Ecency has been a part of the Hive blockchain for 7 years. Over this time, Ecency.com and Ecency mobile apps have been continually enhanced through multiple updates and additions.
Year 2023 is no exception, Ecency received huge updates with help of you community and the support given by every user and stake holder, in collaboration with our Developers team. We want to express our gratitude to all those who continue to be with us.
Here is a brief overview of the progress made throughout this past year:
Notifications - Notifications are an important aspect of Ecency as they keep users informed about any updates related to their profile. Ecency offers various ways to filter notifications and additionally introduced favorites and bookmarks as part of the notification system. Additionally, advanced notifications now provide more detailed information. On mobile devices, push notifications display the avatar or thumbnail image of the user or post that has received a reaction, making it easy to quickly identify the source of the notification.
Wallet - Easy to use Ecency wallet always focusing user-friendliness and including all the desired operations. The app has made several updates to the wallet throughout the year, adding features like Swap HIVE/HBD, Delegating and managing Engine tokens better, SPK, and Larynx token operations.
Signup - In order to simplify the registration process for new users and provide them with assistance, we have introduced a Premium account feature. This feature allows them to swiftly create an account and enjoy certain advantages. Premium accounts will receive three times the amount of Resource Credits compared to Free/regular accounts, as well as an initial allocation of 300 Points to begin using Ecency.
Furthermore, we have introduced a new feature called "Onboard a friend" which allows you to invite a friend and assist them in creating their profile when signing up or create for them account quickly.
RC delegations - Better representation of Resource Credits, easy delegations, management, quick indicators on commenting or publishing content giving you idea of how much RC exist for performing operations beforehand. RC details screen gives user access to comprehensive details regarding the number of actions they can perform with their current RC. Additionally, they can also view information about their RC delegations (in and out). Furthermore, users have the ability to delegate their RC to any other user and remove their RC delegations if desired. Receive notifications when RC delegated to them.
Decks - Ecency team decided to revamp Decks by creating it as a separate page. This allowed users to gather all the necessary pages in group of decks and easily access the desired information without wasting excessive time. Each deck can contain up to 10 columns and you can create multiple number of deck groups, most importantly, these deck settings are synced across the device and browsers, changing browser or computer or mobile device, no problem your decks setup carried over automatically and with ease you can continue your unique experience on Hive.
Waves - Lastly, we were delighted to introduce "Waves" on both our website and later mobile application, as it was highly anticipated and requested by many of our users. This feature has brought a new sense of excitement for those who enjoy creating and engaging with short-form content, keeping them entertained and informed within platform.
Floating FAQ - floating helper that will guide and help new people joining with different functionality and features on each page, giving suggestions. We are very excited about what this can do and how this can help people navigating ins and outs of Hive and Ecency. We have plans to enhance this feature in the future and will be expanding this neat helper in future updates with probably live-chat, AI helper, etc.
3Speak video - The most popular and well-received feature, this year, was the ability to upload videos on Ecency. Our team, with the assistance of the 3Speak team, successfully implemented this feature. Additionally, we later added the capability to record videos as well. Now, our users have the option to both upload and record videos on Ecency. As video hosting network gets more decentralized, we expect to offer more and more functionality with videos, shorts/reels, special feeds, etc. Managing your videos within Ecency powered by SPK and 3Speak gets easier and easier with each update.
Furthermore, Ecency has accomplished various tasks this year, including revamping and enhancing existing pages, providing them with new features and improved trading options. Overall, it has been a fruitful year for Ecency.
As of right now, our team maintains and continues to develop the following services, open source. This proposal funding will be used to maintain and improve these services:
We have a lot of improvement ideas for the Hivesearcher, Hivesigner, and Hivexplorer projects, and this year we were unable to allocate sufficient time and resources to these initiatives.
Hivesearcher servers upgraded this past year, should be sufficient for another year, we have added couple new API calls which are being utilized by Ecency apps. Hivesearcher is one of our major costly service, that indexes all comments and posts, allowing for quick search and can be utilized for better content discovery. Already in current state, it is being heavily utilized by Ecency.com, hive.blog and peakd.com.
Hivesigner servers also upgraded, minor UI fixes but our goals for this year, we couldn't fully achieve, among those better transaction signing page, improve user flows, rewrite browser extension, etc. Only OAuth2 standard service that allows any developer to easily setup/integrate with Hive authentication. Easy signing transactions from any development environments without compromise to user keys.
Hivexplorer initial release and preliminary version being hosted with easy to use REST API for blockchain methods. We want to expand this gradually by adding unique set of features and stats. As of right now, it is replicating almost all features of hiveblocks.com with very basic UI flow.
Image proxy at https://images.ecency.com got plenty of improvements in our image hoster codebase and we have migrated the image server into a more resilient setup and upgraded servers which were not part of the budget planning but unexpected circumstances gave us an opportunity to upgrade servers and move to new data center. We plan to create and propose PR on official gitlab imagehoster repository with our improvements and changes later this year. Imagehoster server is another one of our major costly service.
In order to cover certain expenses while keeping development and marketing, we have powered down some of our stake. Although we would have preferred to keep it, we believe implementing features that enhance user engagement and align with our long-term objectives is the right decision. We have also cut down team size to 7 from 10. We remain fully committed and devoted to providing you with the finest open-source social experience on the blockchain.
Future plans
Ecency lite, we are exploring idea of extracting Ecency waves into separate app where we can offer light version of Ecency mobile app.
Reals/Shorts, in collaboration with 3speak team, we would like to add shorts/reels video uploads as well as feeds dedicated to that.
Better filters for more engaging waves/threads.
Ecency chat, feature is already in development few final touches and we will be releasing it this year first for web, later for mobile app.
Hive engine advanced token trading interface.
Community break away, we want to dedicate some resources to mainstream community breakaway and create proper structure in codebase to customize those instances. Efforts made by 3speak team on this already, will play essential role planning and executing this vision.
Re-implement Hivesigner browser extension
Allocate some resources to contribute into community imagehoster, dhive, hivemind, documentation API, onboarding and other core initiatives.
Allocate more resources for our outreach programs.
State of DHF
As of right now there is around ~21,956,000 HBD available for proposals
Daily possible funding on Decentralized Hive Fund is ~219,567 HBD
We are asking Daily 396 HBD Monthly ~11880 HBD.
Cost explanation
Dev costs (4 developers) ~ 7000 HBD
Server costs ~2800 HBD (imagehoster, hivesearcher, rpc, hivesigner, ecency.com, etc.)
This year, we will allocate more to marketing and onboarding efforts. ~2000 HBD
We understand that during the duration of our proposal we may get partial funding sometimes, no funding sometimes. But it won't stop us from developing and delivering. We hope you see value Ecency team brings to Hive and support us in common vision and goal!
