We are now one of the most used smart contracts connected to Bitcoin for finalization via Stacks. We have a 150 regular NFT minters every week plus over 10k browsers per day. The API is getting from 2 to 5 calls per second.

You can check the system at land.bitfari.com. Plus, we will soon be releasing a version where you can shop using only Bitcoin.

The marketplace is up and running at land.bitfari.com. A nice milestone for the project as virtual billboards help with adoption and coverage. The site has a tutorial section, plus token minting is free or less than 1 dollar using a Club100K NFT.

Join us and experience the future of location-based marketing!!

The Digital Land NFT Marketplace testnet is live at http://landtest.bitfari.com !!

You can purchase digital land, which is an NFT allowing you to operate virtual billboards in your chosen location. Approve ads, showcase your message to the world, host hyperlocal apps and content and profit from your efforts!

You can buy entire cities, islands, famous monuments and wonders of the world!! It all goes live next week at http://land.bitfari.com

We have prepared 2.7 million places for minting and imediate operation! Land sells for as low as 4.99 USD. This project will provide Bitfari with total national coverage in the USA, with upcoming mints in the rest of the world.

Stay tuned!!!

25M Augmented reality billboards have been added to the system. They solve the cold start problem of having no ads to match with users initially - low engagement.

With virtual billboards, the density of the system can be increased, the number of billboard operators increases dramatically and the incentives for users to participate shoot up.

We are also airdropping coupons of digital land to early adopters. See the tesnet for digital land or augmented reality billboards here landtest.bitfari.com.

Next month we will release couponing and online ads. Immediately after this we will go to mainnet with the full system. Currently we have about 10k social media followers across all the channels + 1k beta testers!

Testnet is live on test.bitfari.com. Documentation has also been posted at bitfari.org. All the modules will go live/mainnet in the summer. The token is also live and a small liquidity pool has been created on stackswap.org. In order to accelerate adoption, some 300K screens have been connected to the system, with 25M augmented reality boards to follow soon. Online ads and AR haven't been released yet, but we are only some short months away.

Version 1 of the project is launching today. You can enjoy a free stream on YouTube by following this link: https://youtu.be/3LCZKixUfzY

Enjoy!

You're invited to our v1 launch event online and free here https://hopin.com/events/bitfari-1-launch-let-there-be-rock

All event details here: https://www.bitfari.org/2022/02/01/announcing-bitfari-launch-event-for-2-22/

Looks like a very nice program. My team will apply. For reference here's our project: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5344556.0

FYI, screen registrations are now open. Local ad booking goes live tomorrow on mainnet, plus additional tutorials and content will be published to guide users and developers.

We expect to launch with 1500 billboards (for which we are finalising negotiations) and 4 million hours of ads (already booked). Right now we are getting about 10,00 uniques per day, so we hope to translate that into a healthy growth of 500-1000 smart screens added to the network each month.

In November, we'll push the Parra release. That's the one intended for agencies and large institutions. We expect the network to grow significantly then.

Keep building.

1. Mainnet happens about one month after every testnet release. So, we will release Bitfari incrementally, network by network.

2. The Fari token is now on mainnet

3. The app (release 1) is now on mainnet: http://bitfari.com

4. Additional releases are posted on bitfari.com (app) + weekly announcements are made on the foundation website (bitfari.org)

I think Gaia has solved that problem, however, there might be a lot of room for niche solutions. About Gaia: https://docs.stacks.co/build-apps/references/gaia

Most dev teams don't have staff with a strong valuation background. Additionally, some teams want to raise all the money at once. Traditionally, you raise angel funding and then do a series of rounds where the valuation becomes clearer. Doing it all at once obscures the value.

See our project here, where we try to do things differently: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5344556.0

Well, I've played at both sides of the table. As an investor, it's painful to lose money. It's something that drains your spirit as well as your wallet. You feel cheated.

As a developer, the truth is the more money you raise the better people and systems you can afford. It takes a couple of companies for entrepreneurs to figure out that raising less and keeping more of their companies can yield better results in the long run. Few understand this.

I suggest you avoid ICOs and focus on trading the markets. There are a lot of good opportunities out there. 

The cold start problem, right! Well, first let's talk about the naming of actors in the platform: screen operators distribute ads via smart screens (what you call publishers), advertisers are marketers and regular people that wish to distribute ads via smart screens, billboards, or computers.

Now, the cold start problem. From day 1, the Bitfari foundation will distribute ads promoting the platform on every screen installed, we have budgeted a sizable number of the tokens for this (the budget for this spans five years). Meaning all the audited screen operators will be paid since day one. It will be in faris, but we can get a non-trivial number of screen operators that way.

Some screen operators and business owners will realize that faris equate to free publicity and will start valuing the tokens and installing more screens.

Marketers start coming in, not necessarily when there is critical mass but whenever there is a critical opportunity. This is a very important and key distinction. If you place a single billboard on the lawn of the Whitehouse, advertisers will book ads on it forever from day 1. So you don't need a critical mass to generate interest, rather you need critical locations.

Bitfari recruits critical locations in multiple ways:

1) The pricing model rewards bigger screens and bigger foot traffic making it more lucrative for owners of storefronts to join in.

2) Registering screens is free and doesn't require any affiliation so is only a matter of time until realtors realize they can make money showing ads in empty lots and use that to better advertise real estate or empty offices.

3) Bitfari screens are information centers, you can use them as ambient social networks (something we haven't discuss yet but soon will), you can use them as calendars, message boards, and translation stations. So you don't need a critical mass of advertisers to find the screens useful.

4) Everything posted on the platform is advertised. You post a screen in a cool location, we advertise it via 10 different social media channels, on our website, thru the marketing email list, etc. Most importantly, this screen will be advertised in the app with location photos, description, estimated foot traffic, and, at the cheapest price anywhere since there are no intermediaries.

5) The big tsunami: our platform allows any individual, agency, IT consulting firm, or freelancer to start their own agency network within Bitfari, install as many screens as they like and take whatever cut they like.

6) We advertise incentives daily, meaning, when there is ad auditing $$$, promos, etc customers fill visit locations where Bitfari ads are shown at a higher rate gaining bigger exposure to the platform.

7) Every Bitfari client is a potential screen, meaning the app you install on your phone, computer, smart TV and watch are all potential network screens. So about 5x per user in the developed world - let that sink in.

Having said all that let's play devil's advocate: very few people install/use the platform. That changes nothing. The system will simply start its exponential growth cycle later in time. But it will be an exponential growth cycle. I'll circle back with more demos and videos as soon as I have them.

The first Bitfari demo videos are here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPvmtrX1ZXE&list=PLdhvBFmB1JmhUp6CIq0KaS6U8_8dOGFrP


Here are the first demo videos explaining how to use Bitfari. These videos are taken from the perspective of an advertiser that interfaces with Bitfari screens at home, in the office, and in city storefronts. In terms of user experience, you log in with your Stacks wallet, make changes to a node/react client we call the "Community Connector" and then commit the changes to the blockchain. Every time you commit an ad or screen to the blockchain, auditors and social oracles (computer programs) audit for spam, DOS attacks and hate speech, etc. making Bitfari simple and safe to use.

Bitfari is a network of public and private screens. It is highly usable with one or one million screens. The smart screens are information centers, containing ads, dashboards, message boards, calendars, signage, web pages, and so on. You can install Bitfari on a personal laptop, smart TV home, etc, and choose whether you want to receive ads or not.

The network is built to be self bootstrapping, in terms of halving incentives and foundation ads which will pay in faris from day 1. Since ads are displayed using HTML and a web browser, even $100 screens can join the network and start making money. Please keep in mind that each screen is paid according to size, placement, and foot traffic.

In the second release, we will ship an app that will allow digital billboard operators to join our network and show Bitfari ads along with theirs.
  
With regard to the consumer-facing side of things, we are building smartphone ads where they can list their preferences and create an interest/shopping list allowing them to explore their cities more intelligently. Here is a walkthrough of that app: https://bitfari.org/the-bitfari-explorer-app/

We are preparing to let everyone in to check the apps on Testnet by late August. But although most things looked finished, please keep in mind that we are still coding very very hard!!

We have just published the Roadmap for 2021 and 2022! https://bitfari.org/bitfari-roadmap/

Forgot to send you the videos. I took a handful of videos this week, but we are still waiting on something more professional. Here are some random shots I took of the ad composer + web interface for advertisers and customers:

Placing an ad on a message board: https://twitter.com/jordhy/status/1407360001681854467
Social Dashboard + Gamification: https://twitter.com/jordhy/status/1407359611653574657
Adding todos like shopping lists etc: https://twitter.com/jordhy/status/1407359409538351108

You can also see screenshots of the mobile app here: https://bitfari.org/the-bitfari-explorer-app/

As you can see pretty easy to use. We batch client actions and then submit them to the blockchain as a whole when the action requires ad publishing or similar events. In this fashion, the experience is pretty smooth and uninterrupted by blockchain transactions except when absolutely needed.

The one video that is completed is the anticipation video for the beta launch, but that one is just a promo with no app screenshots. You can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_atO1a0szA&t=14s

I'm finishing a web page with the release roadmap to share today. Next week I'll prepare screenshots, professional videos, and maybe a full walkthrough (if the bugs let me!!).

Thank you for wanting to join the platform. Auditors review ads at random from their homes and in the streets (where ads are shown). The incentive is for auditors to be truthful as they only enter bounties when they belong with 51% or more of the rest of the auditors selecting a given choice. Meaning as long as there are more honest people than not for a particular auditing task, bad actors will be automatically punished. Most auditing is done in the streets, so there is no room for machine impersonation there. Also, auditors are chosen at random for ads in their area. Let me entertain for a second the idea of an automatic program for auditing done at home:

Let's suppose you create a Selenium program to automate account creation, joining the platform, and auditing ads at random. Your program will fail social oracle auditing, which are programs that review publisher, operator, and auditor behaviors (https://bitfari.org/2021/06/19/what-is-a-social-oracle/), case in point you might fail prompts requiring to verify you're human. Your karma will stay at zero and you will have to wait weeks for a second task and eventually your karma goes negative and your account is blocked from auditing tasks. You can read our section on fraud prevention here: https://bitfari.org/how-bitfari-prevents-ad-fraud/.

This is good advice. Thank you. Yes, advertising is a minefield, child protection laws, anti-spam laws, defamation, libel, it's quite complicated and variable across jurisdictions so we have to be careful and conservative as we scale.

Love this question. We have absolutely no traffic requirements whatsoever. Anyone can show ads with our platform, either on a website, physical screen, digital billboard or AR virtual billboard (support for these will be announced soon). But how can we do this:

1. The fari token is divisible up to 18 decimal places, so for example,  we can pay you 0.000000000000000001 faris for a one month period. That's a level of divisibility that only crypto can give publishers.

2. We expect to have advertisers for which traffic of 10 people per month will be valuable. These advertisers will be regular people from local communities looking to fill churches seats, increase attendance to public hearings, and boost engagement for their local movements. We also anticipate a crowd of hobbyists advertisers who want to enrich their social media presence and appreciate global traffic even at a small scale.

3. Fraud is not possible in Bitfari, I repeat, it's not possible. We have already discussed this for digital billboards (https://bitfari.org/marketer-fraud/), in the case of websites fraud is easily avoidable: just charge for clicks. I know it sounds simple, but that is the solution we will present later. Content publishers join our platform, users pay a fee to visit sites that have joined our platform, and the money from clicks is distributed proportionally to receiving sites. Please note that while this solution is coming we have not announced it yet in a broad fashion and is not part of our August 22nd release. However, it is coming and we'll be glad to have you as a publisher then!