Hello Carbonians!
We’ve been hard at work as usual, and yesterday we had a lengthy development meeting with the goal of setting a fixed date for the Carbon Beta release.
As you know, we’ve always said we will not release anything simply due to an arbitrary date “deadline”. As a beta release serves the purpose of testing and ironing out any bugs, and making improvements, it needs to be at a certain level where the testing will move us closer to the full public launch. We had hoped that the beta would be ready this month. There’s a good reason (actually a few) why that won’t be the case. Don’t panic, it’s ultimately good news!
We are excited to announce a significant new feature of Carbon. Carbon Groups. This feature will allow users to subscribe to topics of interest, and easily browse in a separate section, or view the posts in the main social feed. When creating any post on Carbon, the user will have the option of posting into a group, or into the general social feed. Aka, Reddit style, or Twitter style. We believe that Carbon Groups will lead to seriously increased engagement, more rewards, more followers, more visibility and ultimately quicker growth of the entire platform. Carbon is no longer just a social feed, it will be a great place to hang out with like-minded people and discuss whatever it is that matters to you. At first, we will create the main groups (broad categories such as gaming, tv, movies, cars, funny, politics and others). In time, users will create their own groups, because our team can’t possibly keep up with the niche interests of all users. Group posts have the same rewards system as regular posts. You get an upvote, you get points. Upvoted comment, more points. Groups are a great opportunity for someone with few followers to gain a lot of attention and compete with influencers.
In summary, you can now consider Carbon to be more of a hybrid of Twitter and Reddit, in terms of the social functionality. This is a significant upgrade, and hence will take some more time to build, because we want it included in the very first beta release for testing.
Another major development we want to introduce before beta release, is the ability to sign up and use Carbon without MetaMask. As you know, our MetaMask account creation and management process offers great security and anonymity. It’s brilliant for those users who want to take some extra steps to protect their identity and control their data. However, we want Carbon to be for everyone. We want it to gain mass adoption, and we don’t want the roadblocks of technical skills required. You’re probably familiar with MetaMask as you’re involved in crypto. 99% of people aren’t. Rather than try to explain how to install MetaMask just so they can use Carbon, we are going to allow signups in more traditional ways. Regardless of how you choose to sign up and manage your account (MetaMask or otherwise), all users will share the platform and interact together. So, we are giving users the choice, giving them control. This will be a recurring theme for Carbon. We want to give the power to the users. The new signup methods will also require some time to include in beta release, which is our plan. Users that sign up with “non MetaMask” methods, will not be eligible for rewards. They’ll still earn points but cannot receive a share of tokens. So this is good news for those who are, and offers an incentive to use MetaMask as they will share in a larger pool (fewer people).
So, with all of this extra development and internal testing required to ensure Carbon Beta is a very usable and attractive platform from day one, our beta release date is March 31. This is as guaranteed as it possibly can be. It’ll still require we work long hours as there is unlimited work and testing to do, but that’s the beta release date. Put it in your calendars. We’ll be promoting this date as much as possible and believe it will be worth the wait.
We understand it may be disappointing to not have the beta this month, as we had hoped. It’s totally up to you if you stick around and we understand this is a fast moving space. We are building a social network here, and it takes time to do it right. Everything we do is designed to set up Carbon for long term success. We’re thinking many years down the track here. We will try to put out a video showing progress, in the next week or so. The previously planned beta is fully functional, we’re really just holding off so we can include these new features, and also work on the scalability, assuming mass adoption in a short time.
In the mean time, while the devs do their thing, we will also be pursuing more partnerships and integrations, but also looking for some high quality content creators to join. Carbon will offer the ability for long posts, not only short messages. We want users to be able to tell a story, we want to encourage creativity. Content is key. If you are a blogger, journalist, artist or any other content creator, get in touch with us and let’s get you onto Carbon from day one.
In other news, we’ll be giving away a limited edition NFT to 10 lucky Beta testers! To be eligible, use Carbon Beta and earn some points (for app usage, not CRBN holdings). 10 random testers will win this NFT:
Summary:
1. We’re adding Carbon Groups, a Reddit-style feature!
2. We’re adding mainstream signup options.
3. Beta release date is March 31
4. Special rare NFT giveaway to 10 lucky Beta testers
If you have any questions, feel free to hit us up in Telegram or on Twitter. We’re very busy at the moment but will try our best to respond.
Thanks again for your patience and support. We believe those who stick with us will be rewarded.
Daniel & Rob
Carbon
crbn.io
