Building a strong æternity community can take you places.
You may have already noticed that æternity has an active æmbassador network with offline meetups all around the globe. We are seeing great community engagement in the cities of our local æmbassadors, but we want to reach out even further. As part of our æmbassador scaling program, æternity’s æmbassadors have budget allocations for trips within their local area / country and are encouraged to host meetups beyond their own cities. The goal is to expand their reach in the process of building a strong local community of developers and entrepreneurs interested in æternity.
æternity’s first travelling æmbassadors have already set out to conquer the world!
æternity’s Indian æmbassador Ashish Chawla has already held three meetups during the Future Blockchain Summit in Dubai. He pitched to local government officials in the national Health, Aviation, and Migration departments. Dubai is looking forward to becoming a blockchain-powered country by 2021 and transfer all its visa applications and other government transactions on the blockchain, making it a perfect market for æternity’s scalable blockchain platform.
During the conference, Ashish approached about 65 people at the conference and at the stands, some of which were bankers, developers, and students. He gave out t-shirts and caps to the people who showed a keen interest. He got a 15-minute speaking slot at the conference with more than a hundred people listening. One of the interesting use cases that emerged was using state channels for visa applications in the country. Another example was using oracles for real-time data about flight cancellations or delays. In this way, refunds can be handled fast and securely without requiring extra efforts. A third use case was to use state channels to pay out part of the salaries as custom tokens to government officials. More details can be found here.
Manel Ruiz from Barcelona started a tour through Spain and already had his first two stops in Formentera (Balearic Islands) and Albacete (Castilla-La Mancha). The former had participants with various positions, including a plumber with a mining rig, a politician, a Bitcoin early investor, a notary and local residents. Here are the details.
Some of the main questions asked at this meetup were related to the use case of oracles for proving inheritance and how to prevent oracles from acting maliciously.
Other participants asked about the profitability of AE mining and usable wallets. His other meetup at Albabit in Albacete (Castilla-La Mancha) was attended by a great number of local crypto-enthusiasts who are also founders of a local Bitcoin association. The participants included a mix of investors, developers, miners, crypto old cats, and newbies. They discussed state channels, oracles, functional programming languages, the Starfleet program, hæckathons, the Cuckoo Cycle, mining, developer tools, the next hard forks, virtual channels and community development. He recruited a new local æmbassador and continues his journey towards Castellón and Alicante.
æternity’s third travelling æmbassador is Stephen Sunday from Jos, Nigeria. He went out to organize æternity meetups at CoinFest in Port Harcourt and at a Campus Blockchain Event with the Nigerian Blockchain Alliance in Akure. His meetup at CoinFest Nigeria had more than 100 participants and the topics included academic records stored on the blockchain because of damage or loss of documents as well as having the financial sector run on the blockchain.
The event brought together many industry leaders and blockchain experts/influencers with speakers from Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya. Stephen gave an overview of what æternity is doing to promote mass adoption by hosting æmbassador meetups and by looking out for æpps use cases. Central questions at his meetup were:
How can æternity be beneficial to experts from the legal field?
Does æternity have any function that supports arbitration?
What are the advantages of æternity compared to Ethereum and EOS?
How easy is it to setup a miner on æternity’s Mainnet?
Stephen also spoke about how æternity is promoting grass root adoption by funding startups through the Starfleet Incubator program. A hackathon was organized on the second day of CoinFest and the winner (Esusu) had a prototype that allows small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) to get soft loans with a very low interest rate on the blockchain. SMEs are the backbone of the Nigerian economy, but the central bank makes it difficult to access loans.
Stephen approached the hackathon winner to deploy his app on the æternity blockchain. Two of the conference speakers run exchanges in Nigeria (sabiii.com and bitfxt), they make it easier for Nigerians to buy crypto using the local currency Naira. Stephen got in contact with them to list the AE Mainnet token and to enable common people in Nigeria to acquire AE tokens.
The Campus blockchain event in Akure was organized by the Nigeria Blockchain Alliance and Stephen promoted æternity adoption by educating people on dacade.org. He showed them how user-friendly the æternity blockchain is and explained to potential developers how they could benefit from its scalability and efficiency solutions, when compared to other blockchains.
Other blockchain companies such as Ardor, Jelurda, and Luno were also represented at the event. A common use case that is relevant for all of them is the need to implement tuition fees on the blockchain to promote transparency and immutability of records.
We hope you enjoy the travelling æmbassador experience and get to spread the word about æternity at universities and meetup spaces throughout your country!
Apply for the æmbassador program if you want to be part of æternity’s journey towards scalability and blockchain for the masses.
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