Updates on the progress made since December, and many new announcements and things to look forward to!

Let’s get caught up on recent developments and also what’s next in the coming months!

January Updates

Launching our new DAO Dashboard

We are proud to announce the launch of our DAO dashboard! Many thanks to the Librarian Lizards team, Seagolem, Entity & Eliph for helping to establish & monitor the dashboard. The dashboard contains 6 main sections.

1. Ethlizards Official Reporting is a collection of all reports/newsletters that relate to the project.

2. DAO Structure provides an overview of the DAO’s organisation structure, as well as the most updated roadmap.

3. Latest Community Updates is a progress tracker of the works mostly done by the Liaison Lizards and also features other community content (eg, AMAs on Twitter, educational videos and content and more).

4. Ongoing Projects are mostly dedicated to core team works. A timeline view illustrates the main projects and their respective status and progression (reflected by a percentage). The board view provides a more visual view of the pending, current, in-review & completed tasks that we are working on. We hope releasing this will allow the community to feel more informed and up-to-date on progress.

5. The investments section is explicitly reserved for the Ethlizards Investment Council to provide updates on their latest investments and activities.

6. Latest Content is your one-stop shop for all projects in which the Ethlizards have some connections or interest! This section features an embedded view of the Web3 Gaming and Project Library and the Content Vault.

Web3 Gaming & Project Library

The Web3 Gaming & Project Library is a contributor-updated page that contains detailed descriptions of projects, including tokenomics and whitepaper summaries for invested & long-term partnered projects. This project database includes projects in that we have collaborations, partnerships, investments and other general projects of interest that may be unaffiliated.

Content Vault

The Content Vault contains individual content including articles, AMAs, YT videos and more.

Website Updates

Over the last month, we’ve made a variety of new updates to the website. Here’s a brief overview:

• Refreshed home-page

• Refreshed docs section

• New portfolio page

• New dashboard section

• New Web3 Content Vault & DAO Dashboard integration

We don’t plan to make any significant updates to the website but have planned some minor polishing of the existing pages. We also plan to launch a partnership page soon.

Staking Developments

Staking is progressing along nicely. On the front-end and UI side of things, we’ve created flows for each user interaction, as well as 2 separate pages, one for when you stake and a separate dashboard to view your rewards and the status of, once these items pass review shortly, the development of them will commence.

Here’s a link to our user flows/front-end architecture:

On the backend of things, all smart contract code is near completion and we are currently fixing bugs, writing technical documentation, and preparing to get the most value possible for the upcoming audit. We are also testing a variety of solutions to optimise gas costs for both the user and the protocol. After all of this is complete, we’ll release a beta, test-net version of staking for holders to playtest whilst we are completing final security tests/audits.

We are on target for our planned release date for the end of Q1 and will continue to tease more items as works progress.

Social Media

Astral ran our social media for over a year and we are very grateful for all that he has done to grow our presence and bring in new users. He has been a reliable contributor to the Ethlizards DAO. He plans to remain in the DAO, but has stepped down as social media manager.

We have brought in two contributors to manage and run social media for the Ethlizards and the total cost will be less.

Steff will serve as Social Media Manager. He has various professional marketing and social media experience. He currently serves as the Chief Marketing Officer for Dyve and Director of Social Media Strategy at IronBelly Studios.

Lemz, as many of you know, is a long-time lizard. In addition to the knowledge and insight into the community that will help to inform SM strategy and works, he will help deliver various social media items and follow-ups.

The two of them will work together to execute SM items and be present for AMAs, partnership cross-promotions and monthly metric reports. They'll align with the team on SM strategy and we'll aim to bring even more brand consistency and brand building through our enhanced SM presence. We have a few other cool things planned, but we won't share those just yet. You'll have to wait and see.

New Ethlizards Content

Ethlizards is now sponsoring the Gaming on the Block show on our new YouTube channel. This signifies the start of a new era of Ethlizards sponsored/produced content. Reptile Roundtable Twitter spaces will continue as a regular show and we’ll continue to expand the Ethlizards content offerings.

New Investment Council members

Recently, Jeff & Kmao stepped down from their investment council positions. Following this, a Snapshot vote was held to elect two new Investment Council members - Haitzu from IMX & Animositas. We’d like to thank all the nominees for their applications and welcome the new Investment Council members to their positions! We’ve already had the first investment council meeting including the new members and let’s just say that there are many good things to come.

Ethlizards at Australian Open

Fellow Ethlizard Cameron Norrie was competing in the Australian Open. Kieran showed up with some of our lizard brethren for support and even hooked up the lizard crew with T-shirts. Norrie was in excellent form throughout the tournament and made it to the finals to face 20-year veteran Richard Gasquet in the men’s singles final of the ASB Classic tennis event in Auckland, New Zealand.

After a very competitive show of skill and determination between the two players, Richard ultimately won and attained his 16th ATP Tour title. Norrie was quoted after the match saying,

“I wanted that one really bad but all credit to Richard, he hung in there and played better than me down the stretch.”

“For me [Norrie], I had an amazing week. I grew up here watching the tournament, a lot of friends and family here and everyone was supporting me which was great. I really wanted to win the title but for me today makes me even more hungry and I’ll be back and hopefully get the title next year.”

We would like to congratulate Cameron Norrie on an awesome performance and we have very high hopes for you at Wimbledon!

Project Herpetarium

The Herpetarium is moving full steam ahead. We have selected and reached out to the most aligned communities in the space, gathered some amazing feedback and witnessed high levels of excitement about the project.

We are right now finalizing the onboarding process and getting ready to launch the pilot phase. Project Herpetarium, initially centred around us sharing some of our investment deal flow, is now morphing into a strong coalition of highly specialized DAOs. We expect the true utility to emerge from this multilateral, mutually beneficial partnership initiative. Stay tuned for the coming announcements and progress updates!

Monthly AMA replacing newsletter

Following the community feedback, we’ve decided to replace the mid-monthly newsletter with an AMA hosted in discord. This’ll allow us to better address and hear community opinions and will be recorded for people that are unable to attend. We’ll aim to select AMA times that will allow for a greater number of attendees to be present.

Gaming Tournaments

As you may have seen, we are continuing our Illuvium Arena tournaments with our partner XBorg. We’ll continue to co-host Illuvium gaming tournaments and plan to expand our tournament offerings to other games as well. The tournaments we are hosting now are part of a larger strategy to be positioned at the forefront of Web3 gaming and Esports.

Collaborations & Partnerships

There is a lot happening behind the scenes regarding partnerships. Officially, we have launched a strategic partnership with XBorg. However, there are many more things in the works. We can’t release information on other partnerships just yet, but we’ll be releasing these through our official announcement channels on Discord, Twitter and Mirror.xyz.

February and beyond

Additional Staking Development and Leaks

We plan to continue to iterate upon staking this month as the main focus for the devs. The community can expect more teasers as we close to the deadlines for staking, which we are on time for.

NFT Collections Contract Redeployments

Soon we will announce a redeployment of contracts for our NFT collections. We’ve chosen to do this due to roughly 50% of lost royalties from 0% royalty sales on Blur (and potentially other future marketplaces).

A brief summary is that Blur is optionally a 0% marketplace and royalties can only be enforced either by user choice or by the NFT collection at a contract level. Since our current NFT contracts are not upgradeable, we plan to redeploy our NFT contracts as upgradeable contracts to be able to enforce Blur royalties, as well as address any future issues that may arise in the ever-evolving NFT space. Our new contract will allow us to capture trading royalties on both Opensea and Blur, among other marketplaces.

Ethlizards Articles

We aim to launch a crypto gaming-focused content platform. We are going to open an Ethlizards-owned, blog that will aim to provide valuable information to the crypto and crypto gaming space in general. We want both contributors and community members to be able to publish on the blog (pending a review from other contributors and the team), with submissions opening up adjacently with the launch of the platform.

Investment Council Operational Improvements

Last month, we have heavily improved the transparency and tracking of the core team members with the release of the DAO dashboard and its respective “Ongoing Projects” section. This month, we will implement similar changes to the investment council, ensuring transparency of investment council operations within the limits of respecting NDAs and other confidential information. We’ll also be making improvements to council processes and operations.

Revenue Generating Products

1. One potential product which is currently unknown to the community is being scoped out adjacently to other ongoing works like staking and other items.

2. The content platform is currently in Alpha, the previously mentioned “Web3 Gaming & Project Library”. We will continue to scope out the cycle of this product, as it involves us building a unique portal and platform for users to publish content. For now, you can take a look at the existing version, as it contains similar content as what can be expected.

3. The launchpad concept is currently in the backlog, pending the completion of staking and other dev priorities.

Ethlizards Outreach - AMAs/Team Presence/Organic Marketing

We’ve heard community feedback that they’d like to hear more of the team, whether it’s in discord or in other AMAs. In a response to this, the team has made an active attempt to be more online on discord as well as hosted/joined more AMAs. Expect this to continue in the following months.

Changes with the Core Team

First of all, we’d like to thank the community for their feedback on the team’s performance over the last couple of months, without it we wouldn’t able to continue to improve on our processes. Here is a list of changes that have been implemented:

More Granular Tracking

We now have the project task section under the DAO dashboard so the community is able to see what all the team members are doing! Note that team members have been receiving compensation based on actual hours worked. (Less than full-time = less pay).

Stricter Timelines

Last year, we released a newsletter detailing what’s to come in both Q1 and Q2. To ensure that timelines are accurate, the core developers (Jumbo & Kmao) will not receive compensation after Q2 if these items are not completed.

Shift in Roles & Goals

Due to the changing environment, there have been talks of a future fundraiser for Ethlizards. This is currently in the works, and alongside it, we have some changes to Kmao’s position in the DAO. He’ll be stepping over to a product lead & solidity development role and additional hires will be made for the core team. Additional compensation costs will be paid for by new investor funds, while the Ethlizards will continue receiving their high level of utility as always. Unfortunately, we're not able to say much more at the moment as things are still very early stage for this, but we’ll be able to disclose more in the coming weeks. This is all good news for the DAO and opens up a much greater potential moving forward. Keep your eyes peeled for leaks in the coming weeks!

Thanks,

Ethlizards Team