Firstly, let's remember that we set out to redefine cryptocurrency altogether. Before Electroneum there were NO cryptocurrencies that were designed from the start to be widely and easily adopted. We have started to achieve the primary goal of Electroneum which is adoption. Did you know that Electroneum is the fastest growing cryptocurrency in the history of the world (I was going to say "Universe" but I really don't know what our competitors are doing in other spiral arms of this galaxy, let alone the entire universe). Hold on! Let's just think about that for a second! We have grown our user numbers to over 2 million holders and users of ETN in just one year. We fit the real world usage of cryptocurrency better than ANY other.
Biggest (and best) community in crypto!
Electroneum has done something here that's never been achieved elsewhere. We have an enormous community of advocates. Users who are more than just users, they are passionate about what Electroneum is trying to do. A quick Google search of any cryptocurrency will find you some videos and some images, but with ETN there is an enormous following of hundreds of thousands of amazing people who are helping to make ETN a success. Electroneum has Fan Art. Think about that. A "boring" financial product with fan art! I've never seen any credit card fan art or banking fan art! If you are one of the passionate ETN believers and advocates, then I'd like to say a whopping THANK YOU to you for your input, no matter how small. You can (and are) changing the world.
A former British Prime Minister famously quoted "There are lies, damned lies and statistics". This is certainly true of the cryptocurrency market and as such we've just installed the Alexa.com (part of Amazon) certified traffic stats tool onto our website. That shows statistics for ONLY real people. You can't fake it or exaggerate it. Did you know that if you compare the web traffic of all cryptocurrencies – we are in the top 5. If you look at active wallet numbers and actual blockchain transaction numbers, we are in the top 10 of cryptocurrencies for both. We have achieved a great deal this year, by making ETN accessible to everyone who has a smartphone.
2018 has seen us launch our Instant Payment system into BETA, be the first cryptocurrency to offer a payment integration API allowing vendors to easily accept cryptocurrency for instant transactions. We are working with the community to create easy payment plugins for all the popular ecommerce software and we've launched a number of them including WooCommerce which enables over 3m WooCommerce sites to accept ETN with around 15 minutes of work. I can't overstate how important this instant payment framework is to us achieving our goals. It is a huge leap forwards for cryptocurrency. We've seen some great vendors come on board this year and next year I am confident we will see a huge surge of vendors, once we get live on the ground in a few strategic areas.
We are the first cryptocurrency to formally adopt KYC (know your customer – which now officially goes live on the 27th December). As the authorities of the world start to accept and understand cryptocurrency you will see why our early adoption of a regulatory framework is important to growth. Governments of the world fear cryptocurrency. We are giving them something to embrace.
We have produced hundreds of thousands of lines of code this year. I've seen a lot of projects talk about valuations of crypto projects based on Github Commits (this is a place where people store their open source code). Electroneum is different to most cryptocurrencies. It has both open source blockchain code that anyone is welcome to help work on AND closed source code that runs the back end such as the app, the instant payment system, and the custodial wallet system. These are the features that are making Electroneum a success and make us a real business that corporations, governments, NGOs and institutions can feel comfortable with.
This year has been a year of preparing. Growing the team (not everyone in the team wants their picture on the website – we have over 30 full time employees and access to many more part time resources).
Last year we attended MWC (mobile world congress) as the first cryptocurrency member of the GSMA. Next February we attend again (you are going to LOVE our stand, nobody has ever done anything like it!). This time we are attending with a full product and exciting news.
We launch a number of things at that show, all of which are secret for now. Two are locked in as absolutes and there are a few more than we are trying to tie in with the show! I don't want to hint at what is coming – it's only a couple of months before you'll see for yourself, but it will be the base block from which we demonstrate to the business world just how usable cryptocurrency can be.
Apple iOS Launch (finally!)… and Cloud Mining too!
The first week of January will see our iOS app that includes cloud mining go into 100 user BETA. The second week we will release it to our 5000+ iOS testflight users (still in BETA) and (subject to testing) should be in the Apple Store by the end of January.
Cloud mining will make the distribution of ETN much more appealing to the target audience of the unbanked. Ironically with their lower powered hardware and sporadic internet access it has been the developed world that has found it easiest to obtain some ETN. That all changes with cloud mining, where someone with the latest Samsung or iPhone will get the same value in ETN as someone with an ancient smartphone and little internet access.
We can launch cloud mining for Android subject to the successful testing on Apple devices. I think it is going to be a big success and I expect to see it on Android before the MWC show in February.
As you probably know we used the Monero blockchain as a stable base for the Electroneum Blockchain when we launched. We've been moving away from Monero and have removed many of the privacy features of Monero during 2018. 2019 will see even more privacy removed, although we intend to keep stealth addresses, to prevent vendors (or anyone else) looking into your wallet and seeing how much ETN you have – like you can with Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Some say we are not doing anything particularly different or unique with the blockchain part of our project, but the reality is that we are doing the single most important thing there is with blockchain – we are making it useable in everyday life.
This week has been a particularly busy week with a few new exchanges coming on board and a launch of a very important part of our future "Gig Economy" system. You can now purchase ETN quickly and simply with a credit card at Indacoin (https://www.indacoin.com/en_GB/change/buy-electroneum-with-cardusd). We are working on others especially for the US citizens which indacoin currently does not cover.
This is important as when we launch our Gig Economy website in Q1 of 2019 it will enable the unbanked of the world to join the global economy when looking for work. This is one of the major areas that we see for opening up the world to understanding the power of cryptocurrency as people in developed nations become able to purchase digital services from the people of developing nations, with no barriers.
Developed nation businesses can purchase ETN with a credit card and buy software development, data entry, virtual business services, design, data research, social media management and much, much more, from a growing market of millennial entrepreneurs in the developing market. Everyone wins. You'll see way more of this in 2019 including an e-learning system that enables those with digital skills to remotely teach others, with an ETN incentive.
As I mentioned above this should be going live in Q1 – we are trying to get that live for MWC too, but I don't want to commit 100% to that date for this project. The good news is that we have a lot of interest in it from an NGO perspective, so when we launch it I am confident it will be a really powerful force for both enablement and empowerment of individuals but also a huge catalyst for the growth and acceptance of cryptocurrency generally.
People have been asking me "WHY!? WHHHHYYYYYY?" to the 2018, pronounced, dip in the price of cryptocurrencies across the board and I'd like to offer you my view of the 2018 cryptocurrency market and what I believe the market will focus on in the future.
The cryptocurrency markets are very new and whilst they are often compared to more mature markets, such as the equities markets, I believe there are very FEW similarities.
Some people are buying and selling cryptocurrencies based on applying technical analysis, where they look at chart patterns in the historical price and volumes to try and predict the future, others are buying based on momentum, effectively following the herd and then there are the true project believers (known in the crypto industry as hodlers!) who have bought some because they believe in the long term viability and future success of the project.
One of the most successful conventional traders in the world is Warren Buffet – he's pretty good at it too, having been the richest man in the world a few times. What should we learn from him? Firstly, he's not a huge fan of Bitcoin, in fact, he hates the stuff. Why is this and what can we learn from him? Warren hates Bitcoin because he's a value investor, and a very good one. He doesn't believe in chart analysis and he's not a fan of momentum trading. He invests in PEOPLE. He invests in TEAMS and he invests in REAL THINGS.
The cryptocurrency markets are largely coupled with Bitcoin. When it moves, the market moves, and at the moment it is almost entirely driven by the herd and not by people analysing VALUE.
Herds are happy to run off cliffs as well as away from danger, hence the large swings (in both directions of the cryptocurrency markets).
Obviously, I'm a huge fan of cryptocurrencies, so Warren and I are going to differ on some views, but I absolutely know that he would look at Electroneum in a different light to Bitcoin.
We have identified and created a model for blockchain coin emissions which allows us to create a global marketing opportunity which rewards users, partners and vendors for engagement.
We have spent time building products, solutions and partnerships rather than hyping them, meaning that most people are unaware of what has really been achieved in such a short time.
The Electroneum team are fortunate to have considerable relationships across distribution partners, working closely with a number them throughout the planning and creation of our ecosystem.
In our first year, we have developed, tested and launched a much wider set of products and partner benefits than anyone expected.
We are going in to 2019 as a gateway, with a toolkit and approach that enables partners, governments and entrepreneurs to benefit from cryptocurrency; no longer is it just trading or accumulation of crypto. We stimulate every day, continual usage in the real world.
We are focused on the fundamentals of traditional business, giving people what they want and helping to achieve financial inclusion and inclusivity, by creating an end to end ecosystem for everyday use of crypto, by anyone anywhere.
The combination of our ecosystem, our partners and the scale of our community puts us in an incredibly strong position to achieve our goals of opening the world economy to every person, including the 1.8 billion unbanked.
In short, Electroneum has an actual business behind it and is delivering REAL THINGS to REAL USERS (millions of them) via partnerships with other REAL companies. We deliver value and can show future revenue streams based on demonstrated growth. These are real life business things. We know our users and that is valuable. We have access to our users and that is valuable. We understand and can chart growth, and that is valuable. The list of differences goes on. Take a look at the metrics of some of the biggest tech "unicorns" and you'll see they are all valued on the number of real, active USERS. The only reason they have that value is because they can communicate and monetise those users, and that is where the parallel to Electroneum becomes apparent. We have no intention of substantially monetising our user base for years to come, but we have the capability to do so – and all businesses MUST have a revenue stream or potential FUTURE revenue stream.
I believe in Bitcoin, and I see it as a kind of cryptocurrency gold, but because there is so much focus on fully decentralised systems that do not know their users and are run by anonymous miners, we will find that real value investors are wary of ALL cryptocurrencies because of the mistaken impression that they are all alike.
I agree that it is hard to make a purchase of Bitcoin based on fundamentals and value, because it's not obvious where it lies. Scarcity and a belief in the project make me a Hodler, but I can't put a 'fair price' on Bitcoin. Nobody can.
Cryptocurrencies are evolving. Electroneum is unarguably more technically useful than Bitcoin because of its speed, accessibility and ability to scale, but that is not ENOUGH.
I believe that as more REAL WORLD cryptocurrency projects evolve you will see VALUE as the main driver in the cryptocurrency markets.
If a cryptocurrency project is also a conventional company with the ability to drive profits, grow larger and become a dominant brand – THEN you will see conventional investors such as Warren Buffet entering the market.
I hope that cryptocurrency volatility will be reduced as cryptocurrencies start to look and feel more like regular companies, with friendly help desks, balance sheets, contractual partnerships and accountability.