With the abundance of blockchain-based projects and crowdfunding campaigns, it’s quite rare for the crypto industry to witness comebacks from projects that were once pushed into the negative lime light.
One of the most prominent examples of such comeback is, by all means, Ethereum which has once near missed bankruptcy, then experienced an unprecedented pump, and then survived The DAO collapse.
Another example, may be not as prominent as Ethereum, is Matchpool, the first community and incentive driven social network built on top of the Ethereum blockchain.
What Was It All About
Matchpool has agitated a lion’s share of crypto community by announcing its plans to develop a working mixture of Slack, Facebook and Online Dating Apps using its ERC20 token, the Guppy (GUP). The project’s crowdfunding campaign was a tremendous success and brought almost $6 million to the team in just 33 hours.
Shortly after the crowdfunding campaign the lead developer of the project suddenly left, accusing the company CEO of unofficially moving the crowdfund money, exchanging $1.7 million worth of Ethers for Bitcoin.
Yonathan Ben Shimon, the CEO, on his part, stated that the move was about hedging against volatility risks with Ethereum, and, moreover, that the exchanging was outlined in the plan of operations that the lead developer was well aware of. Nevertheless, the community at the time was troubled, and the story even made it to mainstream media.
But, as it turned out, the future was not dubious whatsoever, and the work on the project continued as scheduled. Guppies, Matchpool’s native tokens, that will be used inside the social platform, remained tradable on exchanges and managed to accumulate liquidity with new investors.
What’s On the Table Now
After several months of hard work, Matchpool has just announced it’s first release of the Alpha. The Alpha features a whole new look and feel to the product. The smooth animations and new branding plus introductory features show the core team haven’t held back since the crowdfund at the start of April 2017. According to the team, GUP will be integrated in a Beta release of the platform. Co-founder Maximus Richardson explained: “We’re a community driven project, and want to build the product around the needs of Matchpool’s members. It’s great to see some of our investors now trialing the platform and giving us invaluable feedback and feature ideas in the community forum — it makes the whole process so much more rewarding.”
Matchpool Alpha offers basic functionality of a social media platform, including the option to create your own community pools, which are midway between Slack channels and Facebook groups. Later developments in the coming months will allow Matchpool members to use Guppy tokens within the platform. Guppy tokens (GUP) will be exchanged by Matchpool members and is the currency used inside the platform. With GUP, you can gain access or subscribe to pay-walled groups (pools) and purchase content created by pool owners. Matchpool’s incentivization feature gives pool owners the opportunity to receive payment when two members within their pool start privately chatting.
Matchpool’s business models have appealed to a number of investors, Youtube traders and even ex members of JP Morgan to start private membership and content creator pools on the platform.
According to the statement released to accompany the alpha version, several prominent figures of the entertainment industry have already expressed their interest to use Matchpool as a platform for engagement of their communities.
What’s Down the Road
According to Ben Shimon, “The pools themselves can be dedicated to virtually anything, and therefore, bring people together accordingly with their shared interests”. Richardson added “We will give developers the opportunity to create their own custom business models within pools and pool owners the ability to purchase marketplace add ons to provide more value to their communities.”
After several months of public testing and collecting feedback from users who opt to test the Alpha version of the platform, Matchpool is going to release it in beta. While the exact date of the Beta release remains to be clarified, the project hopes to do it in around 6 months of the date of the alpha release.
In addition to that, Matchpool has announced in their press release that Guppy.fm, a series of podcasts will feature some industry stakeholders and renowned crypto community rockstars.
This comeback may not be as epic as that of Ethereum, but it clearly demonstrates that media smear campaign cannot kill off a dedicated team that easily. But, most importantly, this means that the blockchain-based social network that had excited the community in late 2016 is about to become a reality.
