Impressions from the Pre-Launch Community Zurich
Before we start for real, it is worth getting real user feedback on the overall user experience of Encointer. This post will summarize our field test experiences so far.
We chose Supercomputing Systems offices as a testing ground with over 100 potential testers and two well-frequented kitchens with consumables. So we created the EdisonPaula community with the ⵐEDI currency. The EDI can currently be used to pay for coffee and beer. Income issuance ceremonies take place every Tuesday at lunchtime.
An Encointer community needs ~10 bootstrappers and a few meetup locations. We chose 10 people who are motivated to attend ceremonies regularly and help educating others about Encointer. 3 meetup locations were defined within the office area of SCS
We chose to set the income to 22ⵐ EDI per week with a demurrage halving time of one week. This certainly is extreme demurrage that will burn half of your 22ⵐ during one week if you don’t spend it. The real communities may want to choose a less extreme demurrage, but it is worth getting feedback on the experience of seeing your balance decline constantly.
Experiences and Learnings
Unsurprisingly, mobile app UX is essential. All steps must be very easy, intuitive and well-explained. Performance of the app seems ok for our users, also the payment process didn’t cause any questions with our testnet blocktime of 6s.
Ceremony meetups were successful and mostly painless. All meetups were able to be concluded in less than 10 minutes for a max. of 10 participants. We realized that QR code scanner speed and robustness is currently the bottleneck and 3 out of 21 participants were deprived of their income because either they could not scan someone or were not scanned by someone because of shattered screens or bad cameras. We will improve the scanner and relax the protocol rules slightly to be more tolerant of real-world effects.
Next Steps
Before we start our very first real community leu.zuerich, we’ll have to upgrade our Kusama parachain to full functionality towards end of March. We already have identified the first few businesses who will accept ⵐLEU as payment 1:1 to the national currency CHF for their products or services. Moreover, we have started talks with potential bootstrappers who build the trusted setup of the LEU community. They should be the first ambassadors of the ⵐLEU community currency.
