DEV Community: yb

The state of the QAO ecosystem - Cryptocurrency

yb — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 19:10:27 +0000

The early QAO contributors have been working on tokenomics for many years, observing the concepts created on and around the current blockchains, before finalizing the parameters for the ambitious QAO concept and executing it.

We’ve been unrolling many moving pieces of the ecosystem the past few months, along with adapting sharply to the current state of Ethereum.

The team has chosen Ethereum because it’s the most mature blockchain for smart contracts, without ever removing the possibility to bridge to other chains as they evolve. We find beauty in building an ecosystem that interacts together like Lego blocks; if you can adapt, you can’t fail.

Right now, the roadmap and the token distribution are sexier than ever(Yes, that’s what geeks find sexy) than ever and the ecosystem is rolling out better than expected, even if we had some rough patches along the way.

Here are the details of the token distribution:

• 10T initial supply
• 8.2T burned

• 1.8T total supply remaining
• ---------------------------
• 205B being time locked with the equivalent ETH in Gelato’s liquidity management strategy
• 203B with the equivalent ETH in UniswapV3 Liquidity Pool
• 224B staked (90% of that amount for 10 years)
• 794B in Treasury, to be voted on for further developments or burn events
• 374B in circulation between 828 holders

We have more than $2.5M USD worth of QAO locked for 10 years. How is that possible?

You now understand what I’ve meant by sexy, right?

This is where all the work of the past years designs is currently rolling out perfectly. We are aiming for the future, and this is what excites the current community; we’re here to stay for the long run and have the foundation to back it up. The concept of time locking your QAO brings 2 things: A proof-of-contribution for which the stakers are rewarded based on length and size of their lock, along with stability and incentive for growth in the market as the amount locked is withdrawn from circulation for some time.

QAO is a governance token, and we need people to help us make decisions that make sense for the whole ecosystem. Therefore, when the people vote, they can lock the tokens used for voting for 1 week to 520 weeks, getting a multiplier for the weight they have on the whole network. The longer, the higher the multiplier is. As there is a need for a bigger incentive when someone locks for a longer period, that multiplier is not linear. More details in the whitepaper about the multiplier: https://qao.io/whitepaper-v-0-1.pdf

With your weight ratio relative to the network weight (which is shown on the https://app.qao.io/ app), you know the ratio of the reward you receive each week. The calculation is made each week, but the rewards are sent every 4 weeks to reduce the gas costs on the chain at the moment; with the full intent of switching back to weekly distributions within 1-2 months. More information about the reward sources here: https://qaodotio.medium.com/voting-staking-and-reward-pools-in-the-rarechain-qao-ecosystem-everything-you-need-to-know-be514d5df89

As Ethereum evolves, we have to adapt, so the roadmap haschanged a little bit. We’ve found a lot of success through adaption, and you’ll find these achievements below:

• Created the QAO initial website (https://qao.io) and Whitepaper
• Created and deploy initial custom ERC-20 token of QAO on ETH.
• Created the Voting/Staking smart contract
• Optimized the Voting/Staking smart contract to use less fees as Ethereum network started to experience congestion
• Created and deploy the QAO web application (https://app.qao.io/) where most of the magic happens
• Bought land on Crypto Voxels and prepared the plan for the QAO NFT ecosystem and Museum
• Found optimization solutions for ETH gas fees and start the development
• Created 2 trading card NFT collections that will have perks on the QAO ecosystem
• Designed and start the development of the first NFT collection on QAO NFT Ecosystem/Museum
• First rewards distribution of around $65k worth of QAO to stakers

Coming soon within the next 1-90 days:

• Deployment of the first NFT collection, with 2.5% of the sales redistributed to the QAO ecosystem and rewards pool for the lifetime of the NFT sales on specific marketplaces
• Layer 2 support and bridging to other chains for lower fees while ETH stabilizes
• Rarechain financial API releases with the fees collected and redistributed to QAO ecosystem and rewards pool for stakers
• Many more things as our community adapts to the evolving markets

Most projects like QAO spend a large budget on marketing before they have a working product. We did exactly the opposite: Build, adapt, fix bugs, then start the marketing of the project.

The launch is now and the ecosystem is fully working with a real use case.

RESSOURCES:

Official QAO website: https://qao.io/
Official QAO web application: https://app.qao.io/
Whitepaper: https://qao.io/whitepaper-v-0-1.pdf
Medium: https://qaodotio.medium.com/
Github: https://github.com/rarechain/QAO
Uniswap: https://app.uniswap.org/#/swap?outputCurrency=0x3402e15b3ea0f1aec2679c4be4c6d051cef93953

SOCIAL:

Official QAO Telegram: https://t.me/qaodotio
Official QAO Twitter: https://twitter.com/QAOdotio
Discord invite link: https://discord.gg/75jrNSE6SN

QAO - Technology for the people

yb — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 15:46:29 +0000

I’ve been observing what is going on in the world for as long as I’ve been alive and much before. What is going on right now is planned.

We need change.

The past 100 years have been a buildup of many lies, lack of transparency, profitability before accountability for the actions taken and many more concepts that I don’t even understand why we, the people, accepted.

We need radical transparency.

This is why the blockchain has been so popular lately… Transparency, freedom, control over our own life.

The concept of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) started to rise in popularity in the cryptocurrencies world. Why? Because it gives power to the contributors. True power. They can vote, they can participate, they can give their opinion, they can be heard and they can even be rewarded for those actions.

We’ve seen this concept since the inception of Ethereum and it has been growing in popularity lately, with DeFI exchanges like UniSwap having a voting system for changes to their ecosystem based on the UNI governance token.

A couple years ago, someone approached me with a crazy idea, knowing I have a deep knowledge of finance, cryptocurrencies, software engineering and many other skills needed for the idea to take place.

He wanted to get many people around the world involved in creating something more on top of the DAO principle, where people could collaborate in an entire ecosystem providing financial and decision-making freedom.

The technology for the people. Anyone.

Using the blockchain was the idea, because of the transparency of every transaction. Also, the decentralization made it available for everybody around the world, with no initial value so only it’s utility would give it a value.

He showed me the idea, his whitepaper and all the work behind the concept. I was astonished. I decided to give a hand and help the project because it was directly bonded to my values.

From those discussions is born QAO (Qualified autonomous organisation) with the only purpose to be fully community driven, rewarding the contributors for its implication and dedication in the evolution of the decentralized ecosystem.

We decided to leverage the Web3 JavaScript open ecosystem and many of the existing tools, creating the missing ones, to develop that dream that is becoming a reality right now.

Maybe my opinion is biased by my contribution to the project, but I really think that people interested in their freedom should pay attention to this soon-to-officially-launch project.

If you want to learn more, you can join the community on the discord or browse dome information on the website and the medium.

Discord: https://discord.gg/9s26U8Uf47
Website: https://qao.io/
Medium: https://qaodotio.medium.com/

HTML5 Video Sketch Analysis - Example solution

yb — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 14:46:08 +0000

It all started when a customer asked me to create a tool where he can draw lines, circles, arrow, squares and whatever he wants over videos that have been uploaded by the player on his already existing web application. He showed me a mobile application doing this already, and it is shaaaarrrp. Trying to do the same on a small budget is kind of a challenge, but who risk nothing has nothing.

And knowledge is worth more than money. Also, using the power of the web to build great portable things is what I look for.

I've tried to build something from existing solutions over the web and I came to an interesting proof of concept in less than an hour.

Not a huge challenge you would say? The real challenge is not there, but is to end up with a product that has all functionalities that the user wants with a great user experience. And I am far from there.

What would someone want with that kind of Sketch-over-video tool?

First, I've used a tool called Literally (http://literallycanvas.com). It is a small tool built with ReactJS that creates a Canvas with a couple of drawing tools, something like paint but smaller. The UI is far from what I want, but at least for a small tweak I have a working demo.

Then, I used VideoJS (https://videojs.com), which is a well known product, to be able to easily create a control bar. For the moment, it is only for the pause and play button. We need this because the canvas is over the video player and we cannot interact with the controls.

It would be possible to just subtract dynamically a couple pixel from the height of the canvas and still be able to use the buttons and the seekbar, but there is 2 problems with this:

the html5 video default skin has controls all over the video and when you pause it, the play button is in the middle of the video, which is not so good for the video analysis.
the play button from the custom VideoJS skin is on the top left corner of the player, we cannot click it with the canvas on.

So, we still need to play the video from outside the player. My solution is to create a custom control bar, but I still need to see if I can move the video smoothly with a custom seekbar, as I need this when analysing the video.

Next, I would want to be able to save the sketching for later consultation and usage. It would be nice to be able to load multiple sketches over a video and toggle them when we want or even on a timeline that fits the video. It will be easy to save a canvas state, but I am not sure yet if I can easily reload it in the Literally plugin or any other sketching tool, existing or custom made. It currently keep the drawing history and I did not dig into it for now.

Last thing, the Literally sketch pad skin do not fit what I see of a video analysis tool, so if I continue with this javascript library, I will need for sure to create a new skin. More convenient with the toolbar outside of the video or fitting the video inside. It may be complex to have something that fits all screens well. We have to consider that this tool will be used inside a web application that can already compare 2 videos side to side. The UI can becoming overwhelming.

Here is the small demo: https://mentortechies.github.io/video-sketch-html5/

Here is the source code: https://github.com/mentortechies/video-sketch-html5

Have you ever built or experienced this kind of thing?

P.S. Bootstrap 3 have been used as it is the current CSS Framework used by the project.

Better be wrong than late - A young software development entrepreneur journey

yb — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 14:48:20 +0000

Throughout my software development journey, I had a lot of different adventures. In fact, I started my custom software development company at the age of 19, with a friend, while attending university. During the last 10 years, I have seen a lot of projects, from customers’, to personal, passing by a spin off startup that we created inside our company. One motto we’ve used a lot is: Better be wrong than late.

What does this mean? Let’s start with an example. We had an early client who wanted to create a small project. I was 20 years old at the time and had almost no managing experience. He is the kind of old wolf with a lot of experience, but a shy person. His budget was $10k, which is small, but it is big for someone starting from the dining room of his apartment (Where we had the meetings).

The good thing is that he knew exactly what he wanted; a small application to survey anonymously with short quiz a fair amount of people in each department of companies of 1000+ employees, mostly when there is some good or bad major internal events. He is an independent consultant in human resources and he wanted to use this tool in his existing customers’ companies.

It was easy for us for a first contract of this size, even if we ended up being paid approximately 5 dimes per hour. At least, the customer was comprehensive and he wanted this project on a short budget and in short delays.

He did not seem to lack money though, which raised me some questions; why being so low budget on that kind of project if you’ve been in business for the past 40 years and you come to me “office” with a brand new Mercedes-Benz. Easy question, hard answer. But I had my luck understanding what happened in his mind and it helped my company and our customers for the next 9 years.

His last tech project went bankruptcy. They invested 2 million dollars of private money on a project that they rewrote twice and that did not even get to market. When they tried to onboard early adopters, they had so much request they did not think of and they had so much work to do that the investors decided to stop providing. They were already late, and they were also wrong.

When starting a project, you need to target your MVP (Minimum viable product) and it should be very minimal. Why? Because when you design this product, you do it with what you know and the vision of you and your team. When you onboard customers, they will for sure bring you comments, ideas, needs and much more that you did not think of at the beginning. More than that, they will tell you totally different needs than what you planned. And now you are stuck with 1 year of coding and you are not even ready to introduce new configurations to your project, but you want the early money so you do it anyway.

Here comes in the beginning of the technical debt. To make it short, a technical debt is when you take the decision to do your coding fast instead of good and later you are stuck with a huge pile of code that nobody totally understand. Most big projects has it. Some projects even closed for this reason.

You have to consider something: What you need is not always what people needs. The worst thing to do is spending so much time and money on something for later to find out that this something is nothing. This is why you are better to fail early. As Will Smith said: "Fail early, fail often, fail forward". This way, you can adjust faster.

A lot of tech projects are the fruits of early failures, a melting of luck and determination and sometimes a naive approach. For example:

Twitter; Jack was creating a geolocation app for courrier when he joined the company Odeo. He was inspired by fast and concise communication sent to a group of people like an sms but more open to the world. They brainstormed, created a simple version of Twitter and it was adopted early, even if there was close to no functions except broadcasting a 140 characters message.
Slack; Daniel Stewart Butterfield ran many software companies, mostly in game development, but also including Flickr, the image hosting service. In fact, none of his games were a success, but some companies were interested to use his internal messaging app used for communication between teams member, but also to receive external messages from build servers, error logging and much more. Here is born Slack, out of an internal simple tool.

If you have a project, bring it fast to market, even if you think that the functionalities are not worth being a product, and then add no features from the comments you get. Even if it starts with very few users. You will be rewarded way more than if you build everything, wanting to make a perfect launch, and then you enter the infernal loop of coding unexpected addons.

What you really need is simple:

A good software development team, or at least you being fully in control of the technology you use.
A good organisation: Development environment, staging environment, good testing and a stable production environment with a lot of monitoring.
Good DevOps; I read an article about how Etsy went from little massive deployment to deploying many times everyday and being reactive to bugs.
A niche that needs improvement.
Patience and motivation.

Just get started, you will see, it is fun.