7th Community Call with CTO Troy Hua 05/11/2023
Some key points to remember:
- Development in Southeast Asia: ReadON reached second place on Google Play in the “News” category.
- The first anniversary is approaching: benefits for Catto NFT holders, 3rd RBB season with a sponsor.
- Nearly 25% of transactions on Linea Mainnet took place on ReadON’s Content Hub immediately after release.
- The team is working on new products for the Telegram and Ton ecosystem.
- 3rd raffle in November.
- In the first part of the community call, Troy shared with us some ongoing and new developments.
- In part two, we collected some questions from the community and Troy answered them.
- And in the third part, we had open questions/answers.
Troy: For the first topic, I’d like to outline some of the progress we’ve made in growing our users. Over the past few months, the team has devoted a lot of effort to user growth in the Southeast Asia region, as we find great potential in the product market in this region.
We have now made great progress in this area: in the News section category in Indonesia, we reached second place on Google Play, just below Twitter Lite. So we also have a good trend, I think in the near future it is possible for us to reach the top, the number one application in the News section in Indonesia. We’ll probably tweet about this later with our team. We achieved this by working with local communities, TikTok KOLs, and we also designed and implemented a unique invitation program.
We will intensify this growth strategy, not only in Southeast Asia, but also in other countries. We recently added Hindi and Turkish to the languages we support so far. And we’re also looking to see very good user growth in these new countries.
The second topic I would like to touch on is that we are approaching the one year anniversary of our ReadON app. Many users sent us a screenshot of the number of days they spent with ReadON and that number is getting closer to 365. So we are planning a one-year anniversary event. We still have a few details about the event that haven’t been finalized yet. But in general, it will consist of two parts:
First of all, benefits for Catto NFT holders. The team is always very conservative about releasing new NFTs, because like the RBB box, you will see that we somewhat control the number of NFTs available. We therefore appreciate Catto holders for their trust and always consider them our largest investors. A significant part of the first anniversary is therefore reserved for Catto holders.
The second part is related to the 3rd season of RBB campaigns and in the meantime, we will also share some progress with our important partners who will sponsor the third season. This season is therefore a little different from the previous two. We have a sponsor and the topic will be named by the sponsor.
Things we’re working on right now. You may have noticed that we recently worked with Linea, a very popular layer 2, and released Content Hub which has gained popularity among our users. And almost 25% of transactions on Linea Mainnet took place on the ReadON Content Hub.
So we have great success there. And we want things to move forward.
In addition to optimizing Content Hub and integrating the product into the main ReadON app, the team is working on a new product on Telegram and Ton. There are 8 billion MAUs on Telegram and we see great potential in both Telegram and the Ton ecosystem. I believe this will drive ReadON’s next growth.
You may notice that in the main app we don’t see many new features, as most of the team members are working hard on new products for the Telegram and Ton ecosystem.
1st question:
When will the next raffle take place? And do we have more draws ahead of us or will the next one be the last?
Troy: So the 3rd draw will be released in November, and for this one we have a sponsor. Unlike the previous one, we take a vote in our community and we propose a topic, but this will be predefined by our sponsor.
As for the dates, this has not yet been finalized but it will be this month. And if we will have more Raffles in the future, yes too. We will hold other raffles in the future. And we will explore how we can use the draw for the growth of our community and also to collaborate.
2nd question:
New language options have been added recently. Traditional Chinese, Hindi, Turkish. And as I understand it, not all existing languages are developed in the same way. Can you give us a basic idea of how you do this with different languages?
Troy:
We added new languages based on our user growth in the corresponding regions. In fact, most languages are developed in the same way. There are some technical differences: For some languages we do not yet have local content. For example, in Hindi and Turkish, the content acquisition team (we have a smaller team within our larger team) works on collecting local content, in which the content itself is written at the origin in this language.
And the second thing, I think we support translations for all the languages that we support so far, but we use about three engines in combination. Some of them use Open AI as their API, some use DeepL, and some use Google translate. And in terms of quality, Open AI comes first, DeepL second, and Google third. But in terms of coverage, Google Translator covers all content, DeepL comes second and Open AI third.
3rd question:
Are you planning to increase the prize pool in Pick?
Yes, we are also working on adding READ tokens to the prize pool. There are a few options we might have here:
– Added a READ token pool where users must stake $READ to get $READ.
– Added additional $READ as a benefit for NFT holders.
I think one is a little more complex than the other but makes more sense, you have people joining in different time periods so it makes more sense.
4th question:
Will my Testnet tokens be converted to Mainnet tokens? Are there specific steps one can take to be eligible for an airdrop once $READ is on mainnet?
Yes, definitely, we use the $READ token as the main reward in most of our campaigns. This will be a crucial factor in the $READ airdrop when mainnet is released.
5th question:
What can I do with my $READ test tokens? Should we expect other uses soon?
Yes. There are some things we are designing at the moment.
– Additional selection pool, where users can stake $READ to get $READ
– Special version of the RBB box for which users need to spend $READ to get an exclusive reward that is not available in the normal RBB.
3rd part
How to control the inflation of $READ tokens?
Troy: That’s a great question. So I think we have pretty good control over point inflation, for example, there are two types of rewards or additional earnings, token inflation can come from two things: if, say, the user completes certain tasks and obtains tokens, the tokens would be inflated depending on the number of users present in the ecosystem and the number of days remaining there. So we don’t want to go that route. It will be something like the Pick kitty, it will be a fixed reward. So the total number of tokens will not be inflated based on the number of users. And the other thing is we have a reward system for NFT holders, but we kind of control the number of NFTs, so we’re not worried about $READ being inflated based on NFT rewards.
What about the main network? Will it be 2024?
Yes, at the moment I’m pretty confident it can be 2024. What’s currently blocking us from a full mainnet release are some technical issues. First of all, we need to find a very reliable service provider. We’re working on our own application chain and there are service providers, and it’s a very, very new thing. So it will take us some time to see who can provide reliable services. And the team has to spend resources, not only in time but also in money. We need to spend money to build this application chain, so we want to choose a good provider. And the second thing is we have to choose what is the base chain for the application chain, should we be a layer 2 based on Ethereum, or a layer 3 which will lower the gas and be based on a layer 2. So There are definitely some technical issues that we need to resolve before launching on the mainnet.
