Reflections

This rebranding ushers in a new era for the Souls: while our brand is getting a fresh new look, we are also upgrading the NFT/DeFi experience we set out to create a year ago. This past year, we’ve spoken a lot about Harberger taxes, NFT staking, a marketplace, and the Ectoverse. I’ll (glu) be the first to admit it: things have been dispersed and chaotic as we attempted to separate ourselves from the countless other NFT projects. I’d argue however that this rapid sporadic time has allowed us time to, as they say, test our ideas in production.

Throughout this phase, we’ve released papers, docs, articles, tweet threads, an open-world beta game, and companion NFTs as well as given elevator pitches at conferences & IRL to whoever would listen in an attempt to explain what we are working on and why. We’ve learned a lot from these activities and over the past few months have centered our purpose, defined our goals, and organized our solutions. We’ve taken a hard look at each part of our operation and set out to define in simple terms our purpose, vision, and values to guide us through the next phase of Ecto.

Our Purpose

To allow everyone to participate in and enjoy property ownership in their community.

Our Vision

To create inclusive communities where economic incentives are aligned with community goals.

Our Values

• Champion community ownership.
• Align economic incentives towards fairness.
• Embody decentralization.
• Respect communities' right to privacy.
• Embrace open source.

We set out to apply our purpose, vision and values to each aspect of what we are calling the Ecto Ecosystem and either add, update, or delete the design to fit the above. The four main parts of the Ecto Ecosystem are the Marketplace, the Lost Souls, the Ectoverse and the Ecto Protocol. Our chief focus will be on the Marketplace and the Ectoverse. The information and observations from the Marketplace and Ectoverse will then influence the Ecto Protocol design.

Also Check out our updated landing page!

Marketplace

The marketplace is a culmination of all of our writing, design work, and the first implementation of our ideas around staking and community engagement. The marketplace is designed with L2 solutions in mind, your Land & Soul combination is your key to unlocking a portion of trading fees. Simply introduce users to the platform and when they trade, you receive a percentage of the trading fee. This design allows any soul holder to participate in the advancement of the marketplace, and fulfill the larger Ecto purpose. With this design, we can gather a plethora of data surrounding community participation to inform our design of the Ecto Protocol. To fill a niche in the marketplace scene we have built our marketplace around L2s supporting Arbitrum and Optimism as well as Ethereum. The marketplace features an easy-to-use NFT swap, a L2 Zap feature for buying NFTs cross-chain, and collection on-chain integrations.

Soulbound badges will be given to Soul holders for other interactions that enhance the visibility of the marketplace. Actions include tweeting about the marketplace, onboarding collections and referring users to use NFT swaps.

Lost Souls

Souls will be taking their pixel form! Always meant to be an asset under the Ecto ecosystem, the first step towards that goal is staking on the marketplace. The metadata will be updated on IPFS with their accompanying Souls in a switch fashion allowing you to select the pixel soul or the previous image. Also, our merchandise store will be opening next month to start accepting orders!

Ectoverse

Living at https://beta.ecto.xyz, the vision for the Ectoverse design is an open-world exploratory area with buildable land that would follow the rules of Harberger Taxes, namely it’s always on sale, you set the listing price and pay a fee on the listing price. While idealistic and still the long-term goal of our project, we’ve begun to focus and define the scope more narrowly to ensure we can take smaller concrete steps to grow with the market. Our updated design will feature a unique gaming experience marrying price exploration with land upgradability. As you upgrade your land via staking lost souls or other assets, your land becomes more valuable thus commanding a higher price in an always-on-sale market. The Land will still be visually able to be built on in addition to the pricing mechanics described above.

Ecto Protocol

We plan to marry the mechanics of the Ectoverse design with the marketplace to create a generalized solution in line with Ecto’s purpose. More details on the Protocol will emerge over the next few months.

-Lost Labs Team

P.S. Communication updates

We have a slew of updates to the Discord and now plan to rely heavily on Twitter and Telegram groups for keeping up to date with your fellow Souls and all the happenings of the Ecto Ecosystem, find out more in the Discord.