Saito Update – September 2022

This post is a quick update on what is happening behind the scenes with Saito development. As previously shared, we expect to move into the Second Era in around a month and will share an updated roadmap with details as we move closer to the date. For more day-to-day updates, we encourage community members to track updates on Red Square as they are posted.

Financial:

Our project finances remain in good condition: we have funding for approximately 2.5 years even in the event of a sustained bear market and no immediate plans for the sale of any project-held tokens.

Organization:

Our tech team consists of around 5 developers in addition to Richard and David. We have two developers focused on Rust (Sanka and Tharinda), two developers focused on our javascript client and application stack (Victor and Khan), and a single developer working on the Saito Game Engine and various gaming applications (Dan). 

We have churn in non-development positions, with departures from our former Chinese marketing hire (Shirley) and project manager (Karl) driven largely by the shifting needs of the project. We are grateful to both Shirley and Karl for their contributions. We hope to keep the benefits they’ve brought us while improving execution in marketing and content development.

As part of these changes, we are interested in hiring a growth/usability lead. The ideal candidate will report to the founders. A key part of the job is the ability to identify high-value work. We hope to find a Saitozen who can focus on prioritizing and fixing non-technical problems: everything from copywriting and graphic design to marketing and reachout.

Rust:

Our Rust team is now performance-testing our WASM client, collecting practical information about block processing and chain-reorganization speeds in live network conditions. We expect to complete this work within the next month, as we need the results in order to make development plans for the Second Era.

Javascript / Application Layer:

In the last few months our javascript team has released new modules like video-chat (NAT traversal), expanded support for web3 cryptocurrencies (DOT and KSM), contributed to several new games like Dominion and CDC, and started public testing of Red Square: our new on-chain social media platform. 

Lurking behind all of this work are fundamental improvements to our underlying game engine (i.e. players can now enter and exit poker games on-the-fly), our approach to CSS design and module structure, and also the way that UI Components can be coded and displayed across modules. We consider this work a key part of our dog-fooding process. We are trying to focus improvements on areas that will lead to sustainable transaction growth while also generating UI components that individual developers can use when making their own applications on Saito.

How to Help:

If you’re looking for ways to contribute, our open source “Magic” game is stuck at the stage where we need people to produce or solicit the artwork so we can move forward with card design and programming. If anyone is interested in playing around with Dall-E or Midjourney or Stable Diffusion please get in touch. We have other games under development that could use assistance with artwork / overlay / component design.

We welcome everyone to be part of making Red Square amazing – just posting and using Red Square – while we experiment and flesh it out. Having real usage is amazingly helpful in helping us all figure out what we should focus on. Having engagement on-chain is also a good way for us to shift from using non-Saito communication channels to primarily Saito-centric channels for talking about the project and pushing it forward. There is lots to do, and no better way to learn and prioritize than watching early adopters at play.