Transcript of AMA with CEO of PointPay — Vladimir Kardapoltsev

CEO Vladimir Kardapoltsev answered questions from our customer community. Vladimir Kardapoltsev spoke about withdrawal issues, PointPay’s roadmap, and the impact of the Russia-Ukraine conflict on the company’s operations. Our CEO also shared insights regarding the expansion of the PXP token utility and much more.

Below you can find a summary of the AMA held on the 31st of March, 2022.

AMA Transcript

Vladimir: Hello everyone. I hope you can all hear me well. I know there are 50 of you watching. Can you see me?

Alina (Host): I can see you now. Should we start?

Vladimir: Yeah, let’s start.

Alina (Host): Okay. Hello everyone. Welcome to our AMA session. We’re so excited to see you all here. How about starting with current news and announcements? The floor is yours.

Vladimir: Thank you very much. You know, it has been a while since we’ve all met. I think the last time we met was at the end of the fourth quarter in December 2021. In the meantime, we had an AMA session with WhiteBit, which is posted on their website. The link is on our YouTube channel. We had Twitter and Telegram AMA sessions. So this is our first televised AMA session for this year and I welcome you all here.

I’ve read a lot of your questions. I think we’ve received about 100 of them. Some of them have been repetitive, so we have grouped them together. So, the questions will be organized by topic. We smooshed them together to make it even more interesting.

We also have some good news. The exchange that we worked incredibly hard on has finally been fixed. We’ve rewritten and deployed it. So the exchange, which is the foundation of our platform, has been completely redone. That’s a big, big success for us. We are ready to build new products on that foundation. So that’s great news!

Secondly, we’ve finished our launchpad. I will send you the link in Telegram so you can all take a look at it. It’s working great right now, but it does not have any projects on it yet. We are still scouting for new projects and I will tell you about that a little bit later in one of the questions.

And of course, today we had our 17th PXP burn with 2.2 million PXP tokens. That is a great announcement as well. I will now take some of your questions from the community. Alina, Would you like to read them for me?

Alina (Host): Yes. The very first question is from Artemis and he is asking about the current problems with withdrawals. Please talk openly about the issues that are happening right now with the withdrawals and why they have not been fixed yet.

Vladimir: Well, first of all, I know about your pain, and I want to apologize for that. After we fixed the exchange, this is our most important problem and our priority. I hope that soon we will be able to say that all of our withdrawals are going smoothly as well. The reality is that only 10% of our users are affected. The majority of users have no problems at all.

This is mainly because the old team did not keep logs and records of certain high-volume transactions. They did not think it was necessary. And sometimes, for example, if you have a high balance on your wallet, and we do not have records of where you got that balance, we might suspect that it’s fraud. So we might ask you to confirm that you actually sent us the money. That’s part of our security.

Secondly, it is also a regulatory reason. As you know, we are in the process of obtaining a crypto license in the European Union as well as a banking license. So we already got the crypto license in Lithuania and that meant we had to change our system. That’s the reason why you have been experiencing problems with withdrawals since September. At that time, we started to change the architecture of our system to comply with the European Union data and financial regulations. Because we made these changes, we were able to obtain the Lithuanian license. But on the other hand, we had a lot of delays in our withdrawals. So this is a double-edged sword.

At the moment we are still trying to apply for the license in Estonia. That’s one of the most important licenses for us right now. We are almost there. I think we will hopefully have good news very, very soon.

And a few words about the EU regulations. We have to check every single person, every single transaction that exceeds €1,000. We have to check the KYC of that person. Furthermore, we have to check that this person is not on the anti-money laundering list, the politically exposed list, or the terrorist financing list. Because of all these things together, it can sometimes take a while before we can process these transactions.

What else? We are currently working on optimizing all of these. I know it’s not up to standard yet. We will be there. That’s literally my top priority. I have calls with the people who are dealing with this issue and they have to solve it manually. They have to write the automated system every single day. That takes a lot of time. You can’t develop a perfect system from scratch in a week. But I know we will fix it in the end.

The reason is that we have to check every single transaction against these lists and make sure that we comply with EU regulations and that we will move to the single balance system very, very soon. Right now, we have quite a lot of balances, which is quite uncomfortable. I think that’s the way Binance was written. Other exchanges don’t use such a complicated system. It’s not really right. If you have a large number of balances, you have to keep a large number of records. It’s not really seamless. I think at the beginning of summer we will move to a single balance system. That’s going to make everything a lot easier for people to review each transaction. So that’s what’s happening with our withdrawals right now.

Alina (Host): Got it. Thank you. Another question is when will new trading pairs and tokens be added to the ecosystem?

Vladimir: Good question. Again, the short answer is the end of spring. So only two months away, maybe even sooner. I don’t know. As I said, we have completely rewritten our exchange. We have completed — a new “gateway”. That’s the way our products communicate with each other. That’s the messenger that holds everything together. And in the old system, it was very difficult to add new tokens. You literally had to insert a huge piece of code that had to be written in a very unwieldy manner. And you had to insert it into our system, which was not the way most systems operate. We completely rewrote it and made it more flexible and scalable, so it’s much easier to insert each token into our system. Now it’s just a matter of time.

We are going to introduce the ERC-20 tokens first because they are the easiest to add and I think they cover about 95% of the tokens. So each token will take us no more than an hour to add to our system, if not less.

And then we will focus on blockchains other than Ethereum. So we will do that a little bit later. But we have a clear plan that we want to follow through. We have ranked the top tokens that we want to include in our system, and we will implement them very soon. So I think you will see at least ten new tokens by the end of April. So there are big changes coming very soon.

And we know that right now we are going to have about ten blockchains and most of the major cryptocurrencies. Major cryptocurrency exchanges have hundreds and thousands of pairs, and we are not really in line with industry standards. So we are aware of this problem. We have fixed the root cause of why it was not possible before. Now we will be able to add them much easier, faster, and more seamlessly, and you’ll see many more currencies there. And with the new fixed exchange, every single transaction will be much faster. Yes, that’s the answer to your question.

Alina (Host): Great. Thank you. And another question, what is the timeline for the release of the team tokens?

Vladimir: The question that was asked very often in the last months. First of all, it’s not about the team tokens, it’s about the founder. I just think that at the moment no decision has been made, but the only thing I can say at the moment is that they will be released only when the price of the token reaches the ICO price of $0.50. Right now, we are trying to focus on development, and that’s the most important thing we are trying to do right now.

We do not have any plans right now, but we will certainly wait until the price of the PXP reaches the ICO value. We have certain contingencies and safeguards in place. So, the price of the token will not plummet once we will release those tokens into the market.

Alina (Host): That sounds good. Thank you very much for that answer. And now let us go into a little more detail about the KYC. What is the current status of the KYC and when can it be fully deployed?

Vladimir: Well, KYC is ready. I think about 10,000 people have already passed it. Well at certain stages. It will be available to the general public as soon as we fix all the problems in our system and start our mass marketing campaign.

The current system is available on the website and also on all our apps. We are using artificial intelligence to process the KYC request because it takes a normal human about 5 to 10 minutes to process a KYC request, while it takes an AI system about 1 to 2 seconds. Of course, we match users with all the databases that we have to use to check every single person in the politically exposed, anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing databases, and so on.

It would be impossible to check 250,000 people manually on that list. So we have to do it through the machine. We already have a KYC officer who sets up all these policies, and he has already vetted quite a number of people when they pass their KYC checks. And the number of users passing the KYC procedure is going to increase very, very soon. That has to do with regulatory reasons mostly.

Alina (Host): Perfect. The next questions are about the launchpad. So I’ll just summarize them. When will the first project be added to the PointPay Launchpad and what will be the PXP utility in the launchpad?

Vladimir: As I said before, Launchpad is fully ready to accept new projects. We have 3 to 5 projects that we are at the advanced stages of listing. First of all, we need to check the documents and verify if they are in accordance with our legal framework. The marketing and token market making have to be right. So hopefully you will see a project at the beginning of the summer.

The system is ready, so we are just finding the first project that will be our flagship project. For us, of course, quality is more important than quantity, because there are so many exchanges where you could list your tokens. And we really want to focus on the quality of the projects.

What else? We are still developing our voting system. It should be ready by the end of spring, and that’s how the PXP will be used in a new way in Launchpad. The ballot system where PXP holders will have some voting rights in selecting which projects will be listed on our platform. So that’s quite exciting as well.

We are currently working on it so the model is still subject to change. At the moment, our plans are that voting will be performed by staking your PXP tokens for seven days and you will have to specify the coin or project that you want to win. Staking will not only count as votes but also allow you to earn rewards either in PXP or in the token you choose. The projects that receive a sufficient level of support we will shortlist. They will be reviewed by our listing committee and listed very quickly. So that’s the status of our launchpad.

Alina (Host): Okay. Awesome. The next two questions are about marketing. I think those are the most frequently asked questions lately. So the first question is about aggressive marketing in the second quarter — are you planning to put the price forward? And the next question is, are you going to partner with influencers for aggressive marketing? Why is it so important to give interviews and talk to the media?

Vladimir: Thank you for your question. I think when you said “put price forward”, you meant the PXP price forward. As I said, we are trying to improve our product. Our focus is on development at the moment. We also do a lot of awareness and retention marketing, but not to the full extent, because we don’t want to bring all the people to the product.

We do quite a lot of awareness and retention marketing as well, but it is not at the full scale because we don’t want to, you know, bring all of the people to the product. That doesn’t really work because when you catch someone’s attention, they go to your platform. What happens next? They see a platform that doesn’t work. They turn away. We will never get them back. We want to make sure the product is right so that when they come to our platform, they see how great it is. They see: “Wow, this is a great product! I am going to sign up, and deposit some money”, and that’s how we make cash.

In terms of the price prediction for PXP — I don’t know. I said my aspirations for the price of PXP, but at the moment it’s a free market. So it’s all up to you guys. I can only influence the PXP price by improving PointPay as a product and making sure we have the best platform and system possible.

When it’s fully ready, we will start our aggressive marketing campaign. We are already working with a whole bunch of influencers, for example, YouTubers. There are quite a few articles that will publish about us. I am scheduled for an interview next Tuesday. We are doing that in different communities as well.

So we did one for Russia and one for Brazil. And that raises awareness. If you have any suggestions, for instance, your favorite crypto YouTuber, send them to me. If you see the CEO of PointPay on Telegram, send it to me and we will contact him and ask if we can work together.

What else? You know, YouTube and interviews. That’s what makes us trustworthy, so people know that we are legit, that we have a CEO who shows his face and who can talk about the product and is not just a nameless product without real people behind it. And I think that will ultimately impact the price.

We had one of our biggest interviews with Coindesk last week. They published the interview with me on all their social media, on Facebook, and on Twitter. I think the article got about 7 million views. I think Coindesk is just one of 112 accounts that Elon Musk follows. So there’s a big chance that Elon Musk knows about PointPau because he saw it in his Twitter feed and also saw my beautiful face. That makes me very proud. So it’s all about making the company as transparent as possible and raising awareness for all the publications in the industry. And we hope that in the future, for example, in the financial and investment industries, we will be in publications like the Financial Times, or The Economist as well. We want to be there, and I think we will get there at one point.

Alina (Host): Absolutely. And the next two questions are about the roadmap. So the first question is, what is the detailed roadmap for the next three months?

Vladimir: Well, you can find the detailed roadmap on our website.

• First of all, in the next three months, we plan to improve the backend of the exchange.
• Furthermore, we plan to introduce new orders. At the moment you have limit and market orders, and we’ve introduced the stop-limits orders as well. We are planning to expand this offering to other orders, like fill or kill (FOK), etc.
• We plan to start working on APIs for trading.
• We plan to start developing the margin trading on the solid foundations of PointPay.
• As for the payment system, we plan to work with new payment providers.
• We are doing a big redesign of all of our products. We’ve completely redesigned all of our webs. So now it’s a matter of implementing that redesign. You can see the new design in some areas of the platform, for instance, the blog. It’s been implemented in the new version of the design and I think ultimately, we are going to redesign every single part of the web platform and mobile app. I think you will be able to see the new design of the mobile app at the end of April. That’s really great because we have been working on it for a very, very long time. Right now, the design of the platform is a little bit outdated. We know that it looks fine, but it could be better. The new one will look absolutely amazing. It would, you know, surpass any design of Coinbase and of course, Binance. It would be seamless, and very intuitive. We will also make a lot more improvements in terms of the user interface and the user experience. So here we go.

Alina (Host): Sounds good. You’re very excited about the new design. The next question is on the same topic, but on current events in the world. Will the current conflict in Eastern Europe affect the roadmap?

Vladimir: Short answer. No, absolutely not. First of all, we are not a Russian company. Yes, we have quite a few Russian-speaking employees, but that does not affect us in any way. We are not registered in Russia. We will not have any sanctions.

You know, I do not live in Russia, even though I have a Russian name. Only 5% of our users are Russian speakers. This is not only Russia but also Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, etc. So it should not affect us in any way.

As for my experience with the Ukrainian employees, some of our teammates who are working in Ukraine were affected. You can read about my experience in the Coindesk article that, as I mentioned, someone from my team posted on social media. If you have not read it yet, please do. It’s very interesting.

We had some hiccups, but we were prepared for it. We anticipated the attack, we read the news. We did a lot of contingency planning. We learned from a lot of events in the world because something similar happened in Kazakhstan not too long ago. And we learned that if something like that even remotely happened, we made contingency planning for enforcement, which means we could ask our employees to relocate. We could offer them money to do that. But if they are not willing to leave the conflict zone, we cannot just pick them up and move them from there. So they have to rely on themselves.

Alina (Host): Then the next question is more situational. For example, if I am a new or potential customer and I have an account on other platforms, what would you say or do to get me to switch to PointPay and buy PXP?

Vladimir: You know, you are at the forefront of the crypto revolution because PointPay wants to bridge the gap between traditional banking and the cryptocurrency world. We want to liberate 7 billion people. We want them all to use our products. We are developing products that form an ecosystem. So it’s not just an exchange or just the bank. It’s a holistic product. And we see it as an ecosystem that covers all the needs of crypto traders.

Our ecosystem at the moment stands on four pillars: the crypto bank, the crypto exchange, the payment system, and the wallet. And of course, we will be expanding our services sooner and making everything more secure. Our platform would appeal to a lot more people. We’re still at the beginning and I’m 100% sure that great times are ahead of us.

Alina (Host): Yep. I agree with you 100%. So the next question would be, where do you see PointPay a year from now?

Okay. As I said, you can find our roadmap on our website. You know all our deadlines are written there. First of all, I think the idea that we want to complete our ecosystem is stated in our white paper. We want to take our system to new heights. We want to launch our aggressive marketing. I think that’s one of the goals that I am striving for PXP. At the moment we have 250,000 users. I want us to have at least a million by the end of this year. I want us to be self-sufficient. I want us to make money and reinvest that money in creating an even better ecosystem, increase awareness of our system, to invest it in marketing and new products.

We want to be at the forefront of the crypto industry at the moment. We are playing catch-up, but I am sure that very soon we will be able to overtake all these industry leaders and be the first. I would like us to:

• promote the marketplace worldwide;
• finally, integrate virtual credit cards and debit cards;
• establish the NFT platform and launch a lot of new projects that will bring in millions of dollars and be incredibly successful. So more people will want to come to us and get listed on our platform.
• be the best in terms of trading experience, in terms of UX and UI. I want us to offer margin, options and futures trading. I want us to have the best APIs for banking, wallets, exchange and so on.

So those are my aspirations. I think I’m very optimistic.

Alina (Host): Well, we are all in these difficult times in the world, you know, after COVID and now the war that is going on, we all have to stay a little bit optimistic. So I agree with that. The next question comes from one of our Portuguese-speaking brilliant members. The Portuguese-speaking community is inquiring about subtitles to videos we put out and transcripts, etc. So users are able to get all of these things done and provide some subtitles in Portuguese for them.

Vladimir: Consider it done. You know, our Portuguese-speaking community is not Portugal, it’s Brazil and other related countries. It’s our second largest after the English-speaking community. So we appreciate you, of course. Consider it done tomorrow. I will make sure that the weekly updates are also posted in Portuguese, and some will post the subtitles to one of my videos, although that might take a little bit of time, maybe a couple of hours, but it will get done, I promise you.

We have already talked to quite a number of Brazilian and Latin American influencers. We did an interview with Pedro — you all know Pedro. He has posted brilliant videos that include an interview with him in English, but he has translated it into Portuguese. So I hope many of you have seen it and I will do much more for our Portuguese community. We appreciate you very much. Thank you very much. Obrigado.

Alina (Host): Okay. And then I have a couple of final questions from the community. One of the questions is when will the PXP utility be increased? Aside from Launchpad and staking, what utility are you working on for the PXP token? Would it be possible to trade other coins with it?

Vladimir: Again, great question. At the moment we have a number of perks and incentives that the PointPay customers have when they own PXP tokens:

• You can lower make-or-take fees if you place PXP tokens on the exchange.
• We have our monthly PXP burn program. We take quite a lot of PXP tokens out of circulation. That should eventually support the price. Maybe it’s not that obvious right now, but it’s going to make a difference very, very, very soon.
• You will be able to get high yields, I think up to 20% annually on a progressive scale.
• In our crypto bank, you will be able to send instant payments to other customers for free within the PointPay ecosystem.

I think I mentioned that before, and right now you can trade your PXPs on four amazing platforms that are all top-20 platforms — WhiteBit, Bittrex Global, Bitrue, and BitGlobal.

In terms of future utility, we remain committed to having our token listed on a Tier 1 exchange by the end of this year, which will allow users to trade PXP against other very popular tokens with amazing liquidity. Right now, we are in talks with three Tier 1 exchanges.

We will also introduce margin trading, options trading, and futures trading on our platform. And there will also be reduced fees and discounts for people who hold PXP as well.

As for our Launchpad, users will be able to use their PXP token holdings to vote for projects, and they will also have exclusive access to some token sales.

We also plan to integrate small balance conversion to PXP, as is the case with Binance. That has really driven up the token price. We are currently looking at the technical aspects of such a conversion.

I think that’s the end of our main questions. Now we will answer some questions from the community. Please ask them, Alina, or would you be able to fish something out?

Alina (Host): Okay. Maurice asks how they can apply for KYC?

Vladimir: At the moment you just have to hold quite a lot of funds. It will be automatically available to you if your account exceeds a certain amount. I won’t tell you how much, but there is a limit. So once you reach a certain balance in our system, you will be automatically asked to complete the KYC.

Alina (Host): Okay. And another question that I see here in the chat is from Anthony who wants to know when PXP will start trading on the exchange.

Vladimir: Well, you can already trade PXP on four exchanges. And we will, as I said before, add PXP to our platform when we will be listed on the Tier-1 exchange. I have already said that this is one of the requirements of the top-tier exchanges. If we are an exchange, our token should not be listed on our own exchange because they need to verify the trading volumes independently. And if we have, for example, the top-20 exchanges, their combined volume is several million. That is a 100% verifiable trading volume.

But if, say, 60% of our trading volume comes from our own exchange and the rest comes from other top exchanges. The Tier 1 exchanges will say, “How can we ensure that? How can we be sure that all the volume on your exchange is real?’ So that’s the question. After we list it on the Tier 1 exchange, it takes a couple of days to get it into our system. That’s not even technically a question. It’s a matter of us applying for a Tier-1 listing. And that’s our main goal right now.

Alina (Host): Right. Another question is, can you tell us more about the banking license?

Vladimir: My lawyers have told me that I am not allowed to tell you. We are currently applying for two banking licenses — one offshore and one non-offshore. We are also considering buying a bank, but that is the only thing I can tell you. It’s all very hush-hush and confidential. But we’re working on it.

Alina (Host): Right. Another question is when the new platform will be released and if it’s ready.

Vladimir: The release of the new platform? What platform?

Alina (Host): I assume that they are most likely talking about the redesign.

Vladimir: The redesign of the web will be completed in the next 2 to 3 months, maybe sooner. The mobile app redesign will be available very, very soon indeed. The worst-case scenario is the end of April. The more optimistic scenario is mid-April.

Alina (Host): Okay. Another question is about the NFTs and marketing. Is there any news on that?

Vladimir: I think we are working on the NFT platform at the moment. It will be launched either as a PointPay product or also as a standalone product because it does not really fit into our financial ecosystem. It’s still something related to crypto, so we still want to do it. We have developed a platform, but we’re currently working on the final details and no decision has been made on whether it will be a separate standalone platform or a PointPay affiliated platform within our ecosystem.

Alina (Host): Perfect. And then one more question: when will you be in Dubai in the Middle East.

Vladimir: When will I be in Dubai? I would really like to come to Dubai. I think there will be a conference there very soon. I think we have a business development representative who attended the recent Binance party. And we have a representative in Dubai who handles all of our partnerships with people in the Middle East. Unfortunately, I am not there myself. If my time and schedule allow, I might travel there this year or next year. But right now I am living in Europe, so I will most likely appear in Paris or Istanbul.

Alina (Host): Okay. Sounds good.

Vladimir: I think that’s it. We have done almost everything. 45 minutes. Well, I will say a few last words.

Alina, thank you very much for your help with the AMA session. It was great talking to you. You were absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much for being here.

Dear community — thank you so much for tuning in. I hope I answered some of your questions. If you have any other questions, please ask me in the DMs on Telegram (It’s CEO PointPay), or on Twitter (Vladimir_Card). I will do my best to answer all your questions.

We are moving according to our roadmap. We are very happy with our progress. You know, things, Rome was not built in a day. So we are making tremendous progress and I am very, very pleased with that. You know, when I came systems were in tatters. Now we have a fully functional product and we are going to build on that success in the future. And I see great heights for PointPay and also for the price of the PXP token. So thank you very much for tuning in. I hope you have a great day. I hope you have a great weekend. And I’ll see you tomorrow for our weekly update. Well, thank you very much and goodbye.