The Golden Horde Monthly Update — August 2018

As many may know, August was our first full month of forging since getting into the top 51 delegates back in late July. Since then we’ve been busy creating, tinkering and updating things that we believe will be interesting for our voters and the community. These monthly updates aim to be a comprehensive filler on what we’ve spent our time on during the past month, as well as what we’re preparing for the near future. We’re ensuring that each of our voters and the community alike can stay up to date with The Golden Horde’s progress so these articles will be full of statistics, breakdowns and any trivia we may have to share!

Humble Yet Fast Beginnings
Initially we had to gather ourselves, preparing our articles and proposal earlier than expected in order to capitalise on a fortuitous moment. Forginator, a private delegate had sold one part of their Ark holdings and in effect one of their forging delegate spots, this created a true tussle in the bottom half of the delegate list which enabled us a chance to rally the community behind our efforts and claim our place in the forging list. After a brief yet tasking discussion amongst ourselves we decided that it was the right time and thanks to some spurs of encouragement from other community members and the Ark team, we launched our proposal to the masses.

Due to the fact we were launching our proposal and ideas ahead of schedule we had to do (and still are) a lot of catching up in order to meet our targets that we put forward in our launching articles. It’s been a challenging month in general but we believe we’ll be able to hit the majority if not all of our targets in time. For example the merch shop and loot system have been progressing well and will be discussed later on in this article.

Pedal To The Metal
At the beginning of August we were rapidly launching our content and ideas, we wanted to quickly show what we had in place and our grand vision but it was tough implementing all the ideas in a way that could stick in the minds of the community without being such that it was information overload. Our articles wanted to not only provide our thoughts but gauge those around us and potential voters. Our social feeds have been pinnacle also for our growth and retention of ideas and furthering our brand, we’ve found Twitter and Instagram great mediums to connect with the community. Slack is of course another place you can frequently find us, many of the community there are exceptional people with amazing stories and ideas. We’ve found the conversations that can be found on Slack are a true Hot Pot for innovation and idea generation, some people that have been pinnacle to our progress so far have been the likes of:

Marc (Cryptology) —Ever stoic, this man performs miracles when it comes to life advice and also technology, he’s been quite the support for us but has been a great source of motivation and someone who keeps us on our toes, as his tech is always not only interesting but innovative (Cough ArkTippr Cough)

Justin (Doubled1c3) — Yet another person who always keeps us alert, Justin has shown time and time again why he’s a great fit for the community and nothing shows this off more than his recent appointment to the Ark team, he really deserves all the success and he’s been a great help for us here at The Golden Horde.

Ark Team — The Ark team have been really helpful in inspiring us to create and launch our delegacy, it’s awesome having a great team that engages with the community and that’s certainly what you get from the Ark team.

ACF Board — The ACF Board and most importantly Cam has been excellent at helping us create some strategies including the Ark Art competition currently in place, they’ve been really useful and helpful with this competition!

The Time To Implement Is Now
We’re really humbled with the amount of people who understand and are excited by our systems being created. The life cycle of The Golden Horde will always be something that is continuously evolving, we see merchandise as something that we are passionate for which gives us a good foothold in the crypto community but it’s only a stepping stone on the pond that we want to cross and we’re intent on showing all the tricks and ideas we have up our sleeves.

The Loot System is something that has a lot of legroom to provide great options for our voters, as there will always be more ways to make the points more appealing and useful for the average community member. We’ve been working on it for the past two months from concept to creation and it’s slowly but surely coming into place. As many may or may not know we were originally working with Munich who is very much loved in the Ark community, unfortunately he disappeared a month or two ago which is very worrying as to his whereabouts but because of this we also had to find another way to make the Loot System come alive. Luckily Goose has been of great help and with a modified TBW script this system is now starting to function as we want it to.

We see Loot Points being used directly with our merchandise store, where voters can save up their Loot and purchase great merchandise at a discount than if buying the item with Crypto or FIAT. This encourages our voters and gives them extra incentives than the traditional format of receiving payouts solely in Ark. Most importantly, Loot offers a gateway to more.. whether this be our software services, products or innovations. We’re aiming to create a Golden Horde Ecosystem that will almost certainly have ties to our Loot Points and thus to our voter base.

Statistics
For the month of August we’ve tracked the majority of statistics revolving around our delegate. We’ve shown this off with some nice graphics just so you can get an understanding of what we’ve been doing.

The Months Ahead
The next few months will still be incredibly busy times for us as we launch the merchandise shop, loot system and reveal further plans for The Golden Horde. We’re excited for this to happen, but also cautious so that we make sure to keep a good track on how things are progressing. We’re expecting to launch two services before Christmas as mentioned in the section below which should help to grow our ecosystem as our merchandise becomes more prevalent in the wider cryptocurrency community.

Website
Our website should be launched at the very beginning of September so look out for this. We’ll be expanding it so it’s truly a good hub for voters and offers plenty of great resources for Ark community members. At the beginning it will be a simple website which states what we do and offers some basic functionality and explanations as to who we are and what we do at The Golden Horde. At a later date and in the next few months there will be a registration and login in order to support our Loot system and then finally services will be implemented onto the site increasing the websites use cases tenfold.

Loot Points
Loot Points should go live a little while after our website so that we can ensure it’s tested rigorously ready for live usage so that we know it’ll run smoothly and as intended. The system will of course be continuously improved upon as time progresses so there will always be new ways to use Loot and different methods to obtain it. We’re excited to release this part of our system but it’s also one of the areas which we’re incredibly cautious with as it’s truly the back bone of The Golden Horde ecosystem and therefore needs to work well. Expect to hear more about this during September.

Services
There are currently two services being created so far in the month of August which well exceeds our original plan for the first service to see the light of day by August 2019. The main service and the larger of the two won’t be teased nor announced for a while as we prepare and test the software and get art assets ready for it’s launch. We’re excited to show off this service as it’s actually quite engaging and fun in what it achieves, it’s certainly a unique twist to an overlooked area of Crypto and it will be announced in the coming months accordingly. The service we can however announce is:

BARK — Badass Ark Resource Kits
This service is a very simple concept which will be fully open source and available through our delegation website. BARK is quite simply a pool of digital art and video effect assets for anyone in the Ark community to use. These kits will include the resultant asset as well as the source file, which will be downloadable, usable in Photoshop, Illustrator & After Effects providing a great base for someone looking to use some cool Ark related media pieces for their projects, announcements or social posts. We’re anticipating to have over 50 Ark related assets upon launch with a continual expansion as time progresses. This pool of resources as mentioned can be contributed to by community members who can upload the resources to the BARK page for anyone to access. We will have a leaderboard for each quarter of the year that tallies each community members assets added to BARK, the community member who adds the most assets will receive Loot Points as a prize.

The source files will be moderated in a way that is simple to follow, providing clear instructions to those who may not be adept with Art Assets so that they can edit the files to achieve their desired result. In the future we will also be looking to add a request feature to BARK where a community member can post a bounty and artists can fill their requests and receive the bounty upon completion of the assets needed, this of course will be something that could change depending on how the implementation goes.

The Other Service
We’re working hard on the other service and you can expect to hear more about this by the end of September and the beginning of October as that’s when we’re aiming to at least role out the basic service for it.

Merchandise Store
The merchandise store is still in full swing and we’re on track to launch this at the end of September which we’re very excited about. We really recommend you checking out our Twitter to stay up to date with this as that’s where we post a lot of teasers for art and primary updates.

We’ll be showing off a lot of products on Twitter in September and also we’ll be sending the winners of the Twitter competition their art work at the beginning of this month. Remember we also currently have an Art competition running with a total prize pot of $4,000 thanks to awesome partnerships from the Ark Team, Ark Community Fund & GhostFaceUK!

We hope you enjoyed reading our Monthly Update and we’re excited to share more in the month of September, for any feedback as always you can find us on slack or through Twitter/Steem/Medium! If you like this article please share and clap to spread the word! 👏