Welcome to the January/February 2019 LBRY Community update!

If you aren’t part of our Discord community yet, join us anytime and say hello! Our community allows LBRYians to interact with the team directly and for us to engage users and grow the LBRY platform. If you don't already, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, and Telegram.

In This Update

• 2018 Review and 2019 Roadmap
• LBRY.tech
• Highlighted LBRY.fund Projects
• Upcoming Events
• Recent Events

To read all of our previous updates, please visit our Development and Community Update archive.

2018 Year Review and Roadmap Check-in

Jeremy Kaufmann, our CEO, penned a retrospective on 2018, and announced our goals for 2019. We’re super excited about the new updates to our Roadmap, which also relies on YOU to help us revolutionize the content world!

2018 was filled with great accomplishments for LBRY, and Jeremy's blog summarizes these wins, including: protocol performance, new features, our YouTube partnership program, Android app beta, huge increase in content, lbry.fund debut, lbry.tech soft launch, major press coverage, and social growth.

2019 Focus Areas

• User Engagement: LBRY in your browser: Plans are in place to bring the full LBRY desktop app experience to the web! Making LBRY easier to access will boost user engagement. Content discovery is also important: we want users to be able to find relevant LBRY content easily in the desktop app, on the web, and in search engines.
• Win Creators: We want to show our creators lots of love by introducing new tools to track, build a fanbase, and better monetize content. We're also working to make it easy to use and spend your LBC.
• Build Community: YOU are our most amazing asset! We're introducing better documentation and tools for using and developing with LBRY. To this end, we're launching lbry.tech, and later this year, lbry.org, which will enable our LBRY Swarm to grow.
• Technical Improvements: We saw great download speed and failure rate improvements in 2018, and this remains a top priority in 2019. We're also planning to take LBRY to the next level technically, creating better tools for a more robust marketplace, and laying the groundwork for future ease of scaling.

Roadmap Updated for 2019

• Android 1.0 app release: We want to move from our functional beta into a robust 1.0 release.
• User commenting in the LBRY app: This is a big step towards making LBRY-based applications more socially interactive.
• Improve protocol performance: We made huge strides in 2018, and want to make downloads even faster.
• Technical Community: Launch LBRY.tech and continue to build our technical community with excellent documentation and tools.
• Website redesign and brand unification: We want everything we do to look consistent, professional, and super-easy to use.
• Community swarm: We want to enable building communities within the LBRY ecosystem using existing social tools and developing better tools to support and grow community.
• New creator features: Create new tools for creators to have better control and presentation of their properties, track statistics about their files, and easily edit metadata.
• Focus on creator partnerships: Create active partnerships with prominent creators to better promote both the creators and LBRY technology.
• Discovery: This is a multifaceted issue. We want users to be able to find relevant content on the LBRY network, whether they're in the desktop app or doing a web search. We want to increase general awareness of LBRY.
• LBRY on the web: You will be able to access LBRY in your web browser in addition to the standalone desktop app.
• Multi-device experience: We want you to be able to access your LBRY content and wallet accross multiple devices.
• Advertising: Explore advertising solutions for folks who would rather view advertising than pay a small fee for downloading content.
• Blockchain Bricklaying: Continue to implement measures to preserve the security of our blockchain.
• LBC On/offramps: We want to make it easier for you to acquire or spend LBC.
• Community Metadata: Explore proposals, choose a design, and receive community feedback.
• Internationalization: Add local language support to our web properties and applications.
• Robust Data Market: Improve incentive for participation in the LBRY network and host data.

You can check out the full details on our Roadmap.

LBRY.tech

While LBRY.tech soft-launched in 2018, we've been hard at work fleshing out the content and adding great features for anybody who'd like to learn about the LBRY protocol and developing using our API.

Also part of the lbry.tech rollout, we're launching a developer specific mailing list with resources and updates about developing on LBRY. We welcome all levels of developers to our project. You can join the list here at the bottom of this page.

Stay tuned for LBRY.tech official launch later this month!

LBRY.fund Featured Community Grants and Updates

The LBRY.fund is a pool of LBC Credits set aside for promoting community development on the LBRY protocol.

In 2018, we awarded over $60,000 USD worth of grants to community projects promoting or using the LBRY platform. This included projects like: The Anti-Media news on LBRY, Jelly-Beats audio project, LBRY devices for television, and informational videos.

The fund is open to anybody, and you can submit requests for your ideas using, developing, or promoting use of the LBRY protocol.

Here are the latest awards and project updates:

New Projects

We're pleased to be awarding new grants to:

• Atlanta Bitcoin Embassy: Ongoing LBRY meetups and events in Atlanta, Georgia. See Events for more details.
• Soundbytez.io: A music and audio sharing site that allows you to publish your sound on the blockchain. The team can be found on Discord.
• International Youth Conference Technology Workshop: in Jaipur, India. See Events.
• Matt Sokol YouTube Sponsorship: Matt will be talking about blockchain on his Quixotic Flux.

Jelly Beats Update

We featured Jelly Beats in our last community update, and we're super excited to see new progress on this app.

Veteran LBRY contributors Baltazar Gomez and Roman Przybyła are creating a streaming music player based on the LBRY protocol. You can now favorite your favorite music, and playlists are coming soon. Looking great, guys!

You can download an Alpha version from their GitHub Releases page - this will require you to be running the LBRY SDK or LBRY app before it’s started. You can also find the source code on Github: https://github.com/btzr-io/jelly-beats

Events

United States

February 22-23, HackYSU 2019 - Youngstown, Ohio

LBRY is proud to sponsor HackYSU 2019 this year. This is Youngstown State University's fourth annual hackathon, an event where students are invited from all over the United States tech belt onto the YSU campus to learn, create, and network with each other for a weekend.

Shawn Kameneh, LBRY Lead Application Engineer, will be on hand at the hackathon! More information.

Coming in March in Atlanta, Georgia

The Atlanta Bitcoin Embassy is the central hub for all networking, training, and community adoption of blockchain tech in Atlanta. We're partnering with them to introduce LBRY to high school students through senior citizens in the Atlanta area through meetups, swag giveaways, and more. If you're anywhere near the Atlanta metro area, explore their website, and find out more about their events with LBRY.

Poland

February 28 - March 3, IEM Katowice

LBRY is sponsoring an eSport team at the Intel Extreme Masters in Katowice! Madiator and his team will be competing and live tweeting from the competition.

Take a look at Noob Team styling in their custom LBRY game jerseys! The competition in Katowice better watch out!

India

February 18, 2019 2nd International Youth Conference, Technology Workshop - Pratep University, Jaipur

This is a LBRY/blockchain event, introducing LBRY to novice users and developers. For more information, Contact Clement Gerber at ceogerber@gmail.com or by phone at 7982297653.

March 10, 2019 Women Techies, Developer Student Clubs, VIT, Vellore

We're excited to be the main sponsor of 2019 Women Techies, a two day hackthon exclusively for women. Participants will be given real world subjects and issues to address using LBRY technology.

LBRY shares VIT's and Google Women Techmakers' vision of creating gender equality in the field of computer science, and to encourage and support women in tech to become active role models and leaders in the field of technology.

Here is a blog about last year's event to give you a taste for the hackathon experience.

LBRY Student Group at VIT

We love working with the students at VIT, and we've been blown away by their enthusiasm for LBRY. Stay tuned to hear more information about an upcoming student group on campus!

Recent Events

Bangalore Blockchain Application Development Meetup

Amit Tulshyan and Clement Gerber from LBRY gave a presentation to the Bangalore Blockchain Application Group. For information on future Meetups in India or to invite LBRY to speak at your meetup, email Clement at clement @ lbry.com or submit a request through LBRY.fund.

Want to develop on the LBRY protocol?

Are you a developer and want to find out more? Start with LBRY.tech! It's a great place to learn about the LBRY project and how all the pieces work together. All of our code is open source and available on GitHub.

Check out our contributing guide and our LBRY App specific contributing document if you just want to dive right into the code.

Thanks for supporting LBRY - stay tuned for more news and updates! And if you haven’t downloaded the LBRY app yet, what are you waiting for?