Mars in retrograde, and new business plans

Good times, bear times

It’s fair to say that some of the projects we’ve been involved with had a challenging 2023.

After a year of incubation and development, the Howl project was launched in Spring, but failed to get wider traction and gradually wound down over the following months.

Having been elected to Juno’s Core-1 steering group, our CTO the-frey helped with the restructuring of developer commitments, and steering the ship until the Juno constitution and charter could be finalized. That complete, they’ve now stepped down from any direct involvement in the Juno chain. Elsewhere they’ve started a PhD, primarily focussed on privacy-preserving digital cash and the complexities of extending those solutions into permissionless ecosystems (like Cosmos).

While the Stargaze team goes from strength to strength, other projects have stalled somewhat. Mars remains unprofitable for Needlecast, and there isn’t much active development that we can see.

So, as a result, we are going to spin down our Mars validator at the end of February 2024. Please unbond before then.

Moving forward, and new focus

In the past, we’ve been guilty of doing too many things at once. There was a time when as a business we were doing all of the following:

• Traditional consulting
• Core blockchain development
• Building our own products/protocols
• Validation
• Additional infrastructure services
• Documentation and devrel support

That’s clearly too many things for a small team such as ours.

Moving forward, our goal is to be more picky and to spread ourselves less thin.

Unless on a contract/project basis, we are unlikely to bring new smart contract projects to market, and will not be doing core blockchain development.

Instead, we will be focussing on three things:

• Validation operations: with a goal of validating a maximum of 5 hand-picked, high-quality networks
  • in line with research that sits in our org, our bets will be heavily on networks that use newer consensus mechanisms (e.g. narwhal), and/or zero-knowledge proofs
• Commercialization of company-sponsored research carried out by the-frey
• Traditional consulting, and web3 consulting to a “traditional” fintech audience

This seems more sustainable to manage, and also mutually supporting. In addition, it will hopefully keep our revenue base as a company diversified away from simply success or failure on big bets (incubating projects) or validator income (which is impossible to predict as the basis for business growth).

As always, if you have a business use-case or commercial partnership that you think we might be able to help realize, then get in touch.