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August 14, 2014, 04:15:58 PM |
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We've been having to waitlist our signups over the past week, which has been tough for everyone. It's meant that many people haven't been able to have access to the network. So starting tomorrow, we're getting rid of the waitlist entirely and funding everyone with a starter amount of stellars upon connecting with Facebook. This starter amount will be enough to start exploring Stellar and experience sending transactions.
Introducing Invites
The Stellar community has grown faster than anything I have seen. It is full of amazing folks who have been chipping in to help translate, bug fix, and answer questions of other newer users - all in less than two weeks. Since it will take us a while to develop and translate educational programs to cover our already international community, we wanted to think of ways to let our existing users fund more people since they are already putting a lot of effort into teaching people about digital currency. To do that, we are releasing an invite system tomorrow.
Via the invite system, Stellar users will receive invites from time to time that they can send to friends. Invites will appear in your dashboard. Upon receiving an invite code, that friend is then funded with additional stellars. This lets community members be the decision makers regarding when people receive more stellars beyond the starter amount, and it increases the chance that people new to digital currency have someone to whom they can ask questions and learn from.
How does this Affect Waitlist Groups?
You can see the listing of all the waitlist groups here. As of today, Groups 1-3 have been fully funded. Group 4 has received their starter amount. All of Group 5 (everyone who is on waitlist now) will receive their starter amount by tomorrow. This means everyone who completed a valid Facebook login so far and everyone who signs up with a valid Facebook login starting today will receive their starter stellar amounts - no more waiting.
Moving forward, everyone who signed up after August 7 (Group 4 onward; i.e. those who received starter amount of stellars) will be eligible to receive more stellars (amount will be dynamic) either i) through an invite code from a friend or ii) via educational programs which will be coming.
We expect some people will be unhappy with the fact we are no longer funding people in one fast, large amount, but the mission of the Foundation is to provide financial education and access. We always intended the stellars to be distributed in conjunction with educational content and materials, and it's important that we link stellar distribution with education. Our launch materials were focused on developers, but the world showed up at our door. Now we are working as fast as we can to get programs together for regular, non-technical folks (starting with this Learn page) - but these things take time. In the meantime, our primary objective remains the same and we think the invite system will help us work towards that goal.
What Comes Next?
At the moment, we are focusing on increasing security features, addressing any remaining login issues people had from the launch rush, and developing the multi-currency client. We also just had our first developer meetup in San Francisco where over 120 developers showed up for a packed event. At the meetup, people were discussing a lot of interesting projects already happening in the “Stellar System” - iOS clients, gateways, games, libraries, and more. So we can all expect to see more Stellar projects coming out soon. If you are working on something Stellar-related, please feel free to share with everyone - we'd love to hear about it.
Onward~
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