Ledgerback Update: 05/28/2019

Hello and welcome to the official blog of Ledgerback, a member-driven research platform for blockchain, decentralization, and cooperativism, organized as a solidarity cooperative.

We hope you enjoyed your Memorial Day weekend if you are reading from the United States.

This update will cover last week's major events and upcoming events for this week.

Membership

You can become a Member of Ledgerback (hereinafter "Scout") by reading the Guide to Ledgerback, and completing both the Membership Application Form and the Disclosure Statement.

As Ledgerback is updating its Bylaws, we are changing to a multi-stakeholder cooperative, AKA a Solidarity Cooperative, with the following types of membership:

• Research Analyst
• Supporter
• Exchange
• Developer
• Writer
• Social Coordinator

Each type of membership comes with "regular member benefits," which include a 25 percent (25%) discount on all Ledgerback products and services, and a $10.00 credit for network transaction fees (i.e., miner's fee).

Last Week

Two major events occurred last week.

First, we celebrated the cryptocurrency holiday, BitcoinPizzaDay, on May 22, 2019.

Second, Ledgerback had its one-year anniversary on May 23, 2019. A short summary for the year shall be provided in this update.

BitcoinPizzaDay

Bitcoin Pizza Day is a cryptocurrency holiday commemorating the first real-world Bitcoin transaction, which was for a pizza.

We celebrated Bitcoin Pizza Day at Ledgerback by offering free pizza to guests who came to our Downtown Las Vegas location.

Ledgerback One-year Anniversary

Ledgerback celebrated its one-year anniversary since we started on May 23, 2019.

From all of us at Ledgerback, we are proud of what we have accomplished at the Cooperative and are hoping to grow Ledgerback even more in our second year.

As part of our anniversary, we are also rpoviding a short review of our first year, including our accomplishments and letdowns.

For our first year, we were able to accomplish many of our preconceived expectations, but fell short on some of them along the way.

We are immensely proud and glad that we were able to accomplish the following in our first year:

• Complete a Blockchain Utility Research Report (on the Music Industry)
• Develop and cement our brand
• Learn and practice the Cooperative organizational model
• Write multiple articles covering the blockchain industry
• Complete the first issue of Amalgam
• Engage with new collaborators who are interested in working with us
• Promote other Nevada-based blockchain projects
• Promote Ledgerback in Las Vegas, Nevada
• Open the Greenback Exchange, the first in-person digital assets market in Nevada
• File for federal trademark registration of "Ledgerback" and our Logo
• Attended University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) Blockchain Day

However, we did have the following letdowns in the past year:

• Too many in-house projects failed because of lack of time and resources, or not enough time to dedicate specifically to a project.
• Not launching the research platform by the end of the first year
• Lack of time and resources to dedicate to the mesh network project (sorry Althea, we'll get to when we have more t- ime)
• Not attending enough in-person meetups to discuss our research and the blockchain industry in general with the general public in Las Vegas, Nevada
• Inability to engage members in more active participation
• Not exploring enough funding measures.
• Inexperience with the Cooperative model.
• Not enough funding dedicated to advertising and marketing
• Lack of active member participation
• Inexperience with managing and funding a startup.
• Lack of clear message about our philosophy, mission, and goals

We plan to make up for our failings in the first year by setting up a recourse/remedial plan to address our failings, and what other ways exist so that we can work on improving Ledgerback.

Coming Week

For this coming week, we are planning to work on renewing Ledgerback for one more year, continuing our planned research, revising our Bylaws and Membership Agreement, and promoting Ledgerback.

Renewing Ledgerback

As a Cooperative Assocation, we are required to annually file certain documents with the Nevada Secretary of State to remain valid and to continue on conducting business.

We plan to renew Ledgerback for one more year and shall be filing the necessary documentation.

After renewing Ledgerback, we plan to officially update and pass the Bylaws and Membership Agreement.

Planned Research

For this week, we shall focus on Automated Music Licensing and Project Historia.

Automated Music Licensing

As of this writing, we are about halfway on making the first draft of the research report.

We have added to add new sub-sections to the "legal frameworks" section of the report, which have delayed the first draft, but are necessary to have a clear understanding of the legal complexity that comes along with utilizing smart contracts to create music licenses.

The legal framework sub-sections left to be completed are American Contract law, European Union (EU) contract law, and EU Copyright law.

Concerning the "literature review" section, we believe we have enough to complete the section for the first draft. The literature review covers prior research discussing blockchain applications in copyright law and the music industry.

The literature review is currently the bulk of the research report, and rightfully so, as there are many amazing research papers on this subject and to not mention them would be a great disservice to anyone who wants to implement a smart-contract-based licensing model.

The next section from there is the "blockchain" section which provides an introduction to blockchain, smart contracts, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), oracles, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), Web3 framework, and the Interplanetary file system (IPFS) (if not mentioned in the literature review section).

If you believe there is any research we should examine , please send us an email at [email protected] or leave a reply.

Project Historia

We are currently working on our sample analysis using the multi-stakehodler analytic framework.

We designed the framework to be generally applicable to any blockchain community, with certain factors relevant or irrelevant depending on the project. We wanted to make the framework as general as possible so that anyone familiar or unfamiliar with the blockchain industry could utilize the framework to understand a blockchain community's ecosystem.

Hopefully, we can have the sample analysis completed by the end of next month.

Project Historia also includes a "literature review" section, but currently we only have one article reviewed.

If you believe there is any research we should examine , please send us an email at [email protected] or leave a reply.

Raising Funds

As part of our efforts to make up for the failings of our first year, we plan to increase our efforts on fund raising and increasing sales.

In so doing, we are going to work harder on creating investment materials such as a pitch deck on Ledgerback how it can meet its goal of increasing involvement in the blockchain industry through research and education.

Additionally, we shall spend more time advertising and marketing our products and services. The unfortunate case in the first year is that we spent more time on conducting research than expected, thereby leaving us little to no time to advertise the research we conducted and the research services we provide.

In the second year, we plan to counteract this by increasing our focus on advertising and marketing our products and services, and showing why becoming a member of Ledgerback is a great choice for receiving research and education about the blockchain industry.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading our Weekly Update and make sure to follow us to stay up-to-date on Ledgerback.

You can find our recent articles by visiting our Medium page.