- "help develop the ecosystem" != "easier and cheaper promotion of BitShares"
- Also, as a side note, Dan Larimer wasn't involved in development of the gateway software or BlockTrades (the company I created for trading cryptocurrency) as you imply. The extent of Dan's involvement was we were in a meeting discussing the need for gateways to allow cryptocurrency trading on the Dex. We developed a prototype of the gateway technology and licensed it out commercially to a couple of companies.
Gateway technology was necessary in BitShares to allow for other cryptocurrencies to be traded on the DEX. They solved a very fundamental problem to allow trading of other coins like BTC on the DEX. They weren't created to market BitShares, although many gateway operators did market BitShares.
One weakness with gateways, though, is they require a reputable/trustworthy gateway operator, and this is ultimately where several gateways failed. With the rise of gateways here on Hive, ETH, etc, I hope people remain cognizant of the risks, which are similar to the risks associated with keeping fund on a centralized exchange.
I was never really much involved in promotion for BitShares (i.e. marketing/advertising of BitShares), I mostly stayed on the tech side.
I don't really like getting into marketing/promotion too much, because I find that marketing and promotion teams tend to need to resort to outsized claims about the quality/performance/etc of whatever they are marketing (I felt this happened in Bitshares to some extent and far worse in most cryptocurrencies, from what I've seen). While I understand this on a pragmatic level, I find it a bit distasteful. I'd prefer a world where we can just honestly list benefits of any given solution to a problem.
..
..
..