Over the past months Bitcoin has crashed from over $19,000 to below $6000. Ethereum has been hit even harder falling from a high of $1,417.38 - a 13,000% increase in a year - to the current low where it’s hovering around $200. The general trend is that smaller coins are more volatile, they fall fast and rise fast, XPAT being no exception of course. The media reports that most ICO funded startups have now spent as much as they have raised, and the token market is bleeding profusely. No doubt many good projects will fall by the wayside as a result. Nevertheless, one of Bitnation’s core traits since its inception in 2014 has been our resilience, having successfully developed award winning software and a worldwide community on a shoestring budget for years during the last crypto winter after the infamous Mt Gox crash.
Recently there has been some concerns raised in our telegram channels because one of the main wallets has been distributing tokens. This is multisig wallet 0xdf2fc872ce8837719ec0719896d0ee1de144e4ee, the Future Contributors Fund, which was set up specifically for this purpose, as outlined on the Bitnation website and whitepaper. Unfortunately liquidating tokens to reward contributors has led to turbulence in the XPAT price. To address the slide in XPAT value recently we have put in place a set of measures both to enable us to weather the crypto market storm, and to protect our investors:
We have been working hard to operationalise our revenue streams, and the latest update to our tech allows us to begin implementing them.
In-App revenues. The latest 1.3.1 release currently on Google Play and on iOS TestFlight allows us for the first time to charge additional transaction fees for Bitnation when users use Dapps. The current release charges for use of the Public Notary Dapp. More Dapps will be added with subsequent releases with more in-app revenue streams .
Listing of ECR20 Tokens in the Bitnation Jurisdiction wallet. At the moment we are only charging 3 ETH to integrate an ECR20 token into our wallet, but as the app downloads and usage grows we'll be able to charge more. It means that users can hold a range of tokens in our wallet and trade them for other tokens, ETH or XPAT to pay for services. In the near future you’ll be able to list your ST20 token as well.
Diplomatic passports. We recently released our first batch of diplomatic passports to the core team and ambassadors to test in a range of jurisdictions. We will now offer these more widely and accept applications on our website. Passports will create another revenue stream to support our development process and our Ambassador Network.
We set ourselves an ambitious development roadmap, which has delivered great technology very quickly. However we need to become leaner and meaner by trimming some fat including staff costs. It means some good contributors will leave us, but also that the core team will become more focused on delivering the central functionality of our tech. We are cutting about 50% of our current costs.
We are also examining how we could have been better prepared, and what lessons we can learn for the future. For example the rapid rise in crypto value during late 2017 should have enabled us to predict that a reversal would follow, and we could have hedged our reserves much more effectively into fiat and stable coins - something we will do in future.
Our team is working very hard to push out new releases of our tech every 3 weeks, improving existing functions and adding new ones. We believe that the software will mature sufficiently over the next six months to initiate a large go-to-market push. We have already defined an aggressive strategy to maximise market adoption. Before we can do this we need to ensure we are on the Apple Store proper (we are currently on TestFlight), we have built our desktop client and the AI driven reputation system is is integrated into the the app. Once these steps are completed - our plan is to complete in the next six months, and hopefully the crypto market recovers somewhat, we will be in a strong position to go-to-market as well as starting Phase III of the token sale - the slow release part - to be able to kickstart the Nations and Dapp developer communities.
We have always relied on our community, and right now if you want to help Bitnation realise our vision for Governance 2.0 the best strategy is simply to buy and hodl XPAT and download and use the services on our software.
Lets hodl for the crypto winter, and lets hope its not a Siberian one!
Yours always,
Susanne
