FUNDRAISE.

As many of you already know, we’ve been in the midst of a seed funding round. Given the climate in capital markets currently, this has naturally proven to be a difficult task, but not one that we weren’t expecting, nor one that has discouraged us.

The feedback from VCs has been overwhelmingly positive, and has helped us refine the strategy that is set to define the coming months. August will naturally be slightly calmer externally, while we continue to graft on the inside on an ambitious building sprint which I’d like to share with you in detail here today.

B-BUILD.

Our team is currently hard at work on our V2 platform, which will introduce user-friendly web2 functionality, allowing anyone to easily purchase our releases and begin generating passive income. The purpose of this is to open up to markets outside of the web3 space, while introducing new features that are aimed at making contributions easier, and adding to our community-building ambitions.

Some key highlights of these upgrades:

• Personal profile creation

• Comments section

• Contributor visibility

• GPT 3.5-integration for grammar checks

• Smooth fiat on and off-ramps for convenient conversions.

The aim of these new features has been to offer easier access to people from the web2 space to interact with our platform without needing to create a crypto wallet.

This is made possible by a wallet and fiat payment API integration by CrossMint, which allows us to maintain all the token-gated processes that make our V1 platform tick, while keeping them purring under the hood without the need to action any further steps on the user side.

Profile creation and the comments section both feed into our long term goal of maximising community sentiment and allowing users more ways to interact with the novels, and each other. Fan-fiction, which has long been a source of inspiration for TQOE, serves as a perfect example of how conversations around stories and the IP within them is what ultimately brings them to life and gives them value.

Some other upgrades have already been pushed live, including the draft functionality (seen in the image above) and ‘contributor visibility’, which allows user to see the wallet address that has contributed to the novel previously by hovering over the text.

These features both serve to further increase community-sentiment and to integrate some features from currently recognised self-publishing and writing platforms, further increasing ease of use and optimising for quality writing. Users can now save ideas, use previous iterations, and distinguish between sections in the text from each previous contributor.

BLOCKBOOK

Part of our latest sprint has also been to experiment with re-branding options. That’s why last week we put a vote to our community for their thoughts on a transition to the name ‘BlockBook’.

We chose it because it describes some of the key updates we wish to integrate in the contribution process, namely:

• Purchasing contributions in paragraph ‘blocks’

• A new and improved auction system

We feel that these updates will allow for an easier contribution process for web2 users, a more descriptive and memorable name, and a more inviting UX (as seen in the image above). Let us know your thoughts!

WORLDVIEW ETHICS.

Every month, we’ve been releasing essays by PageDAO founder Epic Dylan, and June and July weren’t any exceptions. These vignettes represent windows into the themes present in a longer piece that Dylan is working on, slated for release later this year. Dylan gracefully skates through his thoughts on consciousness, AI, philosophy of mind, and more, all accompanied by music and visuals created by the team here at TQOE!

By purchasing one of these essays for a small fee - available now on Quix - purchasers are granted access to commit their own words to the ongoing narrative. Contributions don’t need to be direct responses, or even closely related to the original text. Rather, we just want to ignite a conversation around the work in whatever way possible, even via questions, jokes and rebuttals!

Each essay is released mid-month, accompanied with a Twitter Space with Dylan and a special guest.

WRITING CONTEST.

Two weeks ago we set in motion a writing contest on Twitter to encourage aspiring writers to come forward with their best short stories. The winner of the first edition of these contests is none other than Ben Westerham! His captivating story stood out among the 17 entries we received. Congratulations, Ben!

We want to express our gratitude to all the participants for their outstanding applications. The decision was tough. A special thank you goes out to our trusted Judges, who meticulously evaluated each submission and ultimately reached this well-deserved conclusion.

SALES & CONTRIBUTIONS.

We’re buzzing to announce that all of our novel assets have been successfully sold out so far, achieving impressive trading volumes of 2ETH (approximately $3,725 USD) from just 14 assets. Although there was a market mismatch, this outcome is still commendable.

It hasn’t been without hardship though, with one big issue being that "An Unexpected Withdrawal" is receiving limited contributions due to the high Ethereum gas fees, which often surpass the value of the NFTs themselves.

Furthermore, we encountered marketplace problems, resulting in OpenSea banning us from their platform due to an unclear breach of their Terms of Service. Despite our best attempts, a resolution remains elusive, leading to the loss of all bids on NFTs. In response, we swiftly moved our assets over to the Rarible marketplace. However, Rarible lacks Optimism or Arbiturium compatibility, as well as a bidding system for Polygon, prompting us to actively pursue the development of our own multi-chain white-labeled marketplace. This is in the works.

Despite this, we’ve been fortunate enough to have seen some excellent contributions nonetheless, a particular favourite being the one shown in the image above.

THE WATERING HOLE.

Our other release during the second quarter of this year was our highly anticipated political satire collection, The Watering Hole. We released this smaller scale novel as an opportunity to allow for easier and cheaper access to the Write-2-Earn process, while also fleshing out our collection of published work with more light-hearted content.

Contributions to this collection have been scarce so far, but we expect that this has also been affected by the poor market situation, and the troubles we had with OpenSea last quarter. We decided to launch these on the Quix marketplace, given their compatibility with the Optimism network, which we felt was the perfect fit due to their low gas fees, consolidating the low barrier to entry.

CLOSING REMARKS.

As you can tell, we’ve been making extensive efforts to build on our tech stack and expand into larger markets. During this time, we’ll also be planning new novel releases to accompany these updates, so keep an eye out on our Discord and join our Town Halls for the latest news on when these will be. Our pipeline currently includes over six finalised projects, spanning genres from horror and erotic literature, to fantasy and romance.

We’d like to leave you with a quote from one of our beloved novel Architects and NYT best-selling author Joseph Nassise:

“Working with the team at Quest of Evolution has been fabulous. The ability to collaborate with other creators on a story that not only provides a method for immediate monetization for all involved but that stretches our creative natures in new and exciting ways has been exciting and refreshing. I can’t wait to see where it all goes from here!”

If you want to get involved in our community and contribute to a Crypto-Novel, join us in the Discord!

by Bob Juburi - Co-Founder @ The Quest of Evolution