Important Factland Updates

Hello and thanks for supporting Factland! It's been a while since we last sent out the newsletter, but we've accomplished a lot in the meantime and we wanted to share some highlights and some exciting news about our roadmap.

Note that you don't need to wait for the newsletter, you can always follow our progress on github and we'd love to see you in our discord any time, where you can join in daily discussions about new claims, share bug reports and submit feature requests. If you're new to Factland and want to learn more, we've set up a Youtube channel where you can see the team discussing the project, and we encourage you to read our white paper if you have not already done so. We want your feedback!

Above all we want Factland to be led by the community – that means you – and lay the foundations for a strong collaborative and participatory culture as we prepare to launch our DAO and issue our token later this year.

Yes, we are preparing to move our little Web 2 demo to a full-blown Web 3 dApp in the coming months, and early adopters like yourselves will share in the rewards. Now is a great time to get the word out to friends and colleagues who might share your interest in building a trust-less decentralized verification layer for the Internet.

Thank you Dfinity!

You've probably noticed some integrations with the Internet Computer this year. The IC is a top 10 blockchain that has a lot of cool features, including extremely low gas fees, and we're planning to continue to develop on the platform for now.

We owe a lot of our progress to Dfinity, which runs the IC foundation, and which provided us with a $25,000 developer grant in January. We just closed out the last milestones and received the last payment this week.

With the money we hired two part time beta testers, Julie and Eric, who've been posting claims and evidence over the past month and pressure testing the entire experience.

We hired a designer to rethink the UX and help make the experience more intuitive and delightful. Here's a sample from the explorations, aiming for a simpler, cleaner design and lighter touch interactions.

We also finally were able to compensate some of the core team, who until now have been volunteering their time to get this important work done. A huge thanks to Pam, Keith and John for their tireless contributions.

Big wins: We now store jury verdicts on chain and we have an API!

Below is a full list of what we have shipped so far this year (phew!).

• IC login (Internet Identity) Integration
• Enable primary login via IC Internet Identity
• Enable associating IC Internet Identity with other login types (e.g. email/password)
• Store user profiles on the IC
• Store and serve certified fact check and resolution information from the Internet Computer blockchain
• Make the IC the primary data source for outside consumers of Factland claim data
• Provide certified claim data via HTTPS
• Store and serve certified fact check and resolution information from the Internet Computer blockchain
• Provide certification checkable claim data via an API
• Provide certified provenance and history for fact check and resolution information

What's Next?

We are applying for a follow on $100,000 Dfinity developer grant to continue our progress on launching a Web3 dApp and DAO. Our proposal includes further integration with the IC including:

• SNS governance structure using IC tokens.
• Provably random jury selection.
• Tokenization of FACT$ > then bridge them to other chains like Polygon, Ethereum etc.
• ECDIC signatures > send messages to contract - so your keys are spread out over lots of machines and it's hard to steal them.

It's exciting to see this kind of progress after more than a year of development. We know we still have not nailed the user experience, and we need more people to use the product and send us feedback and suggestions about how to improve. If you've come this far, please log in to Factland this week and submit a claim, upload some evidence, stake on a claim, join a jury and let us know what worked for you and what didn't, and what it would take to get you to come back again and again.

We can especially use help with jurors. The last few claims to be adjudicated all came back undecided, which indicates some of these did not get the quorum required to issue a verdict.

Last we were accepted into the latest Gitcoin funding round, please consider making a small contribution, due to quadratic matching even very small donations can add up if we get enough of them.

That's all for now, thanks for being a part of Factland!