A Review Of 2021 For The X DAO And The Next Stage Of Our Evolution

6 min readJan 8, 2022

The crypto market has changed drastically over the course of the last year, with no force felt greater than that of NFT’s as the public adopted them.

Over the course of this year the market has changed drastically and so has the X DAO (formerly the X53732 DAO at the beginning of this year). Nft’s became the second mainstream usecase for blockchain technology as the world began to understand and use them. It was an amazing time for artists of all kinds as they realized they had the opportunity to add greater value and retain greater control over their digital artwork. NFT hype creates an environment where it doesn’t matter how much money you started with, you could make some art, play a game, etc. and start earning tokens worth enough to pay for your living costs. Other developments only aided the adoption and growth of the ecosystem:

Cheaper competitors to Ethereum like Fantom, Luna, and Avalanche
Metamask as a crosschain wallet
Standardized bridges like Anyswap
Major exchanges like Binance and Coinbase expanding their territorial reach and number of tokens listed
Meme Tokens
Influencer Tokens
Corporate NFT’s
Layer 2 Adoption such as Polygon and LTO Network
Launchpads like Coinlist and Polkastarter

As we went through the year these developments influenced how the X DAO evolved:

Q1 2021

January Roadmap:

In January to start out the year we created our social media channels, including Telegram, Twitter, Etc., At this time there were 2 telegram channels (one for the X foundation and one for the X53732 DAO) and it was imagined that the DAO would only be a small part of the overall project. Little did we know then that the SEC would publicly attack the centralization of “Defi” governance, and we would realize the need for it to be at the forefront of the X currency and Communities social media app’s development. Replicating modern democracies with a multi-party structure was not enough, we would need to fully decentralize the operations with individual builders/creators completing work, earning reputation, and rating each others skillsets on a open job marketplace.

In February and March the company started operations with us raising money and posting the initial job postings for marketing director and lead developer. Due to the cost of a good developer at this time relative to our crypto raise we decided it made more sense to freelance in the beginning. This became especially interesting when we began designing the Agency since we could poach the freelancers we were working with from their platforms to the Agency once it was built. In an ideal world this would provide a natural initial developer/artist base familiar with both our product and freelancing in general.

In Q2 we fully transitioned to “The X DAO” and developed a new roadmap for the future with our new ideas for the Agency and how that would eventually lead to the communities social media app distributing our free X currency. We also experienced our first round of large setbacks, starting with the banks in the United Kingdom being unwilling to work with cryptocurrency companies and closing our accounts. Realizing the potential of NFTs we planned on creating an NFT market and using them to educate people about crypto ideals in an easy to understand and interesting manner.

Q3 2021

Jonathan officially joins the team and our initial task offering begins, we design our new website for thexdao.org, and start designing the lore/characters for the storyline. This was also when we released our old roadmap:

We went through 7 different artists creating characters for us before we decided on 2 we would work with long term and agreeing on that with them. Farming started on Cyberswap with only a few hiccups, however we now envision the future for Cyberswap to be different to its original intentions. Our projects focus is on Governance/Social Media App/X Currency and not on creating the best decentralized exchange.

In this way we see the main future of Cyberswap being a place to facilitate the XDAO token contract controls which convert XDAO to HTZ. This also acts as a place where DEX aggregators will get the best liquidity on HTZ pairs allowing for farming income even for users more interested in HTZ to purchase NFTs/use the Agency. In the future the landscape of crypto will probably mature such that each Defi project building out their own set of features will be combined with the best privacy tech, governance system, trading model, UI etc. being used in a single open source mainstream dapp. Our contribution to that future will be the governance development, an area sorely lacking but necessary if crypto is to exist long term.

We hired a developer to work on our NFT market who would lead us on with an almost functioning ui and code, then never finished it to make it function and look decent. Eventually this became too long but the damage to our DAO had already been done, however with the newest work from our developers the DAO can begin to repair itself.

Q4 2021

In Q4 we worked on completing the script for the storyline which meant fleshing out the characters and the lore fully. Our intentions for the storyline was that it have 3 threads interwoven and interconnected during different comics/animated episodes. This understandably was going to take a lot longer than Q4 to finish writing so we opted to create a quick prequel storyline instead in the meantime. Lastly to finish out the year we animated website animations, made deals with influencers, added vaults, made business cards for events, created cobranded NFTs for future partnerships, developed a NFT trading card game for FantomDC and worked on getting it animated. We also worked on hiring a new permanent dev team of 2 with a possible third starting in January and got back to work on the NFT market with our pre-alpha now complete. Simultaneously we started work on the XDAO token in order to get it ready its distribution at the end of the ITO.