In the world of crypto, there is never a dull moment. As you explore the news feeds and forums, you'll always find something interesting to talk about. Whether that be new features to a product or service, a token that people write off as a scam, hilarious memes, an intense debate, the list goes on and on. Like many of you, I had an excellent time during this holiday break catching up with close friends and family that I haven't seen or spoken to in several months. That warm comforting feeling from food and alcohol was strong for this computerphile. While we were enjoying these festivities, many things were happening in crypto-land, projects such as GitGuild released it's alpha, the price of bitcoin shot up to a little over a thousand and a brand hard fork of Arcade City was taking place. In this piece, I will break down what happened with Arcade City and their reason for wanting to re-brand.
What is Swarm City?
Swarm City is a re-branding of a project called Arcade City, which gained massive popularity last year. It's function is to create a decentralized ecosystem where people can exchange services such as ridesharing (familiar with Uber?) for crypto. People who are not technically inclined can easily earn these digital tokens called Swarm Tokens (SWT for short) and exchange them for bitcoin to purchase tangible things like food, clothing, pay rent, etc. The potential can bring an influx of new users making crypto-currency become more than just a magic internet money that enthusiasts and risk taking investors use. With it's bold ambition to disrupt multiple billion dollar businesses, it will be an interesting project to keep an eye on.
Why they re-branded?
The purpose for re-branding stemmed from wanting to cut ties with the controversial founder, Christopher David, and the extra baggage that came from Arcade City Inc. (his private company that is attached to the Arcade City brand). A token sale took place to assist the development of the Ethereum based application. After it finished, Christopher relinquished his leadership position to focus on providing an optional service with his company and put Bernd Lapp, an Ethereum Foundation member, in charge. His departure made it problematic because according to the white paper, 5% or 476,253 of the tokens raised in the sale were to be distributed to the stakeholders of Arcade City Inc. What made this difficult was knowing exactly who wanted to tokenize their stake in the Arcade City company and who didn't. Another problem that caused the split was that Lapp and David had different views on Decentralized Autonomous Organizations or DAOs. For new readers, a DAO is the idea where the community has complete control of the brand/company and it's value. With a centralized entity controlling the brand, website, emails, etc., it wouldn't truly represent the idea of a DAO owned by its users.
Current Status
With a fresh start for the new year, the Swarm Community has been rapidly moving forward. Only two weeks have gone by and they already restructured their entire online presence. From communication channels, to Facebook groups, users are even able to assist with the beta, testing out the beginning pieces of the application. If you are interested in testing it yourself, you can click here to sign up. Last week, one member decided to create "Swarm Hangouts", a weekly google hangout designed for newcomers to meet other users and ask any questions that they might be having. Another member found it would be best to have "Swarm Tours" explaining how to use Slack (a team focused communication app) which is a vital part to the Swarm Community. Since the transition, the team has been putting in a substantial amount of effort and it really shows.
Conclusion
Despite the complications that took place in the previous year, I see a bright future with Swarm City. It's beautiful seeing how many people are already involved when there is not even an application built yet. With a passionate community and enough funding for further development, I think we can accomplish our end goal of having the ecosystem that we always dreamt of. Maybe I'm being a little too optimistic? Whether or not it pans out, at least we gave it our best shot and who knows we might be on the winning team this time around. Only time will tell.
If you want to find out more about this project or get involved I will provide the links below.
Main Website
Swarm City Times (News Updates)
Facebook Group
Slack Channel
Images From:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/521010250617429352/
http://swarm.city (before it changed)
https://www.facebook.com/luxiano.valdez