Zesty has been building and we have new updates for September 2022! This article summarizes the things discussed during the community call.
Beacon Updates
The Zesty SDK is seeing new ATH in usage at 80k++ visits a week. Usage is mostly dominated in the weekend. We note that there is likely some inaccuracy in the numbers seen and that the actual numbers is much higher. This is due to the rate throttling in the IPFS endpoints that we use at the moment (issue here).
We’re have introduced Filebase as an additional endpoint to mitigate the rate throttling from public endpoints (fix here). As we anticipate increased loads towards the holidays, we will look into further redundancy mechanism to increase the availability of the SDK.
The number of unique users on the SDK (measured through unique IPs) are also increasing, an increase of 3.81% since the last 30-day window. There will likely be a jump towards the Christmas holidays as more headsets enter the market. Majority of the device loads on the SDK still come from headsets with Quest 2 being the largest device segment.
Robot Rally and SDK Updates
To help improve the tooling on the SDK at Zesty, the team has built out Robot Rally which is a social WebXR shooter game. In the past month, new features like a single player mode and more bug fixes were introduced. The game is under review and will be rolled out on the Meta Browser’s New Tab Page.
The content built on Robot Rally helps power development on the Zesty SDK. We envision the SDK to provide more creator tools beyond its current functionality. One area the team is looking into is in creating interactive GLTFs for the SDK allow people to place things beyond the billboards and portals already available.
We have received request for users who would like to use the Beacons associated with the SDK but not want to create the NFT Billboard/Portal. Some users may not need the monetization but want to track data to understand activations better. We will be looking into this and creating better tools around this.
Market Updates
The ad market is seeing continued usage and gradual recovery. At the moment, the core team is helping out build partnerships with Metaviu and Publicis who could help increase usage of the market.
The Zesty team is in discussions with Unlock protocol and Superfluid to help design the next version of the market to help increase liquidity and flexibility of auction mechanism as the current auction on-chain auction mechanism is troublesome for most advertisers and publishers. We envision the subsequent version to rely on the Beacon data and have auctions be settled off-chain. The on-chain contracts would help with settlements and escrow, which can unlock additional financial use cases with loan markets to improve capital efficiency.
New Partnerships and Integrations
The Zesty team made a number of partnerships and integrations in September. New SDK integrations with Hyperfy and Webaverse have been introduced allowing creators in those platforms to index their spaces to get discovered and monetize their creations. We are looking to separate out the beacon tracking out of the NFTs so users can begin to use the beacons to track user activations instead of mainly clicks, views, and session length.
Zesty has also adopted Ankr Protocol as the default RPC provider instead of Alchemy as it is currently much cheaper compared to paid centralized providers. Ankr Protocol provides more decentralized nodes to choose from reducing the likelihood of RPC failures which had led to weird quirks while using applications at Zesty.
We are still in the midst of future partnerships and integrations with, Metaviu, ImmersedVR, Unlock Protocol, Superfluid, and some additional NDA stuff for the time being. More will be announced at a later date as things progresses.
Community Outreach
The Zesty team had been spending some time in September doing community outreach to a number of events. Some notable talks were, WebXR Talk with Bytedance where we talked about developing applications in WebXR, WebXR Brand Summit Talk, and a Talk with ImmersedVR where we discussed more on other modes of monetization and interactivity in the Metaverse, the LedgerFest Metaverse Panel where we jammed on ideas about what would the Metaverse be like in 2030.
We hope to be part of more community events so that we can share more unique insights as we build tooling and infrastructure for creators building spatial experiences and games.
That’s it for now, see you next month!
Zesty Market Discord: https://discord.gg/RCQqgHzaK8
Zesty Market Twitter: https://twitter.com/zestymarket/
Zesty XYZ Twitter: https://twitter.com/zestyxyz/
Robot Rally Discord: https://discord.gg/GnFEJMGBBB
