March 2022 Progress Update

To our amazing Lunar Community,

The leadership team is excited to deliver this monthly progress update. While we have been hard at work on the development of our technology, many of the right pieces are being put in place to help Lunar reach its vision. There’s so much to share, so let’s get started.

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General Updates

lunar.io

We’re incredibly excited to announce the Lunar Ecosystem has a new home. Along with bolstering our web presence and increasing simplicity for visitors, this investment is an important step in the evolution of our brand. The new address is live, check it out at lunar.io

Milestones

• Reached over 35,000 holders
• Reached over 25,000 Telegram members
• Reached over 65,000 Twitter followers
• Reached over 10,000,000 watchlists on CoinMarketCap
• Officially partnered with The Planetary Society
• CertiK Security Score hit a new all time high of 97 on 2/25/22. This put us in the top 0.2% of projects on Certik, higher than BNB and Certik itself. 
• CoinMarketCap NFT Airdrop officially went live last night
• First Lunar sponsored event scheduled (And we’re one of the main sponsors)
  

Exchange Listings

Additional exchange listings are currently in progress. Exchanges have a vested interest in the success of all the projects they list, and due to the recent global market volatility, new listings have slowed down tremendously across all exchanges. 

While we’re currently forced to move at the same speed of the centralized exchanges, there has been no lack of attention towards Lunar. We have caught the attention of many top exchanges over the past several months, making it only a matter of time before our next top tier listing.

With that being said, we expect to receive an official listing confirmation from a very large exchange in the next few weeks. 

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Marketing & Partnerships

Our social media and community channels have grown tremendously since our last update. Our CoinMarketCap Airdrop was one of the most successful campaigns we’ve run so far, bringing in thousands of new holders. Lunar has reached over 10 million watchlists on CoinMarketCap.com; that’s more than Bitcoin, Ethereum, and BNB combined. We’re thrilled to see such a positive response from the community.

Our presence at ETH Denver proved to be a highly successful venture. With Spaceman, Mr. Moonshot, and Apollo in attendance, we were able to meet face to face with team members from Binance, OKX, Chainlink, Algorand, various investment firms and more.

Upcoming Campaigns Scheduled:

• CoinMarketCap: Lunar Crystal NFT Airdrop is live, running March 1st - 20th.
• The Planetary Society Out Of This World Giveaway has launched! It's been posted across all channels reaching over 2 million people. Lunar will also be featured in The Planetary Society's Downlink email newsletter which reaches hundreds of thousands of people weekly.
• Core team attending the Crypto Expo in Dubai March 16th & 17th
• NFT Expoverse Flyaway Contest launches March 21st - As part of our sponsorship, we will be launching a campaign to give away two plane tickets as well as VIP passes to the event.  Other great prizes include: Lunar Crystal NFTs, Lunar tokens, VIP experiences, and more!
• Lunar Crystal NFT Launch Campaign - March 21, 2022 +
• NFT Expoverse in Los Angeles, California July 29th - 31st.  Our team will be presenting the Lunar Crystal NFT Collection in our first experience marketing driven event.  Come meet the team in the Lunar Lounge!
• + more!
  

The Planetary Society

While many others have tried, Lunar has become the first crypto project to engage in an official partnership with The Planetary Society, the world's largest space non-profit. The Planetary Society was co-founded in 1980 by Carl Sagan and is currently led by CEO, Bill Nye. Their mission is to explore worlds, find life, and defend Earth.

Working closely with their team, a designated Lunar Fund was created. Over time, this resource will directly fund research and development and support specific initiatives. The first of which will be based around planetary defense.

Aside from being able to support a cause and organization we deeply believe in, this partnership is an important step in our grand vision for Lunar.

In celebration of our newly formed partnership with The Planetary Society, Lunar is launching the Out Of This World Giveaway. We’re giving away a meteorite! Click the link below to learn more.

Enter the Out Of This World Giveaway here!

Social Media Growth

February 1, 2022

Twitter: 17,000 followers

Instagram: 3,000 followers

Facebook: 2,400 followers

Telegram: 13,000 members

Discord: 2,500 members

CoinMarketCap: 17,000 watchlists

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March 1, 2022

Twitter: 64,000 followers

Instagram: 5,800 followers

Facebook: 43,000 followers

Telegram: 25,000 members

Discord: 5,500 members

CoinMarketCap: 10,000,000+ watchlists

Website Redesign

Along with our new domain, Lunar is getting a fully custom website redesign.

Websites are the face of a brand. It’s important to have a website that properly reflects our design ethos and showcases our strengths. 

We will be partnering with a top-notch design agency to help us design, implement, and optimize our new site. 

Brand Refinement

In congruence with our new domain and website redesign, we have begun working with experts to refine the various components of the Lunar brand. 

From streamlining our messaging to refreshing our design system, our brand will be evolving to embody the values and objectives we strive for.

CTO’s Corner 

Hey folks! It’s MasterJedi. Hope you had an outstanding February, and that those of you in Eastern Europe are staying as safe as possible.

It was a fantastic month for the Lunar Dev team. The core team is in place, we have great coverage on both the .NET and Blockchain sides of the house, and we are all really starting to gel. I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished in the last few weeks, and you’ll see the fruits of our labor hit your browsers later this month.

Launch Schedules

One of the reasons details have been light about our shipping schedule is because we’ve been in the game a long time, and we know a plan usually doesn’t survive the requirements gathering process. Once you put a bunch of smart people in a room and start to hash out the minutiae of what needs to be done, often better strategies emerge. So I’ve been very clear on AMAs that we’re not going to talk about something until we’re ready to talk about it.

At the same time, a number of security events happened in the crypto space in the first part of 2022 that highlighted how important our NFT release process really is. Those glistening crystals started out as just “a cool thing we could do”, but have since grown to an integral part of the platform. 

Launching the Lunar Plexus

So it only made sense to leverage the NFTs as a proving grounds for our ability to ship blockchain-compatible technology with the same rigorous standards my team has done for years with .NET.

To that end, we’ve decided to make our upcoming NFT launch the first demonstration of the Lunar Plexus™️ technology that we’ve been building since November. 

The reasons are simple. 

• Our first NFTs will be split between the BSC and ETH chains, which makes it a perfect showcase of our OmniChain technology.
• Because we intend to have the NFTs unlock functionality in the app in the future, we may need to change the contracts at a later date. So we need to validate our upgradeable smart contracts approach.
• The fact that apparently no one has invented a universal minting platform for NFTs (um, why the hell not, ERC-721 is a *standard*, right?) means we have to deploy our own minting site. This gives us another chance to battle-test our Blazor app framework in the real world, and paves the way for a blockchain-agnostic NFT launchpad on Lunar.
  

So we’ve been hard at work spec'ing everything out, building our EVM DevOps pipelines, and cranking out code. And what we will deliver this month will be a much deeper implementation than we planned, which is a strong testament to this team and the proprietary technology we’ve been building to power the platform.

Communicating Launch Dates

The thing about publicly announcing a launch date is the second you do it, some issue will arise that makes you instantly wrong. You plan out an endgame, you always get tripped up by events on the ground. 

We are at a point in our evolution as a company when we are able to start announcing ship dates. When we do so, we will also give you a confidence level of how likely we think it is to hit that date. That way, you get some insight into what we’re thinking, and that confidence level should go up the closer we get to the actual date.

Now Let me be clear: I don't care what date we told you something will ship, if it doesn’t meet my quality bar I won’t sign off on it. Perfect may be the enemy of good, but “good enough” never is. I would rather apologize for disappointing your timeline expectations than have to figure out how to apologize for losing your assets. Full stop.

Follow Our Progress

We know you want to be able to see what we’re up to, so to that end, starting next week, we’re going to be publishing a subset of our task list on GitHub for you to follow along with. 

How It Will Work

We have an internal system for managing our different deliverables and the schedules, tasks, and bugs associated with those deliverables. Most of February was spent getting all that spun up internally for the dozen or so systems we are building.

We’re going to take the highest-level items from that system, and copy them over to GitHub tasks. There will be a single task for each part of the development cycle, from Design => Alpha => Beta => Production. That will allow you to see how many high-level tasks are remaining before sign-off for that environment is completed.

Rules of the Road

I have plenty of experience managing OSS projects, and I’m aware how blunt and opinionated developers like myself can be. So in order for us to keep everyone in the loop in a transparent way, we need some ground rules to keep my team focused on delivering all the features you’re drooling over.

• The list is not necessarily linear. While we strive to make it easy to understand how we want to work, we will likely complete tasks out of order.
• We will not change the status of items in progress. Doing that would take too much time to keep the lists synchronized with our internal systems.  As tasks are completed, we will check them off.
• No assumptions allowed. What we’re communicating is a high-level overview. 

• You should NOT assume what you see is the extent of what we’re tracking or doing. That is by design. A lot more work has been done then you are presently aware of.
• You should NOT assume the next item on the list is what we’re working on next. We’re working based on the order of our internal tracking systems.
  

We’re super excited to be at a point where we can share this all with you, and have you along for the ride. And with that, I’m happy to announce our tentative launch dates for the Lunar Crystal NFT launch on Binance Smart Chain.

NFT Launch Schedule on BSC

• April 19th at 12:00 PM EST: NFT Whitelist Presale Mint - 2000 NFTs 
• April 20th: 6:00 PM EST: Public Mint - 2000 NFTs + Presale Leftovers
• April 25th 4:44 PM EST: Lunar Crystal NFT Reveal
  

Deadline confidence level: 90%

Minting Your Tokens

On launch day, you’ll head to our Minting site, create your Lunar Account, and claim your LunarTag (This is your username that can be used to send crypto between Lunar users.)

Once you connect your wallet, you’ll be able to mint your Meteorites based on your per-wallet limits, and start trading them on our verified NFT marketplaces. On April 16th, your Meteorite will open and reveal its true contents to the world.

Over time, Lunar Crystals will obtain new powers in the Lunar ecosystem, and as we discover that functionality, we’ll share it with you.

Wrapping It All Up

It’s been an insane 4 months since I joined the team, and I’m stoked to finally get major parts of this platform in your hands. With that, I’m gonna hand this back over to Apollo to talk about the Lunar Crystals and what you can expect.

Lunar Crystals

What we’ve shared about the Lunar Crystal NFTs so far is only the tip of the iceberg. While our development team has been hard at work creating the platform, NFTs, and minting portal, our NFT creative team has been building the artwork, storyline, and promotional materials for the collection. 

In the next several days we will post an updated page that goes over the new mechanics of the NFTs in detail, and we will be revealing more details and artwork over the next few weeks leading up to launch.

In Conclusion...

Despite this post containing a metric ton of information, as always, there is still much, much more we have yet to share.

Thank you all again for your continued support. Stay tuned and strap in as we prepare our journey towards the stars.

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To infinity & beyond,

The Lunar Team