Hey! I hope you all have been doing fantastic and had a great holiday. I wanted to give you all some information about what we have been up to, and loosely lay out some plans for the future.
I can’t believe It has been 2 years since we first started this journey! Some days it feels like it has only been a few months, and some days it feels like it has been decades lol, but we have had a blast so far and are really looking forward to the future.
When we first launched Ethershift in May 2018, we didn’t really know what we were doing. We literally rented an Airbnb, and myself and 4 other people worked shifts around the clock, 24/7, manually processing any orders that came in. Looking back, we did it this way for too long lol. I really didn’t know what I wanted this project to be yet, but I knew if I just got it out into the world and started working on it, eventually we could do some really cool things. Over time, the project parted ways with the 4 other people that were there from the start, but I’m really grateful for them, and everyone else who has helped out the project in any way the last 2 years!
2019 was a big year for us. We really defined what we are trying to accomplish as a project, and began making strides towards those goals. Here are just a handful of the things we did in 2019;
*Rebranded from Ethershift to Switch and made the transition from a centralized service to an open source decentralized service
*ESH token listed on IDEX, Mercatox, CoinGecko, Coinlib, Delta, Blockfolio, and more
*Distributed over $20,000 via fees airdrops, contests, & ESH airdrops
*Introduced a gift card section allowing anyone to buy gift cards with crypto
*Launched SwitchDex, and over 30 white label portals such as McAfeeDex
*Filmed footage for the “Exiled” documentary that will be coming out later this year
*Fully automated Switch.ag with 1 click buying and instant processing
*Launched our first Switch white label exchange McAfeeSwap
And a whole lot more! I’m so excited about the things we got done in 2019, and am even more excited moving forward.
2020 and beyond
In late 2018 we began internal discussions about changing from a centralized project to a decentralized project. DEFI was really just starting and the more and more I saw the power of what could be done on Ethereum, I knew it was the direction we had to go. It took a lot of time and research and to figure out exactly how we would move forward with this type of structure change, as far as defining the hierarchy within the project etc. I think it’s important within the type of system I wanted to build, to do away the traditional roles like “CEO”, so I began working on other ideas that would help with this process. Full decentralization, and the inability to be shut down/forced to comply with regulation was our new focus.
Our goals were to remove any and all centralized parts/single points of failure, and we are doing a great job with that so far! We have over 30 portals up for the DEX network, and will soon be launched a bunch of IPFS + .eth domains that are fully unstoppable, and the same is coming with Switch. We have open sourced our code, and are encouraging other people to come help us build, by setting token bounties on some development goals, and have a small group of developers that are helping with the project that we expect to grow in 2020. Right now Adrian is the only one with commit access (this will change in the future), but anyone can submit code fixes, or new features to our Github, and we are happy to merge any requests that make sense with what we are doing and are done well.
As of right now, I pretty much set the roadmap myself, make all the decisions myself, and play the project manager role to make sure it all gets finished. Moving forward, I think we need a more organic structure with more community involvement in the decision making process.
As of Jan 30th, I will no longer be the “CEO” or “Owner” of this project, but don’t worry at all….I’m not going anywhere and my overall day to day tasks will remain the same :)
Instead of making the decisions by myself, ALL decisions regarding our future roadmap, new features, when, where, and how we use the tokens, and everything else will be decided by our token holders via an on chain vote using ClearPoll. I will post another blog soon that has the full info on how our governance and voting structure will work, but long story short it is a weighted vote, based on how many tokens you own. There is a minimum amount of the supply that has to participate in a vote, and vote yes, before the vote officially becomes valid. Anyone will be able to propose something that can be voted on by the community and I am sure I will be making the majority of the proposals at first.
Currently we have a couple months worth of a roadmap planned and tons of stuff on the back burner. We are planning our “alpha” release in Q2 2020 which will be our “fully finished”, cross chain product.
Here are the things are working on, and the tentative release dates we are looking at.
*Issue new contract for the DEX that includes new UX updates, automated portal payouts, and more — Jan 6th
*Launch all DEX portals as IPFS + .eth ENS — Jan 7th
*Add SwitchDex contract to Switch.ag — Jan 12th
*Switch Widget — Jan 18th
*On chain gambling games on Switch — Jan 25th
*New airdrop system for the Feb airdrop — Jan 31st
*Atomic Swaps for BTC/BCH/ETH — January 31st
*UI, UX, intro screens, audio, downloadable version of DEX, and bug fixes — Feb 7th
*Automatic portal launch for Switch and SwitchDex — Feb 15th
*TRON dex aggregator — Feb 21st
We have a handful of other ideas, but will take them to a vote next month or in March when it is time :)
Next month, I will post a blog that has information on how governance will work, how proposals costs associated with development will work, etc, and we will start doing community votes in March!
If anyone has any questions about anything in this blog, or has any questions in general, feel free to reach out in our Telegram!
