I wanted to post a snapshot of Stellar's first week for everyone, so here it is!
TrafficWe launched at 9 am Pacific time on Thursday, July 31. At 9 am today, just one week later, our Facebook
auth count stands at over 240,000 people. In our
mandate, which we determined pre-launch, our goal was to fund a minimum of 10,000 people in the first month, and 180,000 people total by the end of the fourth month. We ended up reaching the former goal in the first day, and now the latter goal in the first week. This level of response seriously exceeded our predictions, and we want to thank everyone (and especially those who invited their friends and family to sign up!) for that.
We'd expected that we'd have a launch day traffic spike and then a lull, but instead our launch day traffic (56,000 uniques) has been increasingly surpassed (147,000 uniques yesterday). 50% of our traffic comes from repeat visitors, and it's been exciting to see this forum, Stellartalk, be created by community members and grow to almost 2000 users. Two channels have particularly pushed in new users at a very high rate: Mechanical Turk (after people saw this
blog post) and viral growth in Southeast Asia amongst early adopters.
Adapting to the growth The unexpected Mechanical Turk-ing caused consumers to learn about Stellar earlier than we had planned and led to virality sooner than we were prepared for. Unfortunately, all this additional traffic caused our Facebook giveaway to have some scaling issues, which we believe we've addressed (though please be patient if load spikes cause issues in the future — we are as excited for you to have your stellar as you are!).
The signup rate continued to increase, but we wanted to make sure we could handle the growth. So at approximately 10am PST on Sunday, we activated the waitlist we'd built pre-launch. New signups were placed on a queue rather than receiving initial stellars. Yet this still did not slow down the signups and within a few hours, the waitlist had over 17,000 people.
Since launch, we made a few adjustments with the goal of 1) stabilizing the rate of new stellars entering the market and 2) providing people immediate access to some stellars for education.
These adjustments included:- Staggering the stellar reward amount into two parts, an immediate portion and one to be rewarded later. (Saturday)[/*]
- Turning off the waitlist but keeping the staggered payout (Sunday night)[/*]
- Adjusting the stellar reward amount to *approximately $10 (Monday morning)[/*]
- Total potential reward went from 7000 stellars (approx. $18 USD at time of posting) to 4500 stellars (approximately $11.70 at time of posting).[/*]
- Upgraded our database server and removed a bad web server that was responsible for intermittent errors (Tuesday morning)[/*]
- Preparing the distribution for the staggered payout of stellars (by end of the week)[/*]
Those changes have stabilized our technical issues and allowed us to continue to operate the giveway. But providing uninterrupted access to stellars to people in conjunction with some kind of educational outreach and something for them to do with stellars has proven to be a difficult challenge.
Towards the future In our
mandate, we stated:
“Once these monthly limits have been reached, people may be placed on a waitlist and be admitted into the program as more space is available. Every day we will take people off the wait list and add them to the system. We believe that Stellar is most useful when groups of interconnected people are using the system. With this in mind, we may let people in out of order based on certain criteria such as geographic region, availability of tools in localized languages or number of friends in the system.”
We will now activate the waitlist again. People will be let off waitlist per the factors listed above: availability of in-language educational material, tools and local gateways, and an invite system we'll be releasing soon. To ensure reasonable distribution, they'll be given a number of stellar (still targeting $10) depending on when they're taken off the wait list, not when they're added to it.
Our goal from the start has been to provide digital currency education. Our early growth in Southeast Asia reminds us we need to focus on adding more global scope to the open source developer community and our educational outreach. To that end, we will prioritize translating some of our content into local
languages. Having grown up in a bilingual home, I know how important language accessibility is and want to make sure it stays a priority.
Over the next few weeks, we will be experimenting with different ways to keep the giveaway stable and to make sure we are achieving our goals of providing educational content alongside the giveaway. No digital currency has ever had this kind of open distribution, and we are learning every day. Thank you for being part of this with us.
Be stellar ~~
