We held the CardanoRio 2022 event in Rio de Janeiro on September 23 and 24. Ambassadors from Brazil and Argentina were among the Latam community members who were present, and there was a lot of networking going on among the people working on the Cardano projects.

The event was a success, a great accomplishment for our 4-person team! About 90 people attended in person, which was fewer than we had anticipated, but the feedback we got was generally excellent! The intimate setting made it possible for everyone to interact and share ideas. It was wonderful to learn more about the Brazilian community and initiatives; throughout the event, several relationships were established and new participants were welcomed into the Cardano ecosystem.

The event was streamed live on our YouTube account, but we also collaborated with the Cardanistas channel (which has approximately 10,000 subscribers) to increase the broadcast's audience. On the first day of the event, we received more than 1000 views.

We have not been able to conduct new project activities in the last month.

The event will be held at the Lagune Barra Hotel in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on September 23 and 24. We've already confirmed about 20 speakers, and we're confident that the event will be a significant step toward strengthening the Cardano community in the country.

The course modules' videos are still being edited, but we plan to finish the project next month and launch it on September 23 and 24 at the CardanoRio 2022 event.

The proposal has finally been marked as completed. We are just finalizing the video to include it in the close report.

This past month, we finalized the rental agreement for the event venue. This week, we began publicizing the event, and the date and place have been confirmed. We are currently implementing the event website, which should be live by the following week. The event will accept pre-registration until the end of this month. We are proceeding with speaker invitations and finalizing the event's agenda.

We are currently in the process of recording and editing the videos for the subsequent modules, even though the first module is almost completed. The lengths of all of the videos that have been planned for the MOOC can be found listed in the "MOOC Video Scripts.pdf" document. The date of August 22 has been set as the new deadline for completing the project and publishing the course.

In order to prepare the new version of CardaBot for release, we have made UI and UX enhancements to the wallet connection and transaction signing pages. Finally, the tip feature has been released! The implementation of the functionality outlined in the project proposal has been finalized after numerous iterations to improve the user experience. The /tip command is now accessible in the public version of CardaBot on Telegram, and web wallets can be used to send ada to users. We are getting ready to send out the final report and put the finishing touches on the proposal right now.

Although the content is still being developed, we have already finalized the visual identity that will be used in the course materials, allowing us to start promoting the course in order to attract participants when it is published. We made some social media posts announcing the course and the module content, particularly on Instagram, where we reached over 8,000 people with a single boosted post, 327 of whom expressed interest in the course.

We have also created a new project based on the course content — Breaking The Blocks — in which we will create short videos explaining the main blockchain concepts in a format fully adapted for social media, reusing the course material. The new deadline for completing the MOOC project and publishing the course is July 22.

We have overcome the challenges of implementing the tip feature — the proposal's most important feature — and it is almost complete! All that remains is to complete the endpoint to compose the entire transaction, make visual improvements to the webpage payment, and implement the monitoring features. We believe that this will be the final progress report before finalization. The project's new completion date is set for July 14.

We preferred not to start promoting the event until we had confirmed the date and location, which delayed the publication of the event website as well. We have, however, made progress in gathering quotes for services and products for the event. We already have quotes for the stands where projects will be presented during the event, and we have completed the production of the graphic material needed to purchase gifts and team uniforms.

In this last month, we defined the platform to be used to organize the course content (Udemy), as well as the tools needed to build the supporting material. We also finalized the revision of all the course content, the most labor-intensive task so far, including also new topics and modifications based on suggestions from other community members. Our video shooting studio has also been organized and we are finalizing the script for the videos next week, when we will finally start recording.

In this last month we have worked to finalize the entire visual identity for the event and have made progress in negotiating services for the event. We already have a pre-defined venue for the event with a budget and an available date, but we haven't made a final decision yet because we are negotiating the possibility of another free venue, which would reduce the budget allocated to the venue and would allow us to invest more in the infrastructure to receive the participants. We are also looking for sponsors for the event as a way to complement the budget. We have a list of potential speakers from community and their topics, and we hope to start confirming the first names in the next couple of weeks. We already have a partially implemented website that should go public early next month, when we will officially start publicizing the event.

We have implemented all the user-initiated commands that we defined in the bot proposal on Catalyst, with the exception of the /tip feature due to the difficulties described. Throughout this month, we fixed some errors in the stake and saturation information, implemented the entire back-end for building the transaction that will be triggered by the bot command, with only the integration of this back-end with the payment page of the tip feature remaining. We need two more sprints than planned to finish the project, and we are currently in the middle of the second to last one. The new project completion date with delivery of all features of the proposal is planned for June 17th.

We completed our back-end migration and implemented the new replies for the bot in the previous month, and it is now running with all new endpoints implemented in a demo version (@devcardabot). The new version will be available to the public next week. We are currently building the payment page that will be part of the main feature (/tip).

We decided to use the budget for equipment rental and the studio to purchase our own equipment in order to achieve greater consistency in the production of subsequent content created after the proposal. The majority of the studio equipment has already been purchased and tested, and we are in the process of preparing a space to shoot the course videos. We are also refining the course content, which should be completed early next month, when we will begin the first recordings.

We conducted several discussions to refine the target audience of the event in order to get right the choice of talks and topics relevant to the audience. We obtained three quotes for event venues, as well as several other quotes for services and equipment. We expect to finalize an agreement with one of the previously mentioned venues in the next couple of weeks, which will also determine the event's final date.

We are currently revising the entire course structure, updating the content with suggestions that came up in the last stages of Fund7. We are also organizing all the visual components that will be utilized during the course.

At the moment, our focus is on defining the requirements for the event venue. We've had multiple discussions concerning the type of venue and how it might affect the event's dynamics. We've already decided that we want to create an event that encourages social contact in the community rather than just talks and presentations. In this regard, we have already begun to explore suitable venues for the event and to get estimates for venue rents. We hope to have a confirmed venue by next month, at which point we will begin planning the event's content.

We switched our back-end from Blockfrost to a server running the cardano-graphql component in order to construct the new CardaBot functionalities. As developers, we have notice a lack of detailed documentation about cardano-graphql and an easier environment for configuring such an important component for Cardano-based applications.This has been our biggest challenge so far.