OrchidxMachina - Transparency Report Q1 2024

Gm err’body!

tL;dR
*We’re doin’ stuff.
*Buy an NFT to join the (DAO)
*Due to regulatory uncertainty we’re (nonprofit)

…In the tradition of this feed posting hyper casual content, I’m going to share with you the current ever evolving state of our (DAO) without putting too much polish on it. Why? Mainly because I’m also trying to be judicious with my efforts and unpack this information documenting my work for you as quickly as possible.

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*** Development***

As mentioned in our Roadmapish (which, as noted, is 100% arbitrary and capricious), we do still have plans to hire god-level developers (with luck).

While funds have yet to unlock, once we started receiving initial support from Invarch and Tinkernet staking communities, it became clear that I’d best teach myself to code in Unity if I wanted to guarantee we’d get a solution live (someday), let alone a proof-of-concept by August 2024 (although making that roadmap arbitrary may come in handy…).

The first update to share since January is I’ve worked my way from beginner to intermediate lessons in Unity, and if you’d like to follow along you can find my progress here. TBH, most of the early demos are junk and, even though its fun, I’m now skipping ahead in the Junior Programmer pathway to get to the good stuff.

Specifically, today I am working through the intermediate DOTS (no relation) and Entities tutorials which will allow for much more visually rich decorative data presentation as we start connecting APIs into the decorative Unity scenes.

In those regards, I have both discovered some solutions for one of the proof-of-concepts, and run into roadblocks for the other.

At this point, building a demo level webGL based decorative visualizer in Unity looks possible, although I’m still having conceptual trouble connecting historical and real-time price data in the live run state within the Unity Engine.

While I’m sure all you giga-brains are rolling your eyes, remember I started out pushing pigments not pixels and, besides, if I wanted this to be easy, instead of learning to do it myself first, I could sell my soul to a VC and then just hire peoples without really being able to successfully act as (Art Director).

From a business stand point that might make sense but it’d also be paper handing the artistic vision, which is complex enough it’s probably worth doing right if worth doing at all.

In those regards, while Unity may provide a great platform for building static and 3D decorative data visualizers, I have yet to figure a way to create a mobile mesh network on the platform. My initial attempts at posting queries on the Unity Forum were hard scrubbed by the Mods without reason (broken link: here).

My follow up post had more success, to the extent I found what doesn’t work: the AR suite for Unity will not work for this project because it requires camera data to calculate device peer-to-peer proximity which goes against my promise to build something on mobile which uses no location or camera permissions.

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*** DAO Status***

Beyond that, partially due to an alignment of morality, and partially due to uncertain regulatory conditions, the (DAO) has declared it’s nonprofit intent.

This means:

*Supporting us supports Cultural Development

*Invarch/Tinker staker rewards still go to the staker while the (DAO)’s upcoming portion of staking rewards go to ongoing game and (d)app development

*If we can afford to pay me, my salaries fixed

*If you like the art you can download it for free instead of buying the NFT…

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*** Governance***

The best reason to join the DAO is to influence the direction we’re going. Note that we are hierarchical to the extent we’re working towards a focused purpose but even within the boundaries of those goals it’s still a fairly liquid democracy.

So far only three issues have been (casually) brought up by our small membership base (in DMs), and because of the size of our voting pool all three of the decisions were easily executed in their favor. Specifically:

*(Wait to apply for medium to large funding till proof-of-concept is done.)

*(Refrain from taking sides in the Polkadot Meme War on official DAO account)

*(Donate what’s available to the Indy 500 Bridge loan)

If you read this post closely, you can see we’re working to resolve that thorny chicken or egg issue when it comes to development. With respect to opinions on $DED and $PINK we’re pleading the fifth, and thanks to Bifrost we had an extra 105 DOT liquid after swapping out vDot (with 100 DOT donated from our founder and 5 DOT lent against the KSM NFT $$$).

In terms of expenses, including website hosting, I’m currently paying for it with money made from my day job. I work as a small business owner, and have already given notice to various interested parties my availability is going to be scaled back over time as the (DAO) responsibilities pick up. That is a one-to-one job, meaning I only get paid if I show up for the work and if I don’t put time into it there won’t be extra cash on hand, so until we start receiving more funding, I’m going to continue to be burning the candle at both ends.

Exciting times. Thanks for reading. Till next time:

Be safe and make good choices!

Bradley

(Orchids)
(He/Him)
4.9.24

tL;dR
*We’re doin’ stuff.
*Due to regulatory uncertainty, we’re (nonprofit)
*Buy an NFT to join the (DAO)
*Or download the art for free(!)