The State of Lotusia 2022 🪷

We're coming up on a year and a half of Lotus. While it seems like progress is slow, there has been a lot of progress made so far. This is a short review of all that's been accomplished. It's impressive to see all that we've done with relatively few resources.

1. We had a successful launch and two protocol upgrades. We're about to have another one in December.
2. SendLotus.com was built and rolled out by the bcPro Foundation. It's been a great wallet to have for its ease of use.
3. Lotus Vase is a mobile-native wallet that has been published to the Apple and Android app stores by Mags and Shammah.
4. GiveLotus.org has been up with automatic deploys and translations. Anyone who wants to commit can get changes in quickly. This has been a group effort.
5. Mr.Turtle bot exists on Reddit, Twitter, Telegram, and Discord. It allows the easy sending of Lotus to any social media user on these platforms.
6. We now have an official blog (this) with a mechanism to do donations wired up which was set up by Mags.
7. A really nice custom block explorer was set up by maff.
8. Stamp has been converted to TypeScript with many major bug fixes and speed improvements. It now has a public forum where conversations can happen. It's been relatively easy to onboard new users, but there is much room for improvement.
9. The size of the community has grown from 1 person (me) to somewhere around 800 people with varying levels of engagement.
   It's been surprisingly easy to onboard nocoiners to Lotus. When you're not asking people to buy something they're usually willing to accept it.

We've had several failed experiments in terms of promoting Lotus. That's a good thing. We can continue to be flexible and try new things. Eventually, something will stick.

There are several areas where we seem to need improvement.

1. There's sadly no way to easily stay in contact with people who we've spoken to about Lotus. When I set people up with Vase or SendLotus, I don't have a way to let them know what's going on. Hopefully, this blog can act as a conduit.
2. The launch and protocol upgrades have each had issues with the organization. We've managed to avoid disaster, but we need to improve by making sure that everything is working and released with the miners and community aware of the coming upgrade.
3. People still aren't able to easily understand the purpose and point of Lotus and Stamp. Our story is still weak, and the point of Lotus takes too long to explain.
4. The tools are still not easy and efficient enough for people to really use for anything. Lotus, at this point, only has value in terms of its belief that it can work – but work for what?
5. Our organizing ability is poor. All of us are volunteers and have day jobs and other work to do. It's difficult to make time when other people are around to coordinate in any meaningful way. Scheduling meetings to create roadmaps and prioritize is a weak point.
6. Community engagement is down. This was somewhat predictable though, as it has been prototypical for people to get excited early on about a new cryptocurrency in the hopes of making money. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, Lotus isn't intended to be something hoarded nor make a profit in terms of USD.

The way I see things, there are some things we should focus on to make Lotus a success in the coming 6 months.

1. I need to set aside time to productionize the Stamp backend servers. They are still not production ready which prevents me from really promoting Stamp. Unlike legacy crypto wallets, Stamp is stateful and stores its recovery data on remote servers. The backend servers are not currently replicating data, and if something happens to them then Stamp would go down.
2. Stamp doesn't support push notifications when messages are received. This means people just have to make it a habit to get back into the application. However, push notifications require centralized systems and this is antithetical to the design of Stamp.
3. Lotus Vase doesn't support notifications of any type. Adding support for push notifications when people receive Lotus would be the first step, but also it would be a good way to stay in contact with users.
4. One of the things we want to facilitate in Lotus is incentivizing building community through tokenomics. Adding event notifications to Lotus Vase would be a way to do this. We could allow people to create events in Lotus Vase that would be advertised to other people using Vase in the local area. Lotus could be used to create the events – which would be one way it could become useful to local communities and have real value. Personally, I would love to use it to advertise BBQs and find people who share my interest in Lotus.
5. Possibly, a Slackbot that operates similarly to bonus.ly. Bonusly is used at many companies in the pay area for "Kudos." Lotus is similar in use case and would be a way to onboard more people to the concept of Lotus.

Overall, I'm very impressed with what we've accomplished so far, and I can see success in the future if we keep building tools that make Lotus useful, and we keep refining the story so people understand why we're building all these tools.