BitTube 2020 recap
Dear community,
Time flies! What a turbulent year it’s been for everyone. We hope you are safe, healthy and still in good spirits. Before going into 2021 we want to wrap up the year on a positive note, recapping everything we’ve accomplished with BitTube in 2020, and what’s in store for 2021.
2020: Going faster, going federated
So, here we go. In summary, this year we:
- Rebranded BitTubers.com to bittube.tv, our main social platform
- Launched bittube.video to experiment with open source, p2p federated social media
- Upgraded to TUBE4, a much faster blockchain
- Rebranded bittube.app, which now covers apps/downloads
- Launched bittube.cash (coin overview)
- Launched bittube.solutions (company/products overview, roadmap)
- Launched bittube.space (for video conferencing, work in progress)
- Added Premium storage tiers to bittube.video and mobile support
- Started working on bittube.social (a Mastodon fork)
- Started working on wrapped tubes (wTUBE) for DeFi
At the start of the year, we set several goals. The most important one was making a significant blockchain upgrade for faster transactions. In July we successfully launched BitTubeCash 4.0 (aka TUBE4). Although exchange adoption has been slow, recently we were happy to announce that Bittrex will perform the necessary upgrades next quarter.
The next important goal was improving the BitTube branding and positioning. Following the launch of bittube.video in Q1, we decided to purchase several more domains, namely bittube.cash, bittube.solutions, bittube.space and bittube.social. Time and resources have been scarce this year, so it’s an ongoing process. Because BitTube tries to do offer many solutions at once, the idea behind these domains is to segment the ecosystem into more easily digestible landing pages.
In the second half of this year we were able to put more attention into bittube.video. This is our federated p2p video platform based on PeerTube. In October we introduced Premium storage and started working on mobile support. We’ll continue this trend next year by adding more features and micropayment integrations, in part based on recent community surveys. Ultimately, we want to move bittube.tv’s best features over to bittube.video, in order to designate bittube.tv exclusively for live streaming (as the .tv domain would imply) within the same federated framework.
In the same spirit, some months ago we started working on bittube.social based on Mastodon, also a federated platform. It will deliver a feed-driven social media experience similar to Twitter.
2021 onward: the grand strategy
Once all is said and done, our social media products shall then consist of:
- bittube.video for videos,
- bittube.tv for live streaming,
- bittube.social for social feeds and groups.
We love this approach because they will be interoperable under a single BitTube account. Moreover, the federated social network (‘fediverse’) allows you to subscribe to any other user/creator on other federated platforms. You will be able to follow much more content, not limited to BitTube-native creators, all under one roof. Since AirTime automatically monetizes viewership, this should incentivize outside creators to sign up to BitTube to claim their earnings, and this might lead to other federated platforms to adopt our AirTime plugin for PeerTube themselves.
This year we also mentioned plans for wrapped TUBEs for DeFi. The benefits of tokenized TUBEs is clear to us: access to more liquidity, more versatile use cases, and reducing reliance on centralized exchanges (which has been problematic this year after launching TUBE4). Due to some technical challenges there is no ETA yet, but we know, the sooner the better.
Lastly, we are working hard on re-enabling staking TUBE4 for higher AirTime rewards and we are looking forward to Bittrex upgrading to TUBE4 in the next few months. We will continue working on branding as well, which still lacks polish at the moment.
Let us know your thoughts on Discord, we take any feedback regarding our approach to heart.
Thank you for reading and a Happy New Year! :)
The BitTube Team
