Unlike many other projects, Ergo was born out of a true fair start and every effort has been made to ensure the ERG token will be fairly distributed. There was no private pre-mine, private sales, no initial coin offering, or venture capital funding. The Ergo Foundation receives a modest 4.43% of the total supply and is completed in just two and a half years from genesis. This means we need to be smart about where we spend funds on marketing, and support Ergo with grassroots methods where ever possible.
Ergo was launched with an aggressive emission schedule, with all coins to be fully mined in eight years. To stabilise miners income after emission ends, they will be able to reclaim a very small amount (~.13 erg every 4 years) from otherwise lost, frozen or forgotten erg in the form of storage rent. This will be enabled before emission, to allow the community to gauge the appropriate level it needs to be going forward. This approach ensures robust tokenomics; however, in line with the principles from The Ergo Manifesto for creating grassroots finance, we must grow from within to encourage others to develop on top of this bedrock of tooling Ergo is supplying.
Ergo’s Zero-Knowledge Schnorr Signatures allow unique applications using sigma protocols on top of ergo which are being used to build trustless crowd funders, simple collective spending approaches, reversible ICOs, and much more. These systems will assist the community in guiding and vote for the future development of Ergo.
Education
After the great success of the initial ErgoHack a few weeks ago, two more are on their way to you this year helping us build up the structuring, documentation, and pathways for developers into the world of eUTxO.
The Ergo Foundation is actively looking for a director of education. Ergo offers a variety of tools for decentralized finance, one way to maximize their use is to increase the amount of documentation, and offer tutorials to developers new to ErgoScipt and the extended UTxO model.
The Ergo Foundation is also in the process of working to create partnerships with educational non-profits to offer workshops and courses to teach incubators for adolescents and college students.
To make Ergo truly understandable to everyone, this must also come from the community. To get us started, Mrs Glasgow has kindly kickstarted the new Ergo Community BitTube with ‘Ergo for Eejits’ – A brief overview of the manifesto and values behind Ergo.
Incubator
We are launching a Hackathon Incubator. The first ErgoHack event was launched on relatively short notice, yet the community involvement in proposing ideas to the first Hackathon Incubator was very impressive. A special thank you to each and every community member who offered suggestions, ideas and support.
The next two Hackathons will be focused on privacy tools and tools for social good. Users have a unique perspective based on the use cases that would improve their experience and livelihood, so we are planning to launch 2 new Hackathon Incubators to get community-driven feedback. All ideas are welcome.
One lucky team will receive weekly payments, reporting progress during the weekly development chat on Discord.
Grow Ergo!
At the moment there are already some existing funds you can apply for, DarkFund0 is a privacy-focused fund aiming to build up privacy and security within Ergo. The first applicant for this has recently been granted and will be announced soon.
Those of you who remember the Bearwhale Saga will know that as a result of this one of the ‘Goodwhales’ who filled the SigmaUSD bank to minimise the risk to SigRSV holders is generously putting up $20,000 SigUSD for development.
A wild ‘grow-ergo’ repository has appeared on GitHub, providing the framework for a central resource where bounties can be categorised and made accessible to all within the community. Bounties are a wonderful way to attract developer talent as well as advertising marketing and other tasks that anyone can get involved with to help grow Ergo. This may look a bit barren at the moment while we’re setting it up, however; we can announce The Ergo Foundation is assigning a special monthly operations budget of up to $20,000 per month for bounties, contests, tips and anything else that can help Ergo grow.
So join us on the Ergo Community Based Marketing Telegram, and let’s create true grassroots finance!
Header image sourced from: poorguycrypto.com
