Zeitgeist Status Report #1

We’ve had a busy month at Zeitgeist since announcing and subsequently closing our seed sale in late March. So busy in fact that we haven’t been able to keep our community adequately informed about the project’s recent progress.

We’ve had our heads down absorbed in the work of building Zeitgeist, including protocol improvements and extensions, new algorithms and economic research, and of course preparing pivotal marketing strategies. But before we get into all that, let’s start by introducing some new additions to the team, which is expanding every day.

We’ve grown from a 3-person organization to a team of 10 full-time staff and a handful of part time contributors. In this first of our monthly status reports, we’re going to introduce you to the technical and marketing team that is working on the core Zeitgeist product.

Caio Fernandes: Blockchain Engineer

Caio is a Software Engineer with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and over ten years experience in several technologies and programming languages. Currently, Caio predominantly deals with blockchain, cryptography, and networking matters alongside a Rust engineering extravaganza.

Tvrtko Majstorovic: Front-End Developer

Tvrtko was interested in computers and programming from a young age, and received a Masters degree in Computer Science at the University of Osijek, Croatia. After graduation, he decided to pursue a career in web development and has worked as a Front-End Developer on projects for the airline, railway, and automotive industries. Tvrtko has worked on building applications and complex user interfaces that provide various services to travel passengers. The last couple of years he has become increasingly interested in blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

Francisco Manuel De Pablo: Researcher in Economics

Francisco (Numa) is an Economist and Data Scientist with experience in Research, Machine Learning, and Data Analysis. He entered the world of Digital Assets with the ambition of improving the integration between Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain. Numa is passionate about social upliftment, and writes academic papers on how a poor socioeconomic environment impacts teenagers' sports performance, and is also part of a team developing an app that helps your local NGOs receive small donations.

Harald Heckmann: Blockchain Engineer

Harald has been working with Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) since 2017. His current goal is to technologically aid societies in collectively making optimal decisions. In his Computer Science master's thesis he describes and partially implements a novel and experimental Substrate-based system that offers means for a decentralized community to govern and evolve. Harald designed and implemented DLT solutions for MaibornWolff, Web3 Foundation, and the Ethereum community; and also created a teaching curriculum on DLT fundamentals with a friend which he taught to students while in University.

Morkeltry: Fullstack, SDK, and Tooling Developer

Mork started coding on an Atari ST back when he was younger, and then grew up to become a cypherpunk. Since 2018 he has specialized in blockchain, building out smart contracts and dapps for clients, and worked on the occasional infrastructure project - all in Ethereum with the occasional foray into smaller blockchains. His focus is now the Polkadot ecosystem and, as you’d expect, the potential for blockchain technology and small, powerful devices to improve how we arrange society.

James Preston: Marketing Communications Manager

James is a communications specialist and marketer from South Africa. He is a locally published journalist, and ran his own marketing agency until May 2018 when he joined the country’s first crypto news outlet as Lead Editor. James was one of South Africa’s first reporters to write about crypto back in 2014, and has since grown into a leading voice on the topic. He is passionate about a better world, which is what drew him to Satoshi’s ideals after the 2008 Financial Crisis, and believes blockchain tech can provide key infrastructure to an improved society.

Patrick Irwin: Community Manager

Patrick is an Information Technologies graduate with a focus on data and backend development. Entering the blockchain space in late 2019, he immediately found his passion with the technology that powered cryptocurrencies. He has helped to consult on technologies of local businesses in Taos, NM. He joined the Zeitgeist team in early 2021 as a community manager.

Project Updates

• The Zeitgeist account on Twitter recently surpassed 5,000 followers. Along with this little milestone, you may have noticed that the last couple of tweets have been fairly cryptic. What does it all mean? You’ll have to stay tuned to find out.
• If you’re interested in connecting to the Battery Park testnet, we’d love for you to do so, simply follow the instructions here. Please note, though: This testnet may be restarted without any notice with all storage reset.
• Our newsletter now has nearly 1700 email sign-ups! This is the best way to stay up to date with new updates and announcements coming from the Zeitgeist team.

Technical Updates

Although the technical team has only started working together this month, there are already a myriad of updates to report. Among Zeitgeist’s currently public GitHub repositories we’ve merged 31 pull requests comprising over 115 commits to the main branches. Here are some of the highlights:

Zeitgeist

• Remove outdated Shares pallet in favor of ORML pallets (#59)
• Add parachain support to the node (#61)
• Scalar Markets are now supported in the Prediction Markets pallet (#76 and #84)
• The Orderbook, Prediction Markets, and Swaps pallets are all benchmarked, resulting in an entirely benchmarked chain (#65, #82, and #105)
• An RPC endpoint was added to get bulk prices from the Swaps pallet (#85)
• The bootnode was added to the chainspec for Battery Park (#88)
• If you go through our GitHub, you’ll notice numerous bug fixes and protocol enhancements

Tools

• Asset types were added to type-definitions (#29)
• Add approval origin functions to the CLI (#30)
• Add joinPool and other enhancements (#41)
• And an assortment of bug fixes and smaller enhancements

Application

Our application is currently private while we continue development and internal testing, but there’s been plenty of exciting work from our amazing front-end developer Tvrtko. We're excited to be sharing this all with you soon when we finally make the repository public.

Research

We are currently conducting research into automated market makers, with special focus on the LMSR variety of market scoring rules originally invented by economist Robin Hansen. So far, we have done basic modeling of two separate iterations: The profit-charging AMM and the dynamic market maker. Expect an announcement soon about the new Zeitgeist variety of market makers.

Community Updates

Our community is growing daily, with our official Telegram group currently boasting a membership of over 3500 people. Our integration of the Combot automated moderation tool has helped keep spammers out, while maintaining a healthy dialogue around Zeitgeist’s development.

Discord continues to be a great place to engage with various members of our team, and the Telegram integration has also served to boost engagement on the official Zeitgeist server, helping our Discord grow to over 220 verified members. We’ve also incorporated a Zeitgeist Testnet faucet in the server, where avid community members can grow their testnet token holdings by simply entering a basic !drip command.

Considering we’re still in the early stages of building Zeitgeist, we’re excited at the growth of the community already, and owe a lot of gratitude to the Polkadot and Kusama communities for their support. A special shoutout must also go to Alex and Hutch for their work on keeping the eager community updated.

Build the Prediction Market Hub with Zeitgeist

At Zeitgeist, we're passionate about exploring a new ecosystem for prediction markets and futarchy, and encourage anyone interested to join us on our journey. The best way to do so is by subscribing to our newsletter and joining our Discord server, and be sure to keep an eye out for the upcoming announcement of our incentivized testnet program.

We plan on hosting more community initiatives that will support those looking to build a product on the Zeitgeist protocol, and also have a grants program in the works.

Be sure to follow our social channels below...

All social links: http://linktr.ee/zeitgeistpm

Website: https://zeitgeist.pm

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ZeitgeistPM

Newsletter: https://blog.zeitgeist.pm/#subscribe

Discord: https://discord.gg/xv8HuA4s8v

GitHub: https://github.com/ZeitgeistPM

Email: contact@zeitgeist.pm

Thanks for your support.

Yours in building a better, decentralized, world,

Logan and the Zeitgeist Team