Meh... We were voted out of the top 51 for the first time since we started forging. Luckily, we immediately noticed it and started promoting our delegate as never before. Within 30 minutes we managed to get back in the top 51 and since that moment our position has been stable. The reason we got voted out of the top 51 was due to the fact that a large wallet left us. With the ever growing competition between the delegates this was enough to push us out. However, with the larger wallets slowly unvoting us, there is more room for the small wallet holders and therefore we expect more stability along the way.

Despite beginning the week with this false start, the week turned out to be great. On wednesday, Rudy and I (Rhmral) went to a symposium about blockchain at Tilburg University (The Netherlands). This was a great opportunity to learn more about blockchain in general and the potential impact it has on our society. Having listened to the experts, we even managed to get a little Ark into the presentation during the questions! The drinks at the end of the symposium also provided an opportunity to further spread the awareness about Ark to the different presenters.

Ark Question at blockchain symposium

Finally the moment was there! Our very first Ark meetup for the voters of Dutchdelegate and others interested. Last Saturday we had the pleasure of meeting several of our fellow Dutchies at the pub “Van Ouds” in Nijmegen. We didn’t know what to expect beforehand, but it completely exceeded our expectations. You could even pay for your beer in Bitcoin, but unfortunately for us, not in Ark. We still had a very good time, everyone turned out to be as awesome as they are in the Slack. Here is a picture as evidence of our jolly good times!

At Van Ouds in Nijmegen

We even managed to attract one of the team members (Lars) to our meetup. We hope that - with this first meetup being a succes - more meetups will follow. It is our intention, as Dutchdelegate, to do so and we hope we can welcome more Ark enthusiasts in the upcoming events.

That all being said, there is more news to come. It was our intention to run our own payout script this weekend, but as everyone probably can remember, we promised here that we don’t want to take risks anymore. The script is practically done. However, we found a small devation in one of the numbers so we decided to run Arky one more time just to be sure. With this full week dedicated to testing the script, we hope to complete it. As soon as the script is complete, we will immediately deploy our website, since that has already been finished for a week now. Charles is, once more, doing the best he can and the prospects look good.

Last but not least, we are (of course) still open to new voters. Everyone is welcome! You can look at our proposal here: https://medium.com/@Dutch_Delegate/delegate-proposal-dutchdelegate-95-pay-out-a53405b1d3a7

We hope that with this information you are all updated on our current situation. We want to give a special thanks to the voters that gave us so much confidence on Reddit when we were out of the top 51. It really supports us when we see that so many people have confidence in our work. We are doing the best we can and it is therefore much appreciated when we get such a positive feedback from the community.

Thank you all, once more, for voting Dutchdelegate! And we hope to see you all at our future meetups.

Kind regards,

The Dutchdelegate team

#Slack: @rudy, @charles, @rhmral

#mail: dutchdelegate@gmail.com