Zilliqa Community Update 23 July 2019 — Developer Outreach, Twitter Contest Winners, Latest Grantees

In line with these promises and objectives, we bring you some updates on our latest hire, our latest survey and the ecosystem grant programme.

Zilliqa Community Update 23 July 2019 — Developer Outreach, Twitter Contest Winners, Latest Grantees

Greetings all,

During a recently held Zilliqa AMA on Telegram and Reddit, we concurred that global community development and marketing are key priorities for the company. Various team members provided concrete examples of our growth efforts to reach our goal — which include expansion of the existing team with skilled professionals; creation of customised surveys for community, developers and miners; and the use of metrics to understand our users base and cater to them more efficiently — among other ideas.

In line with these promises and objectives, we bring you some updates on our latest hire, our latest survey and the ecosystem grant programme. We have also included a shout-out to the Top 3 Zilliqa Day contest winners, and share some related engagement analytics which will help us shape our community relations moving forward.

Expanding our Developer Outreach

We have welcomed a new Developer Evangelist to our team — Gareth Mensah. He has joined our team to help us cultivate a rich ecosystem for our growing developer community.

Gareth brings over 10 years’ experience in technology to Zilliqa, having held roles with both Fortune 500 companies like AOL, Nokia, Wells Fargo as well as start ups. Having worked in various capacities along the way — as a technical service manager, mobile app developer, technical consultant, and developer relations expert — Gareth has a strong understanding of software development life cycle and open collaboration, which he will bring to this role. He holds a BS in Computer Science from San Francisco State University.

In just a few short days, he has already done a deep dive into Zilliqa and initiated activities that will prove to be very impactful to grow the global developer community.

As a first step, he conducted a survey to assess the developer community’s interest in bi-weekly update calls. Here’s what we found from 52 respondents:

  • The survey findings indicate that a majority of community members are not informed on the technical aspects of our infrastructure, but many believe in Zilliqa and support its growth by large. The community is keen to understand what the potential and benefits of the technology are, who is using it and how it is helping businesses and their bottom-line
  • Based on this, we turn our focus to building relationships and synergies with the community, address their queries and provide support in the form of tools and guidance along the journey towards more adoption and greater awareness
  • Moving forward, similar surveys will also help us identify gaps and accordingly customise solutions to drive business opportunities to the Zilliqa platform. In fact, we plan to have another survey after the first call to gather feedback and get to know our dev community better, i.e demographics and their coding experience/background

Zilliqa Day Twitter Competition -Top 3 Winners

There are many ways to describe and illustrate a company or concept, and truly draw out its features in a unique way. We wanted to hear from our community on how they viewed Zilliqa and our work as part of our efforts to make engagement more fun and educational for all. We received some fantastic submissions in our Zilliqa Day contest, as you would have seen on Twitter (#ZilliqaDay2019).

Below, we highlight the Top 3 winners, who have really impressed us with the depth of their insights, concept and design and time spent on weaving a story around Zilliqa’s achievements and brand identity.

  1. Yanuar Abednego (@bee833)

2. Alix Park (@alixmcrew)

3. Victor Ong (@cryptom0on)

In the interest of further understanding the contest and its outcomes, we ran some analytics on our participants demographics. This was done to get a clearer picture of how we can shift or refocus engagement in geographies where required, while keeping the drumbeat constant in those areas where there is recorded interest, investment or growth in blockchain enthusiasts.

We found that a significant percentage of our entries came from Denmark, UK, India and the largest portion was from the Philippines. Romania, Russia, South Korea, Netherlands, Australia and others each represented about 3–4 percent of the total.

Our learning here is that there are many countries (for example: the US) with growing crypto communities and followers (of Zilliqa and otherwise) that are not necessarily reflected in this contest. Moving forward, we will identify ways to increase participation of these community members and understand how they consume news and campaigns. This will enable us to tailor our approach and reach untapped talent.

Zilliqa Day twitter contest — Breakdown of participants

Zilliqa’s Fourth Wave Ecosystem Grantees

Last week, our grants manager Han-Wen Chua announced the 11 grantees from the fourth wave of our Ecosystem Grants programme. A big congratulations to all of them! We look forward to seeing how they will use Zilliqa as the building block to turn their business vision and proposals into reality. We hope to highlight their journey and accomplishments along the way, and will share profiles and short updates as and when possible.

With our eyes fixed on boosting the second layer infrastructure tooling which businesses can then leverage for b-commerce applications, we have now opened up applications for Wave Five of the Ecosystem Grant programme under three separate tracks — Infrastructure, Innovation and Research. In this edition of the programme, we will prioritise funding for project proposals which clearly present a value proposition for the Decentralised Finance (DeFi) ecosystem — including chain analytic, simple user onboarding, key management solutions, and web dApp interaction.

Apply here! and reach out to [email protected] for any queries along the way.

Zilliqa in the News

Our President Amrit speaks with Ashton Addison of Fintech News Network and Investment Pitch Media to discuss our approach to addressing blockchain scalability with sharding, the need for smart contracts that are fundamentally more secure at the language level, as well as the importance of user and developer experience in the space today.
Our President Amrit caught up with Vishal Parmar of CryptoNewsZ to reflect on the recent technological and partnership milestones of the past year, as well as our vision for the future and what challenges we foresee in the years ahead.
“As a researcher and an academic at heart, I find that critical, albeit constructive, feedback is necessary to facilitate growth. Ongoing, consistent improvement should be the goal.” Our President Amrit shares his thoughts with Coin Central on the value of fostering a constructive two-way dialogue between projects and their communities, as well as all things pertaining to security in programming languages, industry sentiments, and more.
Our Application Lead Edison recently spoke with Andy Little about our recent Social Pay initiative as well as the benefits of Scilla smart contract from a developer’s perspective and his vision for Zilliqa in the next five years.

For further information, connect with us on one of our social channels: