17th of April, 2021 — A significant date for the Zen Trading community. After months of toiling with our beloved copy trading platform, Shrimpy, we decided as a small group at the time on Telegram that forking the community to Discord would be the right move for growth.
It was met with some disdain, which is understandable given human nature’s resisting attitude to change. However, almost a year on, and with incredible contributions from the Moderators/Developers on the discord we have built a monster of a server.
It has been a mission from the incarnation of the community that we want to build something greater than the sum of its parts. As one former Moderator, xcoolx, put it:
I think we should build this community beyond the simple sense of making money, but also in the sense of investing in its purest meaning, that is not about making a quick buck, it’s about the people, ideas, the process itself…
Expanding on this sentiment, it is my intention to form a DAO. There will be more details on the structure of the DAO in another post but for now, the intention of the DAO is to not only formalise a treasury for the ZenDao team to create cool-ass products/tools, but also to provide a focal point for vested Zen community members. You got to have skin in the game if you want to sell shovels in a gold rush.
You may have noticed that the Karma system has been working with full effect recently and you all have made it to the Knight’s channel via positive contribution. Furthermore, Tyler and I have been on a recruitment drive to bring in more developers/skilled operators that want to be part of a community of like-minded individuals, who want to share ideas and enjoy the process of building products for the market.
So far, we are still taking baby steps, but some of the ideas that have been proposed or are already in development:
- Velos — A Tomb fork on Telos chain that could be taken cross-chain in the future
- The Zen Indicator — A platform for quantitative analysts to build dashboards/models for trading analytics
- A DeFi copy-farming / copy trading platform for Fantom
- The Zen Monthly — Currently a free fortnightly essay that could be turned into a monthly subscription-based magazine with contributions from the community.
- Bootstrapping liquidity on a Beethoven-X pool
- Wallet Tracker — An app that in the future will allow users to replicate portfolios of the crypto world's biggest investors (see Whale Wisdom for stocks as a comparison.)
- Selling subscription to trading signals.
It is not an understatement to say the above is quite an ambitious list and there is a lot of work to be done. Yet, with the right people in place and with whatever we can chip away at along the way, I’m confident we can start shipping some products in 2022. Moreover, the process of building out these items will foster more ideas and bring us all closer together as a community.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, but unlike the Roman Empire, I want the Zen community to have longevity and ZenDAO will go a long way to achieving that goal.
Stay tuned for more updates and I’ll catch you in the Knight’s channel…