🤖Robofam! 🤖
It’s the end of October, and it sure has been a tumultuous month!
We’ve spoken in bits and pieces about the situation, but we felt it was necessary to talk about it officially one last time before moving on to the exciting things we have planned.
After our mint started, we were focused on building our community and delivering on the last item on our old roadmap; the marketplace. On August 13th, we released an alpha leak of what we had started planning for rewarding holders of Solarians, and then the Solana NFT space started rocketing and caused a surge in traffic that we were nowhere near prepared for. Our community managers were scrambling, trying to handle the influx of new people coming into the community whilst preparing for the alpha launch of DigitalEyes at the end of the month. We were stretched to our limits trying to stabilize the marketplace and hiring new team members.
To the dismay of the community that had invested time, effort and SOL into us, we got so caught up in stabilizing DigitalEyes that we started neglecting our core product and the amazing community that had been building around it since we first started minting Solarians in April.
In early September, we put out an official announcement regarding the details of the revenue share and fully intended on delivering profits to individual Solarian holders. But because we didn’t like the idea of doing a flat share of revenue/10,000 Solarians. We wanted to gamify the model and reward people for building their unique Solarian Squads and holding rarer titles, among numerous other considerations.
Between trying to handle the extra workload of Digital Eyes and looking for new team members to help us handle said load, we slaved over the data and the mechanics of the revenue model before starting the long process of actually building it out. But the complexity of what we wanted to build led to delays on the delivery, and the delays caused frustration to take it’s seed in our community. Each ‘not yet’ that we said only made that frustration grow and grow.
When we were close to finish building the distribution tool, we entered into talks with FTX on potentially listing on their marketplace. During these talks, it came to light that providing revenue share directly to our holders would prevent us from working with important partners in the space.
For the sake of the project and its longevity, and to not hinder its ability to grow, we chose to direct the promised revenue to the community to the Solarian DAO instead of distributing to individual holders. We chose what we thought would be best for the project and it’s community.
While we had Solarians and our community’s best interest at heart, as Thomas Edison said, “A good intention, with a bad approach, often leads to a poor result.”
We communicated poorly, and have been communicating poorly for too long. The volcano burst, and all the frustration that had been building up over the past month erupted.
We had lost the faith and trust that we had been building up to this point.
We’re truly sorry for the lack of communication and all the poor results that it led us to.
So what happens next?
Two of our pain points are communication and development delays. To help with this, we are hiring new developers and team members that will be dedicated to the Solarian project and community, and have pulled back some of our existing team to focus on building for Solarians. These team members will help us ensure that we honour our new commitment to building up a two-way communication between the community and the team, and assure our community that we hear them.
At the end of the day, we know that actions speak louder than words and so we’ll be putting our heads down and working hard to deliver tangible value in the hope that we will earn what we lost; your trust.
So with that said, this will be a new chapter for Solarians…and we believe that it’s going to be bigger and better than the last one!
Solaria Prime: A New Chapter Initiative
A new chapter needs a new rhythm! This will be the theme of our next few initiatives!
- We’re Changing How We Communicate
We know that there is a need for change. As part of this, we will be re-organizing our Discord and adding specific channels for feedback, suggestions, official voting rooms for verified Solarians and a channel for gauging community sentiment for our ideas. We want to give everyone a place to be heard, and our community managers will be setting up their new office in these feedback channels. - PFP Versions of Solarians!
We love our robots a lot, but we agree that they don’t exactly make the best PFPs…especially with such a busy background. So in November we will be rolling out a new look for our Solarian Holders to use! - New Roadmap
While we continue to have a team dedicated to making Digital Eyes better, we are satisfied enough to cross off the last item on our old roadmap. This means that this gives us freedom to create an entirely new one! - Refreshed Website
New chapter, new website! We haven’t made any major changes to our website for a while, and we know it’s in dire need of a refresh. We’ll be asking the community what they want to see, bringing on some graphic designers, and putting together a website that our Robo Fam can proudly point people to! - The Changing Room
The last planned item in our New Chapter Initiative is our Changing Room, which we expect to start rolling out at the end of Q4! We have two devs dedicated to building a place for people to accessorize and personalize their Solarians!
This New Chapter Initiative will set the foundation for the exciting new things we are building for 2022!
Thank you for helping us improve our game and lighting the fire under our butts, and we hope that we’ll be able to convince you that we are worth believing in!
And a special shoutout to all of our amazing community members who stuck with us and have kept our community alive and kicking!
P.S. Development for our open metaverse, Rumble Worlds is coming along very nicely! Since you’ve made it to the end of the article, here’s a little bit of alpha: Head on over to https://www.motionmiracles.com/ and see if you can find a familiar 3D robot on their homepage ;)
