Callisto Network development statement

Our partner, Callisto Enterprise seized callisto.network/ web page and @CallistoSupport twitter account and announced a launch of their new ICO called "Callisto Evolution" https://callisto.network/callisto-evolution/

Fearing that there can be a chain split community started to wonder if I'm going to support Callisto Network in case Enterprise will discontinue it's engagement with this project. Short answer: "Yes, I would like to".

Here is my response.

Realistic overview

As it is written in the EthereumCommonwealth roadmap I've recently started a new project Dex223 https://github.com/EthereumCommonwealth/Roadmap/issues/69. It is currently in a pre-launch stage which is the most time-consuming and energy-consuming for me. As the result, I would not like to singlehandedly drive the development of Callisto Network during Q1-Q2 2024. I can participate more actively starting from Q3 2024 I think.

There are few things that I would like to sort out in Callisto however.

Transparency & media resources. Callisto Enterprise took over the web page and twitter. Callisto Enterprise is not Callisto Network.
Treasury & community involvement. I would like to finalize one of the Treasury CLOIPs (such as this one https://github.com/EthereumCommonwealth/CLOIP/issues/10). There are active community members in Callisto and there are some projects like 2bears DEX, VipWarz (and these girl NFTs...) and in my opinion there are developers in the community who could actually take a share of Treasury since Callisto Enterprise resigned from their share. I would be in favor of developing a smart-contract where community members would govern part of the Treasury - we could deposit the funds manually at the beginning but in the next hardfork this contract could be paid on protocol level if it will prove to be robust enough.
Bootnodes, servers, explorer, all that stuff. This needs to be negotiated with Callisto Enterprise and if they are willing to leave Callisto Network - then we need to ensure a smooth transition. Payments are still an issue, with the current amount of funds in Treasury we will need to cut the expenses significantly. It seems Callisto Enterprise doesn't have funds to pay for the infrastructure either so we are in the same boat.
Marketing. Alright, this is a hot topic. I'm not the best marketer in the world, but recently I had some experience with Dex223 so let's dive deeper into it.

Marketing

Why is marketing of Dex223 different than CLO marketing? - Because on Dex223 the marketing was handled by EOS Support while on CLO it was handled by Tonton. I wouldn't blame Tonton here, but I do think that the strategy that we chose was wrong. And if you didn't noticed it... yeah, there was a marketing strategy.

Callisto Enterprise's marketing strategy: In a retrospective we can sum it up as "focus on our own existing community, shill CLO to VCs and big investors" and probably extract value from the community to build stuff. As you can see, the biggest investors are now suing Callisto Enterprise founders so we kinda conclude that this strategy failed. It was not obvious for me that it will end up like this for quite long time. Initially the idea was "Ok, if this guys from Callisto Enterprise run their own fund, they know how to deal with VCs and they can attract funding - let's assume they know what they're doing".

Dexaran's perspective on marketing strategy: We need to expand. The network effect of our existing community is not enough on its own to bring new users/developers to the project. The developers would not even know that CLO exist if we will not explicitly tell them. For quite long time I was the only member of both Callisto teams who worked outside of the CLO community and I was repeatedly trying to pull Tonton and other members of the teams to engage with other projects. I was working with Ethereum for quite long time and here is one example of me trying to pull the Callisto team members in the interaction https://github.com/ethcatherders/EIPIP/issues/292

As you can see in my Dex223 ICO completion report I did some analysis of what strategies bring the best effect for money invested: https://dexaran820.medium.com/dex223-pre-sale-round-2-completion-report-14f09ab079cc

With the amount of funds in Treasury AMAs would be the most obvious choice.

AMAs

Most AMAs cost $50 - $400. People engaged in AMAs as well as interviewers normally ask general questions like: "What steps do you make to solve XYZ?" where XYZ could be literally anything ranging from global warmth and famine in Africa to beating your competitors in any aspects. You normally answer: "Your question is not anyhow related to our project, but we have X1Y1Z1".

After that the listeners think "This is amazing!!!" (no mater what you actually said) and join your project. Especially when you promise you have some airdrops or rewards or features that they can try for free. Some of them can even buy your tokens. Just because they heard of you and not the other 12000 fancy coins on the market.

You don't even need to be Dexaran to be doing this.

Vision

Initially Callisto was not meant to be a superior platform to Ethereum. We were just trying to address some problems that Ethereum has while staying compatible with them. Developing protocol-level modifications is extremely costly and it was clear from the very beginning that it is not the best choice to even engage in this competition with the bigger project like ETH.

Ethereum does have some problems that we can potentially address without re-writing the protocol or breaking compatibility.

Security. ERC-20 tokens resulted in a loss of >$100M worth of tokens and Ethereum doesn't want to solve it. We can. Also our security department was quite efficient and its structure can be re-used.
While starting Dex223 I realized that there is no pre-launching DAPP aggregator. If you are willing to build your initial audience from scratch as a DAPP developer - there is no Discord server, no media and no service that you can join and write about your project for free. The cheapest option is paying $4000 to CryptoRank (which is worth their money, but this is not an option for beginner developers).
Gas fees. We are not the only chain with low gas fees in the world, but we do have a working chain unlike Solana.

Callisto's most valuable assets are (1) its history which was full of high-quality crypto drama and (2) it's community. We do have some community, we do have some working DAPPs, we do have something to offer to newcomers. I don't want to sound like I'm saying "I'll delegate everything to the community and quit" - to make my motivation clear I've built Callisto Network from the ground up, I invested a lot of time and efforts in this project, I don't like it's current state nor I'm satisfied with the outcomes but I don't want it all to go to a waste.

The best things we can do in the current situation are:

Take a similar role of an L2 or "an alternative chain you can deploy your DAPP to almost for free".
Redefine the image of Callisto to answer the question "Why should I join this?" to potential DAPP developers. It should be clear from the very first look at any CLO media or web page. For DAPP devs: (1) you can get promotion for free, (2) you can deploy & test almost for free, (3) you can get your first users here.
Engage AMAs. Tell other crypto communities that CLO is here and even if they won't buy it - they can at least try the DAPPs and browse the 6-year-long history of a true crypto project. And we gonna accuse Ethereum Foundation of a $100M problem in the near future! So you have a chance to follow a crypto scandal in a real time.

Preventing the question "Dex, why don't you want to develop some new protocol that will have 10000x higher TPS than TRX and 10000x better EVM than Ethereum" - if anyone has few millions of dollars that he/she is willing to donate for the development of such a cool feature then let's discuss. Otherwise let's work with what we really have.

Preventing the question "Will it actually work?" - we have a hacker defining a marketing plan. What can go wrong?

Roadmap

This is not a roadmap! This is just my point of view as well as my thoughts about the chain and it's potential development directions. We will think about a roadmap once the situation with Callisto "Evolution" is clarified.

EthereumCommonwealth / Roadmap