[Shipped] Power Incognito with 300 more new nodes

[annie]

What privacy problem are you solving?

The Incognito network has been live for around 6 months and we have over 1000 validators so far. The more validators the network has, the more secure the network will become and the more well-known Incognito will be. That’s why my team and I are looking to acquire more validators. By powering the privacy network, they will earn rewards in PRV and other transacted currencies in return.

What is the solution?

There are currently 3 ways to become a validator:

• host a Node Virtual
• buy a Node device
• join Node Pool: hub of staking pools

Here is a simple comparison:

	Node Virtual	Node	Node Pool
ROI	~75%	18-75%	~50%
Level of expertise	***	**	*
Initial investment	$20-40/mo	$399	Any amount of PRV

The plan is to promote the whole Node category: Node Pool as an entry level offering because it is the most flexible way to begin with, Node as a default offering because it’s both easy and efficient and Node Virtual as advanced offering because it requires familiarity with code.

Which solutions do people resort to because this doesn’t exist yet?

People are currently staking crypto at a super low annual rate (Tezos 5%, Cosmos 10%, Tron 4.32%, etc…), or they need to go through a complicated setup to run their own node. In general, the staking experience at Incognito, whether via Virtual Node, Node, or Node Pool, is simpler and more profitable.

This chart below simply explains why the Incognito Node is preferable to other options.

• Zcash, Monero miners: because they already care about privacy. Incognito is more user-friendly.
• Helium, Coinmine owners: because they are already interested in buying crypto hardware devices, and Incognito arguably solves a more meaningful problem.

Who are you?

The project will be implemented by me (@annie), @Ducky from growth team and @elvis.p , @jayce-incognito from the wallet core team.

• @Annie - a member of growth team. I’ve been with the project since the beginning supporting validators.

• @Ducky - a member of the Growth team. For the past 3 months, she has been working on increasing Incognito exposure.

• @elvis.p has over 10 years of experience as a senior software engineer. He’s been with the project since the beginning, leading the backend team. He built trusted bridges like BTC, ETH/ERC20, TOMO, BNB/BEP2, ZIL, and XMR. His team will add Ontology, Ripple, NEO, Cosmos, EOS, and more, soon.

• @jayce-incognito has over 2 years of experience as a software engineer. He is now the front end engineer responsible for Incognito Wallet.

Why do you care?

We want to open up access to as many people as possible. Allowing users with any amount of PRV and any level of technical knowledge to participate results in more privacy supporters, more nodes, a more decentralized network, and a stronger privacy movement. And it gives these validators a decent ROI without needing to go through all the hassle of a staking experience elsewhere.

What’s your plan? What’s your schedule?

Goal: 300 more Nodes total across Node Pool, Node Virtual, Node.
Node Virtual: 100
Node: 100
Node Pool: 100

Current Stats:
Node Virtual: 848
Node: 327
Node Pool: 0

Ship Date	Deliverable
April 30th	200 Node Virtual & Node Pool online, 100 Node sold

Plan:

• Launch Node Pool: including Incognito, Constant & JS Pool
• Launch new UX for Node purchase & improve Node set up experience
• Fine tune Node product page
• Go after Monero users: direct message 1-1 with Monero users, seeding in Monero group
• Push Node Virtual communities with tutorials, updates,… & upsell Node (tool: database reduction -> Node lifespan increase)

What’s your budget?

Resource	Cost	Quantity	Monthly Cost
Project Lead	2000 PRV	1	2000 PRV
Digital Marketer	1000 PRV	1	1000 PRV
Backend Engineer	2000 PRV	1	2000 PRV
Frontend Engineer	1000 PRV	1	1000 PRV
Marketing Budget (est)	4000 PRV	1	4000 PRV
TOTAL (x 1 months)			10000 PRV

Is there an existing conversation around this idea?

This is the expanded proposal from this one.

Is there anything else you would like the community to know?

If you have any feedback, suggestion or idea to help us, feel free to join us, or leave a comment. I’m all ears!

[ning]

cool annie. you got 5/5 votes – this is an essential metric and the plan seems sensible. moving this to funded!

[annie]

Update for the past week:

Node sold: 14
Node virtual set up: 38
Node Pool: will be launching on April 18th

Total: 52

[ning]

Hey @annie, guessing you mean April 18 for staking pool, not Feb 18?

Looking forward to it!

[annie]

@ning

Hey @annie, guessing you mean April 18 for staking pool, not Feb 18?

Thanks a lot for pointing it out. I’ve made my edit. I’m gonna blame the whole Covid-9 and work-from-home thing for losing me my sense of date and time .

But here’s a more detailed update:

For the past week Apr 5 - Apr 12, we have been working on Node IoT promotion and Node Pool development.

The Node promotion was going pretty OK, and I figured something interesting about our some of our users were actually waiting for Node Tree to come out instead of buying a Node now. My smart team member suggested me a “trade-in program” like spring for a node now and get earning if they knew they could swap it out later for More Nodes! I’d love to hear what the community thinks about this.

Regarding Node Pool development, we’ve been talking with Constant and Jsever about integrating them to our staking feature on app, which makes it more convenient for all of our users, free choice of staking wherever they’d love to do, right from the app.
If anyone of you who is running a staking pool or would like to recommend one, please do let us know. Node Pool is still on track to go live on Apr 18th.

That’s it. Have a nice week, everyone and stay safe!

[Mike_Wagner]

@annie

My smart team member suggested me a “trade-in program” like spring for a node now and get earning if they knew they could swap it out later for More Nodes! I’d love to hear what the community thinks about this.

Yes, please!

[duy]

@annie adding 52 new validators to the network within last week is great progress. congrats!

for this week, i’m curious to know more about these two things. can you share more with the community?

growth – what’s your plan for acquiring new nodes this week?

product – you mentioned in this proposal that the node team will launch 4 new features this month:

1. node pool
2. node purchase
3. node setup experience
4. node product page

do you have target ship dates for these 4 features? it would be helpful to share the ui/ux screens or just mockups of these new features, so we can provide early feedback to the team before they go into development.

[annie]

thanks for your questions.

as for growth team, the plan is to approach 1-1 with users from other privacy projects to introduce about Incognito as well as get more insights from them.

for the product side, the target ship day is as follows:

1. node pool - Apr 18th
2. node purchase - Apr 17th
3. node setup experience - tbd
4. node product page - today Apr 15th

I’ve attached some screens from the node pool below

Node staking screen (already staked -> stake more)

Node staking screen (1st time stake)

Node withdrawal screen

[annie]

Hey, it’s been a week. Some updates on last week progress:

• Node Pool will go live tomorrow Sat Apr 18th. However the official launch will go on Monday to avoid weekends.
• Node sold: 2
• Node virtual: 35
  Total: 37
• Direct approach 1-1 with Monero users quite tricky and not gaining much insights from them.

For next week, we’ll focus on launching Node Pool, promote other community run staking services. Below are some activities for the launch, we hope to receive more feedbacks:

• email blast out
• ads targeting staking communities
• set homepage banner to Node Pool site
• notification shoot out
• cross marketing with Constant and JServers

[aaron]

I’m stoked for the Node Pool. Great progress all in all!

I’m curious, what do you think is causing Monero users to be resistant? Or is something else tricky about it?

[klepidas7]

@annie

However the official launch will go on Monday to avoid weekends.

waiting for this like crazy

@annie Staking Pool Pays every 30 minutes like constant service ?

[zes333]

@elvis.p @jayce-incognito @annie
This is very cool!

[andrey]

Hy Annie the Staking pool looks awesome! I think it can attract many more users.

Some interesting feedbacks I got while talking with users you may also find useful:

1. For the staking some users prefer to hold private keys instead of using centralized staking services
2. I think you should show this Node Earnings Statistics - Weekly Update 5/16/20 to Stakingrewards founder to increase our staking parameters on their website. It could bring more attention to the Nodes.
3. Today @MackTjan mentioned that he was considered which device to choose between Helium and pNode. I suggest you to chat with him and ask why he was chose node instead of helium.

[klepidas7]

@annie @Peter @Jamie got the new update of the app and show me that the APR for staking pool is 57%. Is it correct ?

[Jamie]

It seems it was increased recently.

[chi]

hi, congrats on the staking pool launch. It seems like you’re gaining good traction. I just have several comments on your progress:

1. possibly wrong TA for physical nodes: as the number of virtual nodes set up is consistently higher than physical nodes sold over the past 2 weeks, it seems like we either have problems with the current target audience/content of physical nodes. so you might want to revisit those before doing everything else. If we market to the wrong people, it would be really hard to take off.
2. the number of nodes sold drop significantly last week compared to that the week before. Have you figured out why?
3. When looking at the Node Pool page, the page seems to talk to people who already have PRV (correct me if I’m wrong). I couldn’t find the number of PRV holders, so I would assume it’s the total number of validators (buy physical nodes and virtual nodes) which is around 1200. If it’s the case, you might either want to revisit your Node Pool’s TA/content/USP or recheck the KPI. Convert 8% of the total pool in 10 days is a major task.
4. it seems to me the USP of Node Pools is not strong (might be because I’m not within the target audience group). You might want to check with people who have engaged with the page. TA and messages are the most important, other activities are just tools and tactics.

[annie]

That was such thoughtful feedback. I’ve been giving it much thought and I will get back to you in 1-2 days.

About last week’s update, product-wise, we launched the Node Pool on Monday and below is the result:

Total PRV staked: 240,115.38 PRV
Total users: 288

That is equivalent to around 137 new nodes added to the network. Besides the Incognito Node Pool, JServers also seemed to get some good traction, too.

The product team is still working on streamlining the UI, UX for Node Pool this week.

[duy]

feedback on growth plan this week

@annie i think @chi made a lot of valid points above. i’ll piggyback on her feedback.

1. node pool. i assume that most of the node pool users are existing prv holders. you’ve probably exhausted this list of users this past week already. what’s your plan on acquiring new users for pool this week?

2. node device. i’m on the same page with chi, i think you still need to corner the target audience here and find “product-market fit”. good news is that you are not starting from scratch – you already have hundreds of node device users. i would suggest starting a conversation with your users to understand their persona and see if you can scale it.

just another general feedback on growth, it would be more helpful to show progress with charts rather than a single number (240k prv). it could be day-over-day or week-over-week for at least 4-8 weeks so we can see the progress over time. charts over the most recent period of time are helpful when it comes to understanding how the growth team is performing.

feedback on product plan this week

The product team is still working on streamlining the UI, UX for Node Pool this week.

can you share more on what will be worked on this week? it’s hard to give feedback without understanding will be built. maybe adding screenshots, feature lists, revised user flows, etc – anything that could be helpful for the community to review.

[annie]

Hi, it’s been a busy month and I’m more than glad to update that we’ve hit our goal. (thank you everyone)

From Apr 1st to May 1st we have acquired:

Node Virtual: 143
Node: 27
Node Pool: 157

The chart is as follows:

The proportion is quite not as we expected at the beginning.

@annie

Node Virtual: 100
Node: 100
Node Pool: 100

Although we hit our goals, we haven’t found a product-market fit for Node yet (reflecting in the number of nodes sold). The reason may be as @chi 's comment: wrong current TA. We’ll learn from this and make this a priority for May.

Again, thank you everyone for a hardworking month. We’ll have another proposal for May coming and I’ll post the link here for an easy follow up.

[ning]

thanks for your hard work @annie, @ducky, @elvis.p, @jayce-incognito! well done for april. this proposal received 4/5 votes - the feedback being what you mentioned previously - the need to find product market fit for the Node device, so node sales can grow organically.

the full amount of funding has been released.

this initiative continues here:

Acquire 400 more Nodes, hit 1800 validators in total

1. What privacy problem are you solving? We are looking to acquire more validators for Incognito network to make the network more secure and to gain more awareness for Incognito in general. 2. What is the solution? The solution is to promote the whole Node category, which includes: Node Virtual Node (device) Node Pool Here is a simple comparison: Node Virtual Node Node Pool ROI ~122% ~86% ~57% Level of expertise *** ** * Initial investment $20-40/mo $399 Any amount of PRV N…

so this one will be moved to the archive. have a good May!