May was a difficult month for the blockchain industry. The collapse of UST and Terra sent shockwaves through the market that had widespread effects on tokens, projects and people. As builders, it was a strong reminder that we need to be extremely diligent with how we handle funds — particularly as they relate to our token. We’ve always believed that you can’t rush a project as ambitious as ours, and the last month has reaffirmed our long-term approach: getting things right rather than rushing to market.

Still, development has been progressing well. In May we refined our roadmap, called for Android testers, grew our team, had two community votes and saw two new AR NFT drops hit the marketplace. We launched five regional channels and explored some exciting aspects of both our AR metaverse vision as well as the exciting AR news from Facebook and Instagram.

In this recap, we look at all these exciting highlights from the month and look forward briefly to what we’ve got planned for the rest of Q2.

Android beta test

We know a large part of our community uses Android, so that’s what we prioritized in our April and May development sprints. We’re now extremely excited to announce that the app is nearly ready to go, and we’ve already begun collecting the details of potential testers.

So far, more than 11 thousand of you have signed up! This is an overwhelming response, and we can’t wait to send out the APK as soon as it’s ready.

There’s still time to register your interest — head to our application form and fill in your details 🔥

Like with the iOS test, we’ve got some awesome rewards and content challenges planned for the app — keep an eye on our announcements for all the details.

Roadmap update

We recently released a refined version of our roadmap which showcases our refocused development priorities. Agility is a core part of our development philosophy, and while our roadmap has had some changes, we’re still standing by our core milestones.

If you haven’t already, check out this article where we break it all down.

Marketplace

The Crypto Zoo is officially at capacity, with the Bitcoin Whale rounding out our drops for that collection. We had a blast putting these AR NFTs together, and we’re excited to see how you interact with them in the wild 🐳

We also launched a collaborative drop with our friends at AltcoinBuzz! The AltcoinBuzz Tiger is by far the fiercest feline in the AR metaverse, and we’re looking forward to collabing more.

To celebrate this release, we gave away some AR NFTs to five lucky community members. We announced the winners on Twitter — go and congratulate them if you haven’t yet 👏

New team members

In May we welcomed two new members to the Hololoot team ✨

Jan Barcicki joins us as our Head of Studio, bringing with him more than 15 years of professional 3D experience. Jan has worked as a team leader on world-famous 3D movies and cartoon productions and has experience leading teams in the gaming and 3D services industries.

We also welcomed Piotr Trybalski as our Product Owner. Piotr is a leader with more than
10 years’ experience building strong and well-organized teams. He is passionate about management best practices, VR/AR and business.

Regional Communities

We’re always looking for ways to get closer to our community, which is why in May we launched 5 regional Twitter accounts! These communities are already active parts of our Discord, and with this expansion, we’re now servicing Hololooters in their language on Twitter.

Check out the channels and give them a follow:

🇳🇬 @HololootNG

🇹🇷 @HololootTR

🇵🇱 @HololootPL

🇻🇳 @HololootVN

🇷🇺 @HololootRU

It takes a lot of work to moderate and manage these extra communities, so if you think they’re valuable make sure you hop in and say hi! We’ll consider opening more if there’s enough demand from the community, so make sure you’re in Discord chatting and hanging out in the regional channels we’ve got there ✨

Community governance

Community polls continued throughout May, with two questions posed to the Hololoot community.

The first vote was taken on the name of our mascot. The results were clear, and we were thrilled to introduce everyone to Holly! 🐱

The second vote was taken on a design proposal for an upcoming AR NFT airdrop. This vote was a little closer, but in the end, a winner emerged. The design has been passed to our 3D artists who are already working on producing an awesome NFT for our community.

We’ve really appreciated all the feedback so far on the voting system, and your support has been amazing. If you’re not in the Discord already, make sure you join so that you can have your say on upcoming proposals.

The AR metaverse

The word metaverse gets thrown around a lot — we covered that topic earlier this year in a handy explainer. At Hololoot, the AR metaverse is a core product that we’re developing, and our vision is to bring the metaverse to an even wider audience through AR.

We released an article explaining our vision for the AR metaverse: what it is, what it looks like, what you can do and how you can earn from participating. Each day we get closer to making this a reality, so if you haven’t seen it yet, dive into our summary on Medium.

Meta news

At the start of the month, Facebook and Instagram (and their parent Meta) announced their move into the AR NFT game. This was huge news for our sector, and for us at Hololoot. We consider ourselves pioneers in this nascent industry, and the decision of one of the largest tech companies in the world to begin implementing AR NFT features into their apps used by billions of people is extremely significant.

We wrote an article breaking down the news and what it means for us here at Hololoot. We’ve always believed in the inevitability of the AR NFT wave, and with this news from Meta, the age of AR NFTs is closer than it has ever been.

Looking forward

June is going to be a busy month as we push to complete our Q2 roadmap goals. With the Android beta right around the corner, we’re also expecting a massive influx of new users to the platform and, by extension, the marketplace.

Even though crypto markets are down, spirits at Hololoot are high — we can’t wait for even more of you to get your hands on our app, and we’re excited to share even more updates over the coming month. Make sure you’re following all our channels so that you don’t miss out on any news ✨