Welcome to Mass Labs' first community update!
In case you’re here by accident: Mass Labs is building Mass Market, a crypto-native commerce infrastructure that fully decentralizes in-person and online sales and empowers merchants, customers and developers instead of extracting from them. We are making it possible to buy physical goods directly with crypto. Our mantra is to Make Crypto Currency Again!
And at this end of Q4 2023 we have plenty to report on.
Q4’23 started out with a dash to develop a very rough proof-of-concept Point-of-Sale app ready for EthRome in October. At EthRome we sold a grand total of 7 beautiful future-themed art posters (pretty good going as the organizers estimated an attendance of ~100 people!), purchased in USDC and ETH directly from any wallet using a QR-code.
We considered this pretty awesome, given that we had neither an in-house team nor any entity set up yet.
Excited by our first success, post-EthRome our MVP-team crystalized into its current form, we set up the bureaucratic basics and hunkered down to work, closing the year with our first ever team offsite - a mix of get-to-know-you-strategy-and-planning-project-kick-off discussions spanning three weeks in not-so-hot Greece!
We geared our first set of group discussions around preparing ourselves for the journey. We developed a shared map of the territory (who else is here), agreed on the destination (what we are building, for who and most importantly why) and figured out who might co-pilot the ride (who our initial customer(s) might be).
Our second set of discussions were then spent developing an initial roadmap. This began with yet another brainstorm: we drowned ourselves in a tsunami of orange post-its as we imagined every possible feature that could ever be built.
We distilled these down into three different ‘directions’ that we could take, which came down to three slightly different products that constitute three slightly different approaches to reaching the ultimate goal of a fully decentralised cryptonative marketplace for physical goods.
After much discussion around the comparative value of each strategic route, we found ourselves agreeing on a single, by now ‘obvious’ direction for the coming 12 months, which we will soon post up on our website: www.mass.market
Things always feel like they move so much faster when you’ve got everyone in the same room!
For our remaining time together, in between a healthy schedule of home-cooked meals sprinkled with a handful of authentic Greek cuisine, we got to work designing, architecting and writing code.
We sketched out a design for and implemented a relay, implemented the login and authentication flow for clerks, started work on the client library for merchant and customer interactions with the relays and added an access control system to the smart contracts.
Alongside the code we also spent a good amount of time working out our logo design, refining our UI and UX for our Point-of-Sale application, and after much back and forth discussion decided it was time to hire an in-house front-end developer onto the team.
Of course it wasn’t all work all the time. We also indulged in some quality sight-seeing, exploring ancient Greek history on the weekends, while our lead engineer tackled some of southern Greece’s highest mountains on his regular bike rides - succeeding in his attempts at dodging territorial dogs and stray rocks at least 90% of the time!
Upcoming next quarter we will hopefully have some exciting news for you about our presence at EthDam and EthDubai. If you’re planning to go to either of these events and would like to test out our Point-of-Sale app or just hang out with the team do drop us a message - we’d be happy to hear from you! You can find us on all the social media apps using the handle mass_labs, or better yet write us an email at info@mass.market.
With loads of love, the Mass Labs team