Good evening! Today we want to give you a little update on why we aren't planning to reset the chain again, how our mainnet and incentives thinking has evolved, and the ways you can get involve with Pylons as we start to open up to the mainstream.

In the last few weeks we've seen a lot of progress as we transitioned our systems into more of a permanent form, with real money transactions starting to flow as we enabled buying art using native in-app purchasing. We realized relatively quickly that although we had planned to reset the chain after an incentivized phase, people were attached to what they had collected, and in many cases paid fiat money for, and it would be better to maintain continuity.

Instead, we will be handling issues between now and our official mainnet point with upgrade handlers, the first of which will be cleaning up the revenue distribution and payment tokens to reflect how we want them to look in reality (test tokens will be deleted, and only tokens purchased with real money will remain). This means that items purchased since our last chain reset will persist through mainnet.

It also means that our incentive programs don't need to end when we reach mainnet. We've had a few incentivized drops, and there will be more, but in the next few weeks we will open up a bug bounty, as well as an art challenge for creators. We will also have developer challenges when our SDK is polished enough to make our CEO smile. [I am very frowny about code I don't like]

If you want to get ready for the bug bounty, or just check in on our progress towards our next chain upgrade, you can look at our mainnet milestone breakdown here. If you want to participate in the art creation challenge, start minting on Easel on Android or iOS and sharing art with your community. We are also excited to be able to share more about our crowdfunding very soon!

In the meantime, have a great week, everyone.

Pylonians, Greetings & Salutations!

I am Jordan Keeling, marketing guru here at Pylons. If you’ve been following us recently, you’ve most likely seen our Community Feedback Survey that went out not too long ago. The replies we received were amazing and we would like to once again say thank you to everyone who shared their thoughts with us.

Our team has been hard at work behind the scenes not only preparing all systems for launch but also adding some of our most requested features, such as: GIF Support (which you can see below), Transaction History, Sale Notifications, Purchase Flow Optimizations, Additional Languages - the list goes on! Seriously, there’s a lot in our newest version rolling out to the app stores. It’s truly a major moment for us and gets us another step closer to mainnet, which is shaping up to be something epic! We (most likely) have one more weekly update left before kickoff!

It’s been truly phenomenal to watch the growth of Pylons through these updates and this is just the beginning! Remember, we’re actively seeking your feedback and suggestions to make Pylons the best it can be! We have some more treats up our sleeves for the future, so join us on Discord (discord.gg/pylons) or follow us on Twitter (@pylonstech) to be a part of what we’re building.

Until next time, over and out!

Mainnet is almost here.

A restful day to all workers, American and otherwise! We'll be back next week with some news about mobile blockchain gaming.

We are so stoked to release a new incentivized drop, our first using In-App Purchasing, with the amazingly talented artist, Andy Needham. Andy is a digital artist, educator and freelance senior motion designer based in London and puts his heart and soul into the art he creates. His latest piece is now live on Pylons! We’re proud to have worked with Andy to bring you this piece. By participating in this drop, you will earn incentive points toward mainnet and will get to own one really stellar piece of art - there's only 750 of them!

Lux Floralis is priced in Pylons Points, which are acquired in the Pylons App using In-App Purchasing. They are not themselves a cryptocurrency, they are a token you can spend on art and games on the Pylons network. Once you spend them, though, the item you purchased is secured by the key in your app and not subject to anyone's control. This is how it works:

As always, please keep reporting bugs and issues to the support channel on Discord or to the GitHub Issues page as you use the applications and build with the SDK; that's also one critical way to participate in the incentivized testnet.

This is a first in the world of blockchain art. A mobile app that can buy a digital item using in-app purchasing and self-custody that item with a key held on your phone has never been done before. We will have a few more firsts coming your way in the next few months.

Oh yeah, by the way: Mainnet soon.

Hello, hello! It's been a pretty heads-down week at Pylons fixing bugs and finalizing mainnet launch plans. We also have an internal release of our first game bulid with our games SDK. It's currently console-only, but look for a mobile app soon. We are very excited to deliver that. We can't wait to see what people will build with the games SDK. Gacha games and crafting games are the most obvious applications, but there will be some super creative uses we haven't thought of. The SDK and demo app are open source and you can find them on our GitHub if you want a look at the early work or want to help!

We will also have something pretty cool coming out this week on the content front, so stay tuned for that, could be an announcement as soon as tomorrow. Follow us on Twitter and join our Discord, and get ready to build!

Rejoice, clan Pylons! Free mobile art publishing is live. Last week Easel was approved on the iOS App Store, it's now available on both Android and iOS mobile devices. You can use it to upload images, videos, 3D models, and more from your device to IPFS, get a permalink to them, and with the Pylons app you can put your content up for sale.

With this release, we have a product that's unique in blockchain. You can sell on-chain art from your mobile phone, for no upfront cost, without ever needing to buy or accept cryptocurrency if you don't want to.

Because Pylons chain is still a testnet, this is not a way for artists to generate revenue - yet. There are two currencies users can buy with: Stripe USD, which is in test mode and requires users to use card "4242 4242 4242 4242" and Pylons Points, which can be purchased through In-App Purchasing.  Because we are still a testnet, we don't have a redemption policy for creators yet. We will have one, though. Pylons Points acquired by creators will be redeemable for USD through a process to be unveiled after mainnet.

Give it a shot, and get warmed up. Mainnet soon.

Last week we launched our native in-app purchasing feature for our Pylons Points, which lets users buy low-ticket art, we've been making and sharing some work in our Discord, and a few people decided to make some purchases! Thanks to everyone who participated in building, testing, and using the feature. Here's a photo I minted in honor of our first few sales:

First Pylons Revenue

Photo of a victory sign in front of iOS dashboard displaying first Pylons revenuePrice: 8 PYLON

Built on Pylons

The photo costs about a dollar to purchase, and it's an edition of 500. Grab one with your Android or iOS device to memorialize the first native app store to blockchain integration!

We are working on getting our art minter approved for public release, so that everyone can join in making lightweight digital art. Hopefully very soon!

Next week we will have an update for you on the path to mainnet. We have been making good progress.

Have a cool mid-August!

Pylonians, hello, how's it going? We're doing great over here, thank you for asking. We just pushed out Pylons v1.0, a major upgrade to SDK 46 (the very first chain to get here.) We've upgraded our apps, web portal, indexer and everything is looking great! We've got more testing to do before we put real money into the system but things are in a good place.

Did we mention that we're about to put real money on Pylons? The recent upgrade adds support for In-App Purchasing of Pylons Points, which allows artists to sell digital goods to users using the mobile payment systems they are used to. This is a first, a blockchain that can directly accept payments from mobile platforms. Yes, it's very cool.

This has been a huge effort from everyone involved, including the Pylons team and our two external teams, RNS Solutions and Notional Labs. We're all very excited to be at this stage.

Coming up next, we intend to fully release our publishing tool (putting together store collateral now), and do a major IAP drop as well. Then we will build the remaining pieces we need for mainnet (mainly details of the token incentive model) and get out there with mainnet-1 before you know it.

Thanks for being a part of this journey!

gm! We have been working hard to get the upgrade out, and we are almost there! We are one of the first chains to upgrade to SDK 46, so we are encountering some bugs, but we have created an upgrade proposal and once that passes validators will trigger the upgrade handlers and upgrade to the latest node.

The version of Pylons chain being deployed when that happens has some features that are unique in the blockchain space. It can directly process receipts from the Google and Apple app stores, allowing people to buy and sell art using in-app purchasing (Pylons, Inc. still mediates this by creating the SKUs and handling payouts to KYCed sellers, since the app stores are not self service, but artists with App Store accounts will soon be able to create their own SKUs). The chain will also handle using Firebase App-Check to restrict account creation to real phones that are running the real Pylons app. This will do a lot to help with spam mitigation (since we don't have gas fees)

We also released our games SDK last night, and are looking to have a demo app for you by the next update. Exciting times at Pylons!

Have a great week!

Hi all,

It's been quite a week, we've been figuring out the iOS application process for Easel, (we've cleared two hurdles so far!) and we've been writing upgrade handlers for the new chain version. The next version will be based on SDK 46, and will support on-chain recognition of Google and Apple In-App Purchasing, which we are extremely excited about. It also leverages Firebase app check calls to begin to expand our spam mitigation toolset.

In-App Purchasing that is directly handled by a blockchain is, as far as we know, a first. Letting artists connect with users directly and sell them digital items using the payment methods that are most common in the world is going to be a game-changer, and we can't wait to get your feedback on it.

Opinionated spam mitigation is also very new in blockchain. We are going to be releasing tools for building free-to-play blockchain mobile games over the next couple months, and to do that we need to make sure users can get started without needing buy a gas token they don't care about. App check is one piece of solving identity spam attacks without a self-limiting gas fees system, and you'll get to try that as well very soon.

We are still hoping to have Easel out with the new chain running later this week, and are doing everything we can to make it happen.

Have a great week everyone!