The Greymass team is proud to announce its full-time commitment, beginning today, to building web solutions powered by blockchain technology. Utilizing their extensive platform and web development experience, Greymass hopes to become a major contributor to the growth and adoption of the Steem blockchain.

The team has carved out a two-month window, through the end of November, to devote to the first phase of their newest business experiment.

This post serves as an introduction to the Greymass vision, a (re)introduction to its team, a broad statement of its goals for the next eight weeks, and an early concept of how the team plans to approach crowdsourcing support for the project. You can look forward to deeper insight into all of these topics, and more, in the form of upcoming regular updates from the team.

What is Greymass?

Self-funded since its foundation nearly two years ago, Greymass is an organization devoted to building next generation platforms for content discovery.

For their first project as a team, the group sought to disrupt the status quo of crowdsourced review sites, and selected the underserved e-liquid market as their testbed. This solution has become a premier resource in its industry, thanks in large part to its autonomous systems that contextualize user generated content.

Looking to the future, Greymass believes that blockchain technology offers massive benefits to these types of platforms. Steem has opened the door for developers, entrepreneurs, and businesses to use the blockchain for more than just financial transactions. Greymass plans to harness this potential and build blockchain-based solutions that anyone can use.

Who is Greymass?

Greymass is currently comprised of two full-time members, @jesta and @paxmagnus.

• @jesta, already an established developer of steem-powered solutions, top 19 witness, and long-time crypto enthusiast, is a full stack engineer that has been building community platforms and content systems since the late '90s.
• @paxmagnus, a relative newcomer to the blockchain, previously held leadership roles in operations, development, and publishing departments supporting online social games, mostly MMOs, for almost fifteen years.

The team's strengths in web technologies, community building, and content systems make them uniquely qualified to execute on their plan, but they can't do it alone. The Greymass team is eager to collaborate with people possessing complementary skillsets, through both short-term engagements and as potential members of our team.

Goals

Greymass' first major milestone will be the release of an open source software solution. A detailed list of what this milestone includes will be outlined in the very near future. The execution phase will take place over the course of two months, followed by it's production-ready release in Q4 of 2016.

In addition to the objectives of the first development milestone, Greymass' efforts will revolve around sharing regular communications that grant insight into the process. Topics will include challenges the team is struggling with, progress updates on development, and details of their business strategy. Greymass welcomes the opportunity to vet their narrative, iterate on their plans, and ultimately make cool products that people actually want to use.

Greymass will also be exploring the viability of its business model during this time, in order to determine if continuing with the project in 2017 and beyond is feasible. During this initial phase, Greymass will be reliant upon community donations and support, as it has no intentions of charging for these open source solutions. While Greymass remains eager to grow the team and become self sustaining, the team believes this exploration period is a necessary first step.

How do I get involved?

The Greymass team would rather officially ask for support after they've rolled out more details of their plan. However, they will soon be seeking two primary avenues of contribution; volunteering time and financial support.

If you already know you're interested in contributing, sight unseen, please contact the team to discuss further. Regardless, any funds or earnings collected on the @greymass account will be accounted for, and used exclusively for project-related purposes.

For additional information or questions, either reply to this post or send us an email at [email protected]. Further replies to the @greymass posts will come from the accounts @jesta (Aaron) or @paxmagnus (Max).