues and realised how much is important to have the right team. @Gregory.Latinier, our recently added CTO, has done an incredible job of splitting the work into tasks. We have begun offering these to our community of contributors as bounties.

Utopian V2 is scheduled to be live by early April 2019. With your help, we can make it happen sooner. Learn how you can contribute to make this Utopia a reality, by reading the complete tutorial.