Check out our proposal here: https://forum.ark.io/topic/501/grow-ark-check-yokoama-acf-board-member-and-tk0n-delegate-proposal-94-payout-2-new-member-bonus. We are currently forging!

Being a delegate at Ark is not foremost a way to earn Ark, it is a way to support Ark, grow it and show leadership in the community. The success of a new technology or crypto currency comes from a combination of factors. It is not only having a solid dev team who builds great products, it is also having a strong community, relaying what your product is about and of course growing! It is also for this reason I dedicate a lot of time to Ark, not only in the form of delegate, but also by being on the Ark Community Board which is would advise you to read up on here: https://arkcommunityfund.com/ (a great initiative to support our community and Ark development!).

You can see in the variety of proposals on the Ark forum (https://forum.ark.io/category/5/delegates) that many delegates do exactly this. They focus on the different aspects that can make Ark successful. Delegates forge blocks and for each block that is forged Ark is earned/created. A delegate can decide what to do with this Ark, but has to think carefully because you can only remain a delegate if you are in the top 51. You get in the top 51 by getting enough votes from Ark holders.

If we look at some examples we can see amazing delegate proposals. Jarunik and Dutchdelegate for example have very strong development proposals and are highly active within Ark keeping their voters up to date regularly. Jarunik has even gone as far as creating a voter bounty program, handing out additional Ark to voters that developed useful features for Ark.

We propose to also have a focus on a separate aspect that can result into growth for Ark which is the active quest to obtain more Ark holders, an Ark outreach. We propose that 2% of what is forged or roughly 250 Ark a month is used to reach out to people who do not hold a single Ark today. Practically, we want offer 5 free Ark with a purchase of 25 Ark or more. This will make the initial step easier as buying crypto and voting within Ark cost some fees. For first timers, the 5 Ark is a gesture on our side, a sign of goodwill to meet halfway and cover the fees.

So how do we do that?

For one, yokoama (me) and tk0n will actively promote our offer on a variety of social media platforms (twitter, facebook, youtube, reddit, bitcointalk, etc.).

Secondly, we will rely on our community to participate in this outreach as well and forward the message to people in their circle (and now there is a nice incentive to it!).

Thirdly, we are doing this for the community so we will also communicate to other delegates that if they refer people to us, we will actively steer those new Ark members to voting for those delegates. We are not in competition with other delegates, we are a team that has the desire to make Ark successful. And for those who are reading this that are now interested in buying, once you vote from your Ark wallet you will receive Ark regularly and you don’t have to leave your wallet open! Just vote once and you are done!

Now how do we avoid people abusing this offer?

Me and tk0n will invest a serious amount of our time actually ‘vetting’ a new member. That sounds more unfriendly than it is. It just means we want to talk to whomever this new member is on the Ark slack channel for which a invite is needed via the ark website under ‘pages’ (https://ark.io/). We will ask the following:

Can you show some social media proof you are who you say you are (facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc.) Can you post a message on one of those platforms about Ark Make the Ark purchase as we are chatting on Slack, we can check via Ark explorer if it happened

You can see the benefit here for both the new member as well as Ark. We get a new member, we promote Ark and by chatting we also have the opportunity to introduce this new member to Ark and the Ark community.

We will of course keep track of how many new members we are signing up and will make regular reports to the community on this. As you might have understood, there is a 250 Ark cap a month for this. If this proves to be highly successful and we empty the 250 Ark quickly, we will consider increasing the amount.

We just started forging. If you like what you read, please vote for ‘thefoundry’! Any questions, join our slack and reach out to @yokoama or @tk0n. Also, we plan on setting up our website soon, so we can keep all our voters up to date there (as well as on reddit, slack, bitcointalk). Stay tuned!

UPDATE: Check our follow up post here: https://medium.com/@samuelzwaan/the-foundry-the-beginnings-of-forging-ark-9fa99d23d071