Dr Martín Raskovsky

Time for another @Xibit_App update. Last week we released the watermarking feature. Any time a high-res version of your artwork is displayed, your username and Xibit are displayed in the image. This will deter theft of artworks. Consignments are paused right now as we are in the process of separating out Xibit AWS resources from Vitruveo resources. These have been in one Amazon AWS account, but now with the VGC structure we are splitting them up. We're doing a bit of optimization as well as moving resources across deployment regions. We have done most of this in real-time, but can't do this with IPFS storage. We are working hard to get this issue resolved asap. We had hit a snag with our truLevel feature rollout as our partner for doing the KYC, Synaps went out of business just as we were wrapping up development of the feature. This required us to identify a new partner (thank you @martinraskovsky), test their API, change all the existing code for their API and revise the scoring algorithm. Our Brazil team is on top of this even though it's a huge task. The new partner is didit.me We made a strategic decision to bundle the truLevel feature with the roll-out of our Physical Artwork license. It makes a lot of sense — there are real-world assets (RWA) involved and it's good to have some basic KYC in place. We are finalizing the whole architecture of the Physical Artwork license and we'll publish it in the next couple of weeks. Our catalog integration with Prodigi has gone well and although some architectural changes had to me made from what we built with Gelato, we are pleased that we now have a multi-vendor model. The print-on-demand system has worked flawlessly and we have shipped hundreds of orders. We thank you for your patience as we finalize the (delayed) roll-out of new products in the catalog. We are doing all development of Xibit while being capital constrained. If capital were no issue, development would occur at warp speed. We are in the process of raising capital to cover two very important goals — adding development resources and marketing. Marketing is vital to our platform. Without the right promotion, Xibit won't scale up. But marketing at global scale is incredibly expensive. While we are working on raising capital, we are also working on figuring out the channels we will use. We have settled on two channels we would like to pursue: mini art ads with TV streaming services and mini art ads with airline entertainment systems. We considered movie previews also, but back-burnered the idea after good community feedback on the logistical challenges. Overall, we are making good progress. Slower than what I would like due to our capital constraints, but deliberate and with an eye to accessibility for artists not yet in web3. We are committed to our mission of sustainable income for all artists, and continue to experiment on many fronts. We are in uncharted territory and sometimes this means false starts or dead ends. But we keep moving forward relentlessly. It's all part of the journey. I'd like to thank Artists who believe in us and are on this journey with us. We recognize that the experimental, startup approach isn't to everyone's comfort level and some of you may choose to watch from the sidelines. This is totally cool. We appreciate you and in short order, with capital in hand, as we scale up and start execution on marketing, we hope you will give us another look. For love of Art 💜