Ecency team has a job of developing and maintaining number of services and apps on this space. While we do our daily duties we always keep Ecency community, people like you in mind and make sure we are bring you the best products, serving you the best.
Your support means a lot to us and because of that support we are here and continue to bring services and products that challenges web2 social networks and services.
Diverse yet power individuals like you, who want to take control of their speech, money and freedom is foundation of what we are working towards.
Who wouldn't love working for community like ours?!
Last year there was a short video about state of Ecency and future outlook, this year trying to change that to letter format. I try to keep it short!
We build opensource products that is designed to push forward adoption of #web3 and blockchain technology.
Ecency.com, Ecency mobile app and Ecency desktop app as well as Hivesigner, Hivesearcher, Hivexplorer projects are the ones we are currently working on and focusing on improving utility of each these projects is our goal.
We are constantly looking for ways to explore other fields as well, that pushes our team's limits. New directions to find new ways to improve engagement and utility of projects we are working on, so we can serve the community better.
Year 2022 was quite eventful for our team. Year started out with us focusing on marketing and Press Releases. Later on technical development took over because we have had intense monthly releases for both Ecency website and mobile app and we lost some momentum on press releases. What I learned personally, press releases are great to get brand awareness and it needs to be done consistently. In press releases, usually goal was to introduce world about Ecency, web3 and Hive blockchain. I hope we can bring back consistency and have dedicated person for managing our press releases.
On Ecency.com project, we have released different major features such as Decks, Advanced Trading, Premium accounts. Mobile app side, there were few performance challenges that we had to spent few months researching and finding out best ways that would scale. New Multi-token wallet management on mobile app was loved by many which is indicator that people like to manage things in simplistic and unified way. We have had tough time proving some community members merits of Points and sometimes struggled to fight abuse as well. Luckily with community's support and help of our dedicated curators, we have established good guidelines to follow.
Due to budgeting cut on Hivesigner and Hivesearcher, we were not able to do much on those projects. Beginning of 2022, we managed to fix few User Interface related issues on Hivesigner. Also Hivesearcher API got few improvements that helped us to deliver few additions to Ecency.
However, we would like to improve Hivesigner UI further simplifying onboarding and usage for average users. Hivesigner is critical part of Hive ecosystem and we noticed that developers know how to integrate in into their projects, only usage of application by average internet joe seem to be lacking aspect of the project. We want to focus on those aspect this year.
Hivesearcher algorithms like controversial and rising seemed like a good direction to start exploring alternative content discovery, but this needed more research and exploring which we simply lacked time and resources to do. We want to allocate some resources into it this year as well.
Finally, we started new project Hivexplorer - opensource blockchain explorer for Hive. There are couple opensource and couple private explorers for Hive. We wanted to deliver something unique yet powerful, resembling legacy explorer with an eye towards futuristic explorer that will give you insight about ins and outs of blockchain activities. I am inspired by Etherscan project and would like to build something that will, not only look similar but also challenges our views of blockchain explorer. So far project had a good start but we have a lot to do. One of the unique selling point of Hivexplorer will be to offer REST API for free and for easy integration for dapp developers. Anyone who can work with REST API can integrate/use Hivexplorer API to fetch and format blockchain data.
Our team have also requested new funding from community DHF with slightly higher budgeting goals and scaling our team. For some reason community seemed hesitant and we ended up lowering our ask to achieve required support. It seem, we have to prove community our dedication and resilience bit more. We have adjusted our roadmap accordingly and team's dedication strong as before. Community funding helps us deliver our product goals quicker and it is not only one source of income to the team though. Witness earnings as well as Point purchases via PlayStore and AppStore even if not enough still contributes to total bundle of expenses. As a team leader, I personally feel responsible to our developers as well as our community to deliver efficiently and explore future potential revenue models.
A lot of things to learn from past year and great things to look forward to this year. I am confident, feel proud to be among you and grateful to every one that's supporting our cause, developers, community, stakeholders, curators, moderators, thought leaders. Let's make Hive great, make Ecency great and bring freedom of speech, freedom of money, tokenization to every corner of the world. Hive on!
Your servant,
Feruz - 
