Everyone wants to know what the secret to success in DeFi space is like. What people often forget is that it all comes back to developing and offering great projects. Plain and simple. In the end, product quality and the community experience are what will determine the long-term success of the project.
Speaking of great projects, Empire’s CEO and Founder Abdullah Ghandour (Dulla) took to YouTube and Telegram for a live interactive session with our esteemed community. He comprehensively shared the details on all the roadblocks and development process that is underway. The objective of the community session was to seek feedback on the roadmap and get insights on what the community’s perspective is moving forward.
The focus of the talk initially was on the three pillars of Empire’s roadmap which include contract migration, development of Empire’s use cases, and the marketing strategies. On top of that, Dulla stressed upon the need to be cautious of the market conditions. He revisited the discrepancies that took place in terms of the development of DeFigram.io in the initial stages and mentioned about the design issues but confirmed that things were now fixed and moving in the right direction.
Dulla further mentioned, ‘’The farming and staking pools are ready. The charts were working fine but we are also updating and same goes for the portfolio tracker. The launchpad is work in progress and it will be done and ready in a couple of months. It is least prioritized but that is going to make money.”
CONTRACT MIGRATION
Dulla also stressed on the need of switching to a more optical system. Contract migration is essential for rolling out all the usecases. There has been delays and the team is well focused to get the process done by the end of this month. Empire aims to get rid of wallet transfer taxes while still letting users farm, stake, and withdraw money tax-free. Migration will take place in two phases: Recovering the data to migrate and writing the data to the new contract.
CONTRACT AUDIT
Addressing the issue concerning the contract audit, Dulla mentioned, “We have submitted and paid for our contract audit for almost 19 weeks now, and that is the main reason that we have been delayed for contract change. I was under the impression that one or two exchanges would charge us money for contract change which I didn’t agree to, but then I was informed that each exchange has a cost. This is the money we are not accounted for; we have been squeezing ourselves to cover our cost, but to put more money on top of it all is doable but then it is going to delay other development stuff.’’
He also stressed that the contract has passed the audit and that the contract change is very much needed for farming and staking pools. Dulla further mentioned, ‘’I am very much interested in farming, since it is going to strengthen our liquidity pools and enable us to bridge to other chains.’’ He was keen on putting it out to the community that the contract change has come with a lot of cost, coupled with the cost of audit, contract, and the bridge.
GOOSEBUMPS
Talking about Goosebumps, Dulla mentioned, ‘’Our Goosebumps was not up to the mark, and we were aware of it. Therefore, we fixed it. It is our powerhouse and the backend of our DeFiGram.io. The DEX itself is ready, that enables our own contract, our own liquidity pools.” Most of the other DEXs in the market don’t have their own liquidity pools, they are a mask of PancakeSwap, meaning they only create a front-end and they use PancakeSwap routers while not benefiting anything out of it. He mentioned our DEX is 100% ours, and all the fees will go to Empire with all the control.
EMPIRE NFT MARKETPLACE
During the community call, Dulla was confident in stating that he believes Empire NFT Marketplace will be among the top 3 marketplaces in the space in terms of functionality. He said that the integration of the marketplace into DeFiGram.io would surely make it huge. Empire NFT Marketplace is our first-ever use case, and as most of the community members already know, it just got an ultimate makeover. New user interface and experience that will make it stand out among its competitors. One of the first collections to utilize the new marketplace is ‘Emperors of DeFi’ NFT collection, Empire’s first official NFT collection.
The marketplace has a wide selection of NFTs across multiple categories, including art, avatars, music, photography, and more. Live on the BNB Smart Chain, Ethereum, and Solana networks. The new marketplace is expected to launch soon after the contract migration takes place. However, Dulla stressed that we will not be doing a lot of marketing activities for the launch.
DeFiGram.io
Talking about the development of DeFiGram.io, Empire Token’s flagship use case, Dulla stated that the focus for now is on the community management part which will be launching in three phases but internally. There will be an exclusive group with the team and community members for the closed beta testing of the app. He further stated that the DEX and NFT Marketplace would be integrated very soon, but the wallet would be integrated later. He mentioned that we are creating the wallet from scratch in order to have full control as we have certain guidelines for user experience.
The team will also be sharing the next APK release of the app outside of our team. We have selected a few active members of the community as part of our Closed Beta Testing group. Participants will be asked to share valuable feedback on the latest app development. Currently, we are open to adding more beta testers but limited to Android users as of the moment. If you are interested in participating, please write to us through our official Telegram group chat.
NEW EMPIRE WEBSITE
The Empire team also showed the new website that went live last week. The design has much to offer in terms of readability and better UI experience. It features all the hot updates with a revamped news feed carousel and a blog section. The tactically designed sections cater to all the use cases with the designated landing pages. Empire has also designed a ‘Careers Page’ for all crypto enthusiasts who wish to be part of the team and grow with us.
TIMLELINE & EMPIRE ROADMAP
The timelines and task sheets leading to the new launches prepared and worked upon by the team were put out in front of the community to develop their trust. The Burj Khalifa advertisement video and the finalised designs of the New York Times Square in three versions were displayed for the community to choose from. Emperors of DeFi NFT collection and the latest Goosebumps and launchpad designs were also discussed. Dulla also brought the merch store to the limelight and stated that the team plans to make it live in the coming period.
FINAL TALK
We had an unexpected cost of $70,000 to be paid to exchanges in order to push through with the contract migration, which we agreed to cover. However, considering the cost of this and a few other things that need to be paid, we had to set our priorities. It doesn’t make quite sense to get listed on exchanges just for the sake of listing or for our community’s sake. This has to be strategic. Hence, we will need to postpone the exchange listings until we bridge to Ethereum, then we can continue processing our application with Bitfinex.
Our main priority at the moment which hopefully will take place in 2-3 weeks is that of contract migration. There has been a delay with the migration caused by our auditing partner CertiK. However, we are in active contact with exchanges so we can finalize the timeline for this. After that, we will launch the new Empire NFT Marketplace, but without putting much of the emphasis on major marketing activities just yet.
Additionally, we will focus on the DEX and the development of our IDO and DeFiGram.io. The DEX will enable our farming pools which will then strengthen our liquidity. We will afterwards bridge to Ethereum and launch DeFiGram.io. Hopefully by then, the market conditions are expected to get better, and we can proceed with the Bitfinex listing.
We thrive on providing value to all the DeFi users and meeting the needs of our community and partners. We opted to showcase our sheer determination to make all our usecases a reality in the near future. The confidence of our community is most important to us. Hence, the founder of Empire took it upon himself to highlight each and every detail to be put forth Infront of the community and seek their blessings. The recorded video of the community call is out on our YouTube channel for all those who could not make it to the live session.
Keep Climbing!
