Pit stop roadmap

Token Sale

We’re heading towards the end of the year 2021. But our year was not characterized by the famous words ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’, Our good intentions were carried by many wonderful people that joined our journey, that provided bricks, and that helped us find alternative ways.

And so, we start to catalyse and transform to address the challenge in affordable housing. It’s not good intentions, but incredible actions, support and drive that has fuelled and enabled us to prepare ourselves for the full take-off in 2022.

This second newsletter will give you a brief update around our progress on the paths we are exploring and the launch of our token to ensure we can pave the way to a solid road through our well-thought through Roadmap (empowa.io). We do not want to create a short-circuit, to race at full-speed but spinning around in circles. We want to create an endurable Road to address the 1 billion opportunity in affordable housing in Africa. It is not poverty, but failing financial systems that have led to the backlog of 50 million homes in Africa.

Together we can make a change, together we can catalyse a movement. If not us, then whom? We Call to Action to join our Journey. Join now (https://empowa.io/token-sale/ )

Empowa Founding Community

The Founding Community NFT, was launched in September and sold-out within a month.
Our Founding Community is now expanding with a growing community of interested people that are following our progress and who will hopefully Join our Journey.

We seek a way to work with them in several ways to do the first tests in decentralised and participative decision-making processes.

It has given us the opportunity to do a first test on Proof-of-Concept for Empowa.

• This community is now invited to join in the first participatory processes that we are encountering to test the first small steps in this.
• we have held multiple community support team meetings to help shape token sale mechanics;
• we have had 2 “unofficial” empowa community meetups that have been organised and run by the community;
• We have hit 5.6k followers on twitter;
  990 followers on telegram (prob 1000 by the time this goes out);
• We have created a new discord channel to better connect with our community

Together we can and are making an impact to Build a Better Future. The time is now!

Catalyst update

A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. – Lao Tzu –

We have taken that step in the past few months, and what an incredible and promising start of our journey that has been.

We will provide you with our Impact Report, which will have a special focus around our Catalyst Project, joined with interviews o

n-the ground, stories and pictures. We’ll bring you the best we can offer at this moment in joining, living and learning our journey around our Project Catalyst before the end of the year.
We don’t want to be the spoiler of this joint narrative and we therefore invite you to step or stay on board, while we’ll try to provide you with a first experience and impression of how we can jointly Build a Better Future. As a small sneak preview… Our first Carbon negative construction with local sustainable FSC certified palm trees.

Empowa’s Initial Stake Pool Offering (ISPO)

It has been two months since we launched our ISPO and we are proud to say we have over
2 200 delegators to our stake pool, staking almost 25 million ADA. The funds staked will help to realise our ambitions of offering affordable property funding in Africa.

Our stake pool partners also receive 10% of the fee ensuring both these great initiatives also benefit. These partners are Smiles on Africa for EMP1 and Proof of Africa for EMP2

What is an ISPO?
Under an ISPO an individual can choose to forgo the fee that would usually be owed to them from staking and instead receive a new token, in our case the EMP token. Empowa can then use this retained fee to fund the building of the platform and houses.

We choose to go with this approach for a few key reasons:

It allowed our community to support our project without having to sell their ADA. This reduces the risk as they still enjoy any potential upside on ADA and can even continue to hold their ADA in their wallet of choice.
There is no minimum staking threshold so it democratises access to our token by allowing anyone to get their share on the EMP token.
We have also opted to share 10% of the fee collected with our stake pool operators. These are both local African projects who are also committed to making a positive impact so the ISPO represented another way to give back.

Can I still participate?
Our ISPO will continue to run until we have distributed all of the 4 million EMP assigned. At the time of writing around 20% of this has been allocated, so there is still plenty of time to take part. For those looking to stake, please search for the pools EMP1 or EMP2 in your Cardano wallet and stake based on which pool you’d like to support.

Community empowerment and engagement
The relative newness of an ISPO-offering and the questions it raised among our active and supportive community members, led us to start an inclusive process around our ISPO-architecture and wording. A corel community review committee was formed, to shed their lights on those parts that were not yet fully clear and crystalised.
The intention to co-create and empower our community based on the core principle of full transparency, generated very positive energy, valuable insights and a much broader and firmer foundation to build upon. We are now exploring new paths to co-create and empower our community to join our journey. Interested in a more active role?
Please contact us using the contactform on te bottom of this page.

Meet the Team: Blane Edwards

“My mission is to combine my love of design and blockchain, to create innovative environmental solutions that are impactful, scalable and ultimately sustainable.”

In this section, each of the team members is asked to share their expertise, role in the team and vision for Empowa’s future

Let’s take a walk with Blane Edwards, Empowa’s Sustainability Architect.
Blane wants to contribute to holistic sustainable impact by improving the construction and housing sector Blane Edwards | LinkedIn. At present, Blane is one of the main architects to build the fundamentals of the ‘most engaged community on blockchain’. a growing and very active Empowa community. He let’s people speak through interactive approaches in our community chat, podcasts and AMAs (Ask Me Anything).

So Blane, looking at the first blue-print for community building, what do you perceive as the most interesting building blocks to ensure inclusive and decentralised decision-making for the community in the Empowa Platform?
It’s been an interesting experience so far. The community that supports Empowa is not a homogeneous group. Their commitment varies between short-term investors to long term supportive community members that want to make an impact in Africa through blockchain technology. I guess in a way our community reflects society. We are now working with and through our community to seek involvement and collective building.

What do you perceive as the most promising, yet most challenging task in community building?
I would like to contribute to a more sustainable and environmental friendly world through Empowa by helping to build a bridge between the real, on-the-ground challenges and the scattered online-community.

Is there a certain destination to this journey? And if not, what would be the first mountains where you would want to place a flag?
It’s a massive challenge that we seek to tackle. The goal is to build as many affordable houses as possible at scale, but also to inspire others who can adopt it in their own way and in line with their own vision and mission. We seek to inspire and catalyse to build a better world, not to compete.