TL;DR: The roadmap on our website has been updated. Before we enable token transfers, we are going to ship a few more things, such as free transactions and universal usernames.

Hey everyone, this will be a big post. We know we've been kind of quiet the last 2–3 months, and we want to give everyone a full rundown on what we are working on. Builders keep building no matter what the market looks like, but we do want to provide some transparency for you all. Most of the things mentioned here will happen before the token becomes transferrable.

We have just updated the roadmap on our website to reflect the features listed below.

Token Distribution

On Tuesday, March 22nd, we started the vesting schedule for the remaining 90% of tokens from The Dotsama Token Claim. We also distributed the initial 10% of tokens from the community and public sales, and started the vesting schedule for the remaining 90%. Both of these vesting schedules are 6 months long, and vest over every block.

To finish the token distribution, we still need to distribute tokens to the team, advisors, investors, and set up the treasury.

Free Transactions

We've been hard at work on our free transaction solution. As you may know, Subsocial is made of two blockchains: a standalone Substrate chain (aka solochain), and a parachain on Kusama. The way our free transaction system works is that users will lock SUB on the parachain to earn a certain number of free transactions per day on the solochain, where the social networking activity will take place.

This is essentially a new type of yield farming, where you can farm social utility from your tokens. Having to spend tokens to use Subsocial is a huge barrier for a good user experience, which is why we believe that this is the most important thing for Subsocial to gain mass adoption.

Move All Tokens To The Parachain

The next step after enabling free transactions is to move all tokens from the solochain to the parachain. This is because the parachain has higher security, and you will be able to lock up your tokens on the parachain for free transactions. This will also allow for SUB to be moved to other parachains via HRMP/XCMP, so we can use them for DeFi, for example.

Rename Our Web App

Currently, both our blockchain and our web app are named Subsocial, which causes some confusion.

Subsocial is a blockchain protocol for social networking, which you can build social dapps on top of. Our current web app is an example of a social dapp. Unfortunately, because it is also named Subsocial, people tend to think that Subsocial is just a web app, when we are really building a platform.

Because of this, we will be renaming our web app, but the blockchain will still be called Subsocial. The new name will be revealed soon…

Add Donations Functionality To Our Web App

First introduced to Sub.ID to aid Ukraine, the donations feature will be added to our web app so that you can easily tip or donate to creators of great content, in a wide variety of tokens. This will really be the beginning of Social Finance on Subsocial.

Release Dotsama Domains v1.0

In v1.0, all of the old handles (located in the URL of a space) on Subsocial will be migrated from the solochain to Dotsama Domain's universal username system on the parachain. Later releases will allow for the registration of new usernames and subdomains.

These universal usernames will solve the Web2 problem of having different usernames on different social networks, and they can be used in any app in Dotsama that adds support for them. It's a very natural fit for the Web3 version of social networks.

Add Polls To Our Web App

We will be adding an off-chain polling functionality to our web app. This is a feature we wanted, so we could poll our community without using Twitter, which has bots and people who are not actually members of our community. We took a snapshot of token holders who will be able to vote on these polls. In the future, we want to have a Snapshot like feature where anyone can make polls with custom parameters.

Add Staking Functionality

As we continue towards full decentralization, we'll need to have community-elected collators running the parachain. This means we will be turning on staking, which will function similar to Kusama's staking.

Additionally, we are entertaining some cool ideas about how to take staking one step further. We like what the Astar team did with dapp staking, and think it's a fantastic way to support and incentivize developers that build on your platform, so we plan to implement that.

But dapps may not be the only thing you can stake to. We also want to allow users to stake towards any space, such as their favorite content creator, as a thank you gesture for what they do. Please note that we are still exploring how this will work, and nothing is guaranteed yet.

Enabling staking will add more utility to SUB, and provide another way to lock up tokens, while also allowing you to reward those that help secure the network or grow Subsocial, whether they are developers in the ecosystem, or content creators populating the network. We think that this combo of developers and content creators will be Subsocial's secret sauce.

We firmly believe that all of these changes will have an excellent impact on the value proposition of Subsocial, and improve the user experience of our platform, which will be reflected in the value that you, the token holders, receive.

It does seem like a long road, but it will all be finished before we know it. Thank you to everyone for your patience and understanding, we are working hard to provide you with value, and build the infrastructure necessary for the social networks of the future.

To learn more about Subsocial and the future of social networking, check out our links:

A Community Update