Jul 10•5 min read
Hot From The Press #4
Hot from the press: Sigle 1.3
Last year, we became one of the first startups in the world to use NFTs to raise capital, via an NFT mint.
A true adventurer ahead of his time, Jules Vernes inspired many French kids — including us — and so he would be the subject of our NFT collection. Our Explorer Guild NFTs would provide utility to our writers, would be something for our community to rally around and more.
The collection of 3,000 NFTs sold out, and our community helped us make Sigle a reality by investing in us and buying our NFTs. In exchange, NFT holders get a free lifetime membership to Sigle premium services.
First NFT gated feature
This new release entailed a lot of work. Between Sigle 1.2 and 1.3 (about 2 months), we changed 201 files, made 13,366 additions and 3,451 deletions. Analytics are not decentralised so we had to create an authentication layer that would allow you to access these web2 features with your wallet. We do not rely on any central services (Facebook etc..), your wallet is the service and you own the key.
Today, we are really proud to release the first NFT gated feature: Analytics. With this feature, writers on Sigle will be able to monitor their growth and better understand their community.
When you access the Sigle analytics dashboard, you can directly see the total number of views as well as unique visitors of your blog. Check the chart and change the time range to see how it evolved over time. Wondering where the visitors are coming from? We show you the referrer list so you can see which social media is working best for you. If you’re curious what content your community enjoys most, every metric can also be filtered by stories!
We hope you like this feature! As usual, head to our feature request dashboard https://sigle.canny.io/ to let us know the improvements you would like to see in the next release.
How to unlock the Creator + plan with your NFT?
First, you need to login on app.sigle.io using the Hiro Wallet. Login with your wallet is essential so we can detect you are in possession of an Explorer Guild (TEG) NFT. Read more if needed on how to install the Hiro wallet.
Go to Settings > Plans. This page displays your current plan. If this is your first time on this page, you’re probably on the Starter plan.
Click the “Upgrade” button. You are now on the “Compare plans” page.
Click on the purple “Link your NFT” button, under the Creator + plan. A modal will open.
Select the Explorer Guild you want to link to the Creator + plan.
Important: Please note that if you decide to list or sell this specific NFT on secondary markets, the Creator + plan will be disabled and you will have to choose another NFT.Congratulations, you just upgraded! Now visit the Analytics page and enjoy Sigle’s first premium feature.
Ceramic protocol Stacks Grant
We love to investigate new integrations for various decentralised protocols, to see what could be of use to Sigle. In that spirit, we applied for a Grant to add Stacks support to the ceramic network.
Ceramic is a decentralised network for managing and processing mutable information on the open web. By combining IPFS, libp2p, blockchain, DIDs, and standards for authenticated data, Ceramic gives developers the ability to build completely serverless and silo-free applications using dynamic, verifiable, decentralised data.
The first step for us was to create the CAIP-2 and CAIP-10 specification for Stacks. This won’t only benefit the ceramic integration but can also be used to add Stakcks to wallet connect 2.0 for example. A pull request was opened in the ChainAgnostic namespace repository. If you want to learn more about it, follow the discussion in the stacks forum!
Next, we will be adding Stacks support to the Ceramic Js SDK, which will benefit everyone building applications on Stacks. It also means that all the current apps built on Ceramic can add the Hiro wallet login option in just a few lines of code.
Changelog Sigle 1.3
A more detailed view of all the big changes made to Sigle in this release:
Analytics
New plan page
Hiro login is out of beta and available for everyone
New settings layout
New profile page layout
Changing your name in the settings also changes it in the header and other places
Displaying the BNS next to the name on your profile page
Added a “stories” tab on your profile page in order to add “following” and “followers” in the near future
Improved login process with new signature flow
New story cards on the profile page
Change how profile images are displayed to be ready for more social features
Custom SEO when sharing profile pages
CTA to write a new story changed position
A LOT of internal changes to the codebase, continuing redesign of old components
We’re now able to detect when you’ve connected to Sigle with your BNS name misconfigured, and show you the guide on how to fix it
Many bugs were fixed and small improvements were made
See the full list of changes here.
Explorers keep exploring
The Explorer Guild is placed as the 11th most traded project on STX, with more than 161.9k STX of volume and a 84 STX floor price.
What’s next?
We are working on social features, following system and an explore page showing the writers publishing on Sigle.
Investigating how we will integrate newsletter into the platform, design research started
Some progress was made for the legacy account migration, we will be testing the beta version Hiro prepared it in the coming week, you can follow the discussion here
