Transcript of AMA with CEO of PointPay — Vladimir Kardapoltsev
CEO Vladimir Kardapoltsev answered questions from our customer community. Vladimir Kardapoltsev spoke about two new products — PointPay Escrow and PointPay Talent, latest token burn, the release of a new design for both web and mobile, and adding of the exchange to the mobile apps. 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 28th of April, 2022.
Alina: Okay, so hello everyone. Welcome to the AMA session. We’re super excited to see you all here. How about we start with some news and announcements Vlad? The floor is yours.
Vlad: Well, thank you very much Alina. It’s always great talking to you! So you know, as we do monthly, I’ve tried to hold AMA sessions every single month. I’ve stuck to that rule ever since I became a CEO. We did experiment with a couple of formats in February and March, but nonetheless, it’s going to be a regular thing. So I’m going to announce that on the 26th of May, on the last Thursday of May, there is going to be another AMA session. So put it all in your diaries, that’s going to happen. I want to make sure that I’m conducting an AMA session at least once a month. That’s a good thing.
Why do I want to conduct it once a month? Because we have good news to share, and I miss you all guys. You give me a tremendous amount of energy to be a CEO, I read all of your positive comments, and your direct messages and that bumps up my spirits every single day. Thank you very much for that!
So we have collected over 150 questions this time. That’s incredibly good! We’ve organized them into groups, and we’ve kinda paraphrased some of them in order to make them better, and we also combined some questions together, so we obviously didn’t miss anything. So that is going to be about 15 questions. We’ve included at least three questions on the same topic into one answer.
First of all, I would like to introduce you to the new products that we added to our system. So the first product is called PointPay Escrow. So what is a PointPay Escrow? This is a platform that allows you to sell and buy goods and services online with the confidence of a crypto smart contract. So a smart contract is a thing that you cannot get out of. And when it’s put in stone, you can’t renegotiate again. If you enter it you have to complete it. So it provides safe and convenient protection for both — a buyer and a seller. And it was born out of the wish for a simple, transparent, and secure way for customers to transact on their own terms. So for example, we hold the payment. And we create a contract, and we make sure that the contract is completed. And when it is completed we will release the payment. So this administrative cost is going to be on the outside. And pretty much this system protects buyers and sellers, so if you’re about to get the contract, and you are not sure about your counterparty, if it’s a new company, or if it’s a company that deals with crypto, or maybe it has some bad reputation, you might consider entering into an escrow contract. And we will provide you with this opportunity so we will bear the reputation and the financial risk. Your money will be put on hold and we will release it when you will be satisfied that your contract is completed. Pretty much, it’s to provide security on both sides. On the side of the contractor, because that contractor knows that you actually have the money to pay them, and protects the buyer, making sure the counterparty will complete the task as well. So this is quite an innovative way of doing business. So we will act as a neutral third party, and pretty much we will bear all of the risks for a very, very small fee. So we will be building contracts, including international contracts. So we want to bring the world of crypto into play, and I think it’s incredibly good. I think it’s one of the ways our brand will expand into the future.
We started this thing about half a year ago. So at the moment, we have the fully working MVP. Later we are going to have a lot more features and a lot more promotions for this service. It is now available on our website. It is fully functioning. So what else? We will provide you with 24/7 support. That means that you know any time of the day you will be able to use our platform, and our wonderful support staff will be able to solve any single issue that you might have. With that, you will be able to pay in crypto. So we support 14 of the most popular currencies such as BTC, ETH, or USDT, and our own native token, PXP. So your funds will be protected by the security of a crypto asset or a stable coin whatever risk you want to take. For example, let’s say you want to contract somebody to make me a video. I would answer a contract on PointPay’s platform, and we will create a smart contract with all the details. We will enter into a contract together, and after that person will complete the task, I will transfer the money. And after the person will complete the task, we will send the proof of work to PointPay and it will say ok, you’ve done that so it’s brilliant. I will say that I’m satisfied with the work, so afterward the PointPay bill will release the money, and will take you a very very small fee for doing so.
So we hope we bring the world of traditional finance further into the cryptosphere. So I think this is an exciting announcement and this is one of the ways that we will be developing further.
So the second product that we want to announce is quite similar. It is called PointPay Talent. It’s a working name, so we might rename it to something else. It is very similar to the way that, for example, Fiverr or Upwork work. So this is the solution to solving problems and finding and managing remote professionals on a global scale. So, if you want to hire the best people regardless of their location, you will use PointPay Talent. We may change that name but anyways, and yet again, it embodies the smart contracts, embodies our mission of making cryptocurrencies available to all the world, and pretty much applies the virtues and the principles of distributed networks to everyday life. So pretty much this platform will connect remote professionals with employers seeking services. So for example, we want to make an interface video of how quick exchange works. Usually, we do the voiceovers, and for example, I want to do it in Portuguese. Because Portuguese is an incredibly important community for us. So I don’t speak Portuguese myself. And we don’t have employees who speak Portuguese. So we will go to the PointPay website to post an ad or find a professional who does this kind of work. And they will reply. They will say ok, it will cost this much money. So then they will enter into a smart contract which will mean that all those negotiating terms are in place. They will complete their voice-over, and I will transfer the money to PointPay. They will hold it while that person is doing so, and they will release it when the person will complete that task.
So this will help the company grow, it will help the global digital economy to grow, and it will help the talent and the business to come together. I really like the work of Fiverr and Upwork, but sometimes they need modern technology. So we will provide blockchain technology for this world by pretty much utilizing digital, gig economy and using the distributed network in order to complete this task. And I think this is a new exciting way of doing so. The person will have to write specifications and have to submit the proof of quality.
It will be free for everybody to use this service. You will be able to hire somebody, will be able to submit your ads for free, could search for people for free, and you will be able to get paid in cryptocurrency. It’s an emerging trend of the globetrotters, for the digital nomads nowadays. We will again support all of the cryptocurrencies that we support at the moment. As we expand the number of cryptocurrencies, you will be able to select from such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDT, PXP, etc, etc. So I think it’s a great way to grow our platform
I’m going to move on. My third news of the day is that there is a burn baby, burn! We’ve completed our 18th burn at 2,300,000 PXP. We burnt it this morning. So this is a regular thing that we want to do. We are not committing to the timeline, but we made it today. So congratulations to everybody on that! This is actually a lot harder than you think, because we have to buy from the open market, and take it out of circulation. It takes approximately a whole month to complete it, but I think this time around it costs about $50,000, so you know it’s not a free thing.
In other news, the exchange is fully functional right now. We have improved upon the bugs that we had before. So it is now fully functioning in terms of the speed, the visibility of the graphs, the execution of orders, and the depth of the market. So now you can enjoy it also in our new design. As you might know, the exchange was not available on your telephones, so now it is available on the mobiles. It took us a lot of work: fixing the exchange itself and introducing it to mobile devices. It’s finally done, which is incredibly great news! New functionality for our mobile app, the most emerging interfaces that we have at the moment. It is great!
So what else has been happening with regards to our mobile apps? We’ve updated all about apps according to the new design. If it’s automatically refreshed, you will be able to see it. If you haven’t refreshed, please do so. It is now available on Android and iOS. Our old design was about 3 years old, and the new design is slick, it’s fresh, it’s very similar to Coinbase, it’s very similar to Revolut, so it’s absolutely great. We are moving in step with the times, so it’s great news for us. We released that little video back in the day, where we showed what the screens would look like. I think not all of the screens are available yet, but I think by the end of next month we will be able to release all of them. We’re working incredibly hard on doing so.
What else has been happening? We’ve updated the front page of our website, literally half an hour ago. It has been deployed, so if you go to the main page, it has been fully updated. You can see the new design there. We will update every single page by the end of the month. So hopefully by the next AMA, May 26th, you will be able to see the new complete version of the website.
The old website is a bit old, not user-friendly, however this website is great. It’s absolutely amazing! It’s very user-friendly and very intuitive. It has been stripped down to all the core functions so it’s really great to look at. I’m very proud to announce we have released our website. We have released our mobile app, we have pretty much rewritten all of our exchange, it has been updated on our mobile apps, and we have introduced you to new products — Escrow and PointPay Talent. So what a month! Many months of work but we managed to release it. So it’s absolutely great, and I’m very, very proud of our team for doing so. So thank you very much for that. I think I’ve said enough at the moment. So Alina, I believe we have some questions.
Alina: Yes, thank you so much for sharing such good things. And we are moving to our questions that we’ve collected from our community. And the first question is:
— When do you plan to add new coins / tokens to the PointPay ecosystem to attract new customers? Before or after aggressive marketing starts? Also, do you have plans to propose staking programs for those new coins / tokens?
And i’m gonna combine these two questions together:
— So the last AMA you said PointPay would be adding more trading pairs at the end of April. Is that still on track?
Vlad: Great question! So since we have added the exchange to mobile apps, we are now physically able to add the tokens seamlessly. Beforehand, we had some internal problems that prevented us from doing so. In the old system, we were able to add the tokens but it wasn’t as easy as it should have been. So we’ve fixed all of those problems. We have rewritten everything, and now it is very easy. So hopefully at the end of spring, new tokens will be added to our ecosystem. It will most definitely happen before the aggressive marketing. When will we finish integration? At the moment, we have many, many balances in our system. Our system was designed the same way as Binance was, where you have quite a lot of balances for every single service that you use. Binance combined some of the balance together, but it’s still quite a lot of balances at the moment. We are now going to be moving forward with pretty much condensing all those balances together. It doesn’t really make sense to have that many, and that will make the adding of the tokens a lot easier for us. So it should be completed by the next AMA, if everything goes well. Definitely by the end of the second quarter, but hopefully by the end of Spring. That’s an optimistic deadline.
So we have integrated the liquidity providers. I hope that by Q2 we will have at least 100 new pairs. At the moment, we have about 14, which is definitely not enough. Binance, as well as almost all other exchanges, have thousands. We had some internal problems, we’ve solved those problems, and now we will be able to add them seamlessly. We will most definitely start with the top 20 tokens, and then will continue with everything that is written on the Ethereum contract. So we’ll start with those, and then we will move forward with the others. Then afterwards we will add the native networks, which unfortunately take a bit of time to add. So for an ERC20 contract, it may take us a day, because there is a lot of front end that we have to integrate. Adding the visuals is actually the hardest part with regards to time. On the other hand, in terms of the native networks, adding the backend is more difficult. So we will start with the easiest, then we will move to the hardest later. But yeah, I hope by the end of Q2 we will roll out 100 new pairs. So that’s the answer, next question, please.
Alina: Thank you for answering the question. The next one is:
— As you know, CMC ranks the exchanges according to the “Confidence Degree” criteria. So even if an exchange lists a small number of Coins and has less volume, we can see it in high rankings.
PointPay will have active traffic after Launchboard. In order for our exchange to be interesting and preferred, it will be a marketing in itself for CMC to be at the top of CMC’s list by providing the criteria for the degree of trust. Is the team working on this?
Vlad: Yeah, for those of you who are wondering, CMC is a Coin Market Cap. They are pretty much like Moody’s, or an S&P of the crypto world, or the Reuters. So we’ve already applied for the token listing on both CoinGecko, and CoinMarketCap. So in terms of tokens, we are already there, but in terms of the exchange, unfortunately it’s a lot harder. We submitted our application about a month ago to CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko, but pretty much the ball is on their side. We provided them with all of the API’s that they requested. However, they have strict rules for listings. So by the end of the summer, we want to be in CoinMarketCap’s top 200 exchanges. And probably by the end of the year, that’s my hope, that’s my big hope, that we will be in the top 50. But for the top 200 they have incredibly strict criterias that is very hard to fulfill. They do audits of the documents, they do audits of the team, they do so many different audits. And we have submitted them with all the information, but it’s on their side. We cannot do anything about it. We will provide them with all of the information, and we are obviously willing to provide them with any information that they will ask us. We are very transparent, so there wouldn’t be any problem with that. And of course to promote a launch board, the CMC ranking is incredibly important. That is probably going to be our number one marketing tool. You know, if you’re in the top 50, you can ask for a lot of money, and if you’re in the Top 200, you can only ask for a smaller amount of money, and if you’re not there, nobody is going to come to you for a listing. So it’s a zero.
Now, moving on to the question about confidence score. They have a very complex calculation criteria. They use machine learning and some AI’s. They’ve made it quite advanced, so you would have to have a certain proportion of a liquidity score, the volume, the web traffic, so that they know that if we send them an API saying that we have, for example, 200k transactions per day, but we have under 100k users — they will be able to tell that we are probably not supplying them with the correct information. We will have to have certain licenses, and will have to have them audited by a reputable third party. So with regards to our finances, with regards to a smart contract, etc, we have to have quite a significant number of people in our social media. And lastly, we have to have the minimal data irregularities, which means that every single message and every single piece of information that we supply them should be incredibly consistent. Which is very hard. So that’s my answer to your question. Next please.
Alina: Alright. Perfect, thank you, The next question:
— What is the status of obtaining new licenses?
Vlad: We got the license in Lithuania, which is great. In terms of the USA, we are registered as a money services business (MSB), which is actually incredibly hard. We are planning to submit an application this month for a money transmitter license (MTL) in Wyoming. We are waiting for a finalized website for American users. Unfortunately, in the US, you have to wait. For example in Binance they have the website for all the world users, and they have the Binance US only for the American users. So we are planning to do so for the US users as well. Because you have to keep certain bits of information on the US servers, you have to collect things like the social security number, you have to have a direct contact number of the tax authorities. It’s all very complicated, so we are kind of navigating to complete all the criteria of obtaining it. Should be able to do it this month, so will submit an application by the end of Spring, but it might take them goodness knows how much time to review it. So within a month we will also apply for a VASP license — virtual assets service provider license in Cayman Islands. So that would mean that we will be able to issue and keep the cryptocurrencies, which is great. Going back to the US, we are still in the process of obtaining a surety bond for the company in order to obtain the bit-license and a money transmitter license (MTL) in New York. That’s probably the hardest license to get. If we obtain a license in New York, obtaining other licenses will be much easier, because the criterias are a lot less strict. So Wyoming is one of the easiest licenses to get, New York is one of the hardest, and one of the most regulated. So if you have the easiest and you have the hardest, everything in-between should be quite straightforward. So we’re getting on that. But it takes a lot of time to do. Because we had to adjust our system for the way that we collect information from our users, every single transaction that exceeds $10,000, we have to report it to the securities and exchange commission (SEC). So it’s all very complex, and we had to do the groundwork before replying, because if we would have applied without those things in place that would have been a waste of time. And the second time they will review an application, they will look at us less favorably. So we wanted to make sure that everything is in place before we apply for the extra license. And we also applied in Kazakhstan, registering the application form for a crypto exchange license and a payment system license. So we’re still kind of working on that.
We apply to any kind of license that applies to the cryptocurrencies that are not too restrictive or that are not too niche, like the UK. The UK applies only for the UK citizens and etc etc. So the EU license will help us to conduct business in all of the European Union, not only in Lithuania. But, for example, the UK license is very limited. So we’re trying to obtain all the broadest licenses first, and then, later, when we obtain them, we will have a lot more money to spend, and we will apply for the others. Because lawyers cost quite a lot of money, especially the international ones. We will then be able to obtain other licenses afterwards. That’s the way for example how Binance conducts their business, Coinbase, Crypto.com etc. They are not getting every kind of license that exists. They choose strategically, then manage all the jurisdictions, and when they are reaching a certain level, they apply for those licenses. We did not apply for a Japanese license, because we don’t have that many Japanese customers. But that would mean that we will have to spend quite a lot of money on the Japanese lawyers. So it doesn’t really make sense. So work is in progress, it is going forward quite considerably. And I’m quite happy with the results. So next question please.
Alina: Perfect, thank you. The next question is:
— Are we still on track to have the first project on the launchboard by the end of May?
Vlad: Yes it will be either at the end of May, or maybe, I don’t know it might not happen. I’m telling you straight away because that really depends on the Coin Market Cap: if they will approve our listing before the end of May. So we might have the first project. If they don’t, I think most definitely by the end of the second quarter. I really hope that Coin Market Cap will approve our application. We have some projects in the pipeline. For us, obviously quality is above quantity. At the moment we’re trying to find a project that will promote our system, that will prove to everybody that everything is great in our system. And our system is capable of raising quite a lot of money. In terms of the voting system, the voting system was completed a couple of weeks ago. The PXP utility will be partially utilized in the Launchboard. So you will be able to use your PXP in order to vote for a project, and there will be a ballot system where the PXP token holders will have some certain voting rights, and they will be able to vote for projects, and get some money in return. Either in the native token of that project or in PXP. Still point of discussion. Pretty much that is it.
Alina: Alright. And then few more questions about launchboard:
— Are we able to participate in the ICO launchboard? If I participate in the voting by contributing PXP 1000 tokens to the Bison Army and the value of PXP goes up, does my contribution go up? Or is my contribution only the USD value of my PXP tokens during the initial contribution?
Vlad: Alright. So the first one is the test project. Whatever that is called. It’s not a real project, we have made up this project so we can show to you, our prospective investors, how the listing would look like. So we’ve literally made up those names, so they’re not real. It shows the potential for the potential customers of what a launch board looks like, and it’s an example of the ICO page. In terms of native currency, if the volume goes up, the price will go up. At the moment for staking it should be the same. But the launch board is completely ready, and at the moment we’re waiting for a Coin Market Cap listing, so we will be able to show to our potential customers how great we are.
Alina: Alright thank you. So the next questions are about marketing:
— What is the main marketing plan? Is TV advertising a part of it? no, why not use this channel to rehabilitate your notoriety as crypto.com in the eyes of former users who believed in paying at the start? Do you plan to contact TV stations for aggressive marketing?
Vlad: Okay. So first of all we have a new CMO in place. I think I might have mentioned that beforehand. We have incredibly big plans for marketing, including Youtube, Telegram, and obviously certain conventional Media, influencers, guerrilla marketing, events etc. So as for your question, with regards to the TV, it is very hard to explain to people who are not involved in the crypto world, what crypto is. And in my opinion, it’s not really the best way of spending money. You have to target the audience first of all. That is interesting. In crypto you have to find your niche, you know how to find the people who already invested in crypto, and you have to try them first. When you’ve run out of those people, you have to try all the others. That’s how marketing works. And with regards to TV: first of all, which country? The second question is, they have quite strict regulations. For example, in the European Union, and in America with regards to promoting crypto. Because it’s a financial asset.
So obtaining those regulations would be incredibly hard, I think. Because a lot of countries consider investing in crypto as gambling. And promoting gambling on television and in the conventional media is forbidden. But we already have talks with conventional media, like CNN, the Guardian, The Coindesk, The International Business Times. I actually speak with them regularly, we had an interview with CoinDesk — the biggest blockchain media, some weeks ago. We recently had an article in the International Business Times, and in the Independent. We constantly have articles in Forbes. So we do these publications because they’re not as strictly regulated as newspapers or TV. Regarding TV, I think that’s obsolete. So you only have to resort to this kind of marketing when you run out of users. So companies like Crypto.com or Binance, because they’ve already attracted all of the users that they could have attracted. So now they’re trying to expand it: to reach people who don’t know anything about crypto, and obviously if they expand that outreach, we could track those users as well, because they will now be within the venn diagram of crypto users. So I think I have roughly answered your question. But it’s incredibly complicated
Alina: That’s good. And the next question is regarding the team:
— Could we have an organizational chart of the team ?
Vlad: I don’t think we can provide it publicly to anybody. Unfortunately such information is actually private, and commercial sensitive. For example if we will list the names of our top crypto developers, other companies will try to poach them. Because they’re so rare and they’re so valuable that boating happens on a literally daily basis. You know, people contacting me every single week saying that somebody contacted us, and said that they are offering them twice as much money as they’re getting at the moment. Crypto specialists are getting a lot more expensive than usual, because they have the expertise, and obtaining them is very hard. So sometimes we have to resort to obtaining somebody who works in the finance sector, and then retraining them to work in Crypto. And unfortunately it’s not even a question with regards to our Development Team or even managers. We discourage our employees from publishing their information on social media because of poaching. That’s literally a huge problem in the crypto world, because poaching happens literally on a daily basis. So at the moment we have about 150 employees, because it actually changes, we have quite a lot of freelancers. Some of them, if they wish, can publish their CVs on LinkedIn. You can go to LinkedIn and type in PointPay, and it will show you all of the people who are willing to display their public profiles: their backgrounds etc. On LinkedIn you can also find my CV as well. So you can have a look at that.
Alina: Okay. And the next question is:
— You are a fairly new company with a lot of new employees. Also most of them are working from home. How do you ensure that all the team members who are working for you are fair / performant / give the best in accordance with their wage. How do we ensure our money is well spent ?
Vlad: Yet again, great question. I’m actually quite confident in our team. And with regards to the professional qualities, I have daily interviews with new members. It’s a lot less now than I had in the autumn. I used to have 5 to 10 interviews per day. Nowadays I have at least one or two. So with regards to us making sure that when people work remotely, and they are completing their tasks, we have tracking software, which is used on every single member of the team. So they have to log in the tasks that they’re doing, and they have to log in the time that they’ve spent doing their task. And then the project managers review it. If somebody says, it took me a whole day to write an article, obviously the project manager will know that it doesn’t take that long to do. So we have certain measures in place. For our developers we have a special software. So for example, when they log into our system, it captures the screen and everything that they do, while they work. It’s quite a common thing to use for remote workers. And we always check the amount of code written at the end of each week for every single developer. We can see data on how many lines of code each team member has written, and whether the job has been done or not. If one has written very little code, we will go and investigate why that has happened. Maybe that person was doing research or maybe that person was ill or something like that. But we have those kinds of red flags in place, that are raised literally every single week. I get a report of every single developer that pretty much says how many lines he or she wrote. So overall, remote work doesn’t really affect our productivity. Every single team member has KPIs, if it’s a developer or the manager, they still have KPIs, they still have to decompose the tasks, they still have to prove that the tasks were completed in time. If you complete the task in time, if you’ve decomposed all of your other tasks, that’s a great thing. If you haven’t, we might have some questions for you. And we collect all of that info. We have an HR team that collects all of those metrics together, and we discuss them. If something is highly irregular we go back to investigate, and if everything looks fine, we don’t. But it literally happens on a daily basis. Sometimes, some developers are incredibly productive for months and then they are not doing anything for a week, and then they are productive again. So we go back, and we see what they were doing, we talk to the project manager. And we see — ha! They were doing research for that week, then they could write twice as much code later. So that’s fine, we have an HR team who deals with that question. And also in terms of remote work, we save a lot of money on renting places in capitals. It is quite expensive. It saves money on taxes because all of our developers are freelancers. It enables us to hire top-talent worldwide as well. So we can hire somebody like Alina! Alina works in America. Or I live in Europe. We have some people who live in Kazakhstan or China. So we’re not limited to a specific location. So for example, if we were located in London, we would only be able to hire people in London. So that’s quite a limited resource pool. And now we are able to hire anybody around the world. So we can make sure that we get the best talent globally. And we’re not limited to one single location. So without those limitations it makes us all equal, we have a great company culture. I think it is great, so I think that answers your question.
Alina: Indeed. Thanks. And the next question:
— What is the customer base of pointpay (if any)?
Vlad: At the moment we have around a quarter of a million active users who trade every single day. Most of them are mainly investors during the ICO stage. Some of them are dormant, most of them actually didn’t leave the platform. We have to make sure that we bring them back into being trading active users, who are trading on our platform every single day. They have certain balances on our platform, but they’re not as active as we want them to be. We have experienced significant growth over the past year, and we see even more promising prospects for this year. We want to at least double our customer base by the end of this year. My prediction is that we should have about half a million users by the end of the year. And nothing is stopping us from doing so! I hope that we will have more than a million. So I’m quite optimistic with regards to that. Overall, the customer base is probably 7 billion people, who live around the world. We want to make sure that our products are accessible for everyone, the ones who don’t know anything about crypto, the ones who already trade crypto, and the ones who only hold crypto. So we have a crypto school that explains to the newbies how to use the interface, how to use our technology. And pretty much showing it is incredibly easy to use PointPay in the end. Yeah, so long story short, our target audience is the people who already trust in crypto, and the newbies that want to enter the crypto world.
Alina: Wonderful answer, thank you. And then the next question is:
— How do you see PointPay one year from now?
Vlad: Where do I see PointPay one year from now? I think this is kind of the major task to complete the ecosystem, as it was stated on our white paper, by the end of the year. I want to finalize the product. I want to have at least half a million new users by the end of the year, that’s for sure. As I said before. I want our platform to become self-sufficient because we’re now at the moment eating away the money that investors invested in us. So I want to do more Burns. I want PXP to reach at least an ICO price of half a dollar, and maybe increase it even more. I want to start aggressive marketing. I want to promote PointPay worldwide. I want to start a virtual debit card on the PointPay app. New NFT partnerships, new projects on launchboard. And with regards to other PointPay products, I want us to introduce margin trading, on options trading in futures trading to our platform. I want us to have many more payment providers. I want us to have a new design. I want us to be bug free. No more bugs. And I want us to have an external API for the bank, the crypto loans, the debit cards, the wallet, etc. So people will be able to connect to PointPay externally. So that’s what I hope to achieve by the end of this year. And I think we are on the right track of doing so.
Alina: Alright, thank you so much. And then the next question was asked by one of the members:
— Hi Vladimir, I saw that the staking rates on WhiteBIT are just awesome. Do you have plans to increase rates in PointPay?
Merci!
Vlad: In simple terms, staking of the coins is defined as the act of locking your cryptocurrency to earn interest. The concept of staking is closely related to the Proof of Stake mechanism. So the certain cryptocurrencies, based on proof of stake consensus, protocols allow their participants to earn the additional coins by locking up the assets for a given period of time in the network, as a form of collateral. The PXP allows the users to stake PXPs in quite healthy rewards. And we actually have one of the highest crypto rates across the major centralized exchanges. So I don’t think our rates are low by any means. And in terms of staking — no technical knowledge is really required, no minimum or maximum investment is required. It really depends how much you really stake and that will depend on your staking rates. And the more you put in, the more you will get. And our rates at the moment, if I’m not wrong, range from 4%, the smallest amount of PXP, to 20% largest PXP holdings. So as soon as we will get a working platform and everything is fully working, we might consider raising. But first of all we need to be more profitable.
Alina: Okay, and the next question is:
— What measures are in place to ensure cold storage funds can be accessed in the scenario of sudden death or compromise of both people who have access to these wallets.
Vlad: Okay, I see someone’s been watching Netflix recently. What was it? Crypto King? Something like “Hunt of a Crypto King’’, or something along those lines, about the Canadian exchange, the QuadrigaCX. What’s the fellas name? Gerry Cotten? Who died in India. And he had all of the keys for all the company wallets. And I think there were about 200 million dollars that were lost, because of his actions, and are now in a crypto limbo. Well, it’s impossible for these things to happen to us. Because first of all, the access to all of the private cold wallets are distributed among several C-level specialists, and no one person has access to all of them. So the keys are divided in bunches among different people. So they will have to come together in order to access them. And some keys are doubled as well, so if somebody is hit by a bus or dies suddenly, we will still have a backup of that key from other keys that are stored within the keys of another person. So no key is unique, and they overlap, if one person dies, it wouldn’t affect us anyway. I think what has happened to the QuadrigaCX is really stupid. I think it’s a very bad business practice to entrust one person with all those keys. And we from the beginning worked on dealing with that problem. We have monthly PCI DSS reports about our infrastructure and architecture — you can find it in the footer of our website. PCI DSS — is a little green thing you can click on. And you can read the report. And we also have the quarterly infrastructure audit that is performed by an external organization: they come and review all of our infrastructure, the way that we structured our AWS servers, the way that we keep our money, pretty much everything they review. They give us recommendations on what to fix and improve. And the latest reports were incredibly positive. And we also have a dedicated security specialist in our infrastructure team, who used to work in several top banks. And he makes sure that we kind of do everything according to the bank’s rulebook. So I do believe that we are quite secure in that regard.
Alina: Alright. And then the next question is:
— Hello, Vladimir, can you tell me when we will be able to have a payment card in euros and dollars with cash back at “Crypto.com or Binance”?
Vlad: At the moment we have about three card providers in the pipeline. And we are in the final stages of negotiating and confirming everything. I do think it will happen by the end of the year. We cannot do it internally because of licensing and other bits and bobs. Actually, it’s much easier and much cheaper to do it by a provider, so we’re working incredibly hard on that. But we will only be able to provide those cards to the European Union citizens, or to those who are living in the EU. So you might be a European Union citizen who is living abroad, so we will not be able to provide you with those. Or you might be a Chinese citizen, living in Croatia, then we will be able to provide you with the card. And that’s the extent of our Lithuanian bitlicense. For example, places like Revolut or Binance, also provide cards only for EU citizens.
And maybe for the US citizens as well. We are in the process of obtaining specific licenses this year. We are working on obtaining the appropriate licenses in the US as well as the EU. So yeah, I think that’s the end of the question.
Alina: Okay, and this is the last question:
— Is there any possibility in the near future to list on a Brazilian exchange? Brazil uses the PiX payment system, is there a possibility to implement this system with PointPay? In the new app there is a 40% stake announcement, is there a forecast that PXP will receive an annual APR of that amount?
Vlad: We are incredibly proud of our Brazilian community! I think it’s the second largest community that we have, apart from the English-speaking community which includes a lot more countries than just England and the US. As we promised in the last AMA session, we created a new Portuguese Medium channel, where we posted some news in Portuguese. We translate all of the company updates, and we are starting to actively use those media resources. We did an interview with Pedro a couple of weeks ago, and we are planning to do more Portuguese activities very very soon. Unfortunately I do not speak Portuguese, that would have made things a lot easier. With regards to the PiX payment system — I think it’s accepted in more than 50 countries, but unfortunately at the moment we cannot work with them directly. Though we are now in talks with some third parties that support the PiX system. So if that works out it could be implemented, but it’s actually incredibly hard because of the regulatory reasons, and we will only be able to do it through a third-party provider, and not with the Bank of Brazil directly. Though, we make everything possible to bring this idea to life. Thank you very much for your suggestion and I’m always eager to hear back from you, especially from the Brazilian community. So please don’t hesitate to write to me directly via telegram or use my Twitter. You are a very important community for PointPay. Obrigado!
Alina: So we are done with the questions that we have accumulated for this AMA. Now we are going to seek some questions from the chat. The very first question that I have from the Telegram chat:
— Derek asks: “When are you going to release an iPad app in the Apple store?
Vlad: Good question! I think the iPad app is not, as of yet, available. Though it is available if you use the “web view”. So if you go to your Safari browser on your iPad, it should be available there. Because we do account for pretty much every single resolution of the screen. With regards to the iPad app — not yet! Because not that many people actually use it — I think it’s less than 1%. It doesn’t really make sense financially, but we will still most definitely consider it. Unfortunately developing such an app would cost us a lot more than it will bring us in the future. But, PointPay is fully available on iPads, via the web view. If you go to your browser, it will open all of the trading interfaces. When we do new designs, they’re all accounted for by the iPad’s resolution.
Alina: So, this question asks about the new product that we are providing: Talent:
— Anton has some doubts, how is it going to help the project? If you could just elaborate on that. He is asking, if there is a demand that they don’t know about?
Vlad: Well, first of all, this is the new use of blockchain. I think there are a couple of websites that do similar things. I don’t think there’s one major website that uses blockchain technology in order to use smart contracts in contract negotiations: that’s PointPay Escrow, or with regards to finding or contracting work. I think it’s a brilliant new use of blockchain, and I think it’s going to be incredibly popular! In terms of utility, we will be charging a fee. As little as $5 or $1,000 or $10,000 — if you want to create a website, for example. We will be charging a percentage on top of that. It is a new revenue stream that our ecosystem will have. I think it’s one of the most innovative things that we have done, in a very long time.
Alina: Another question is by Josh. He is asking:
— Are you going to develop a crypto school this year? Any updates?
Vlad: With regards to the crypto school, we do post a couple of new videos every week. If you go to our crypto school website, you can see that we’ve been adding a lot more new interface guides. We have a comprehensive plan for the project. We already have the design, but at the moment we are focusing our front-end development on renewing the most profitable bits of our website. Unfortunately Crypto school is not as monetizable as we wish it could be. So at the moment we are focusing on the monetizable bits of our platform. We want to finish them first and then we will move on to the crypto school. But every single week, Alina won’t lie to you, we release at least one new video for our crypto school. It is all there. And it is looking very new and dandy. Also, every single video, we could do a voice-over for at least one or two videos, so it’s in the works . The grand way that we see the crypto school is that we will have the quizzes, you will have the rewards etc. It took Binance two years to develop their crypto Academy. They first became profitable, and then they focused on that. I think we have a lot more things that we have to fix at the moment, before focusing on things that are not monetizable. When we will break-even, I hope we will do it. I really like the idea of educating people.
Alina: I think we are going to wrap this up. So thank you very much Vlad for conducting this AMA! You did a wonderful job. If you want to wrap this up?
Vlad: I’m going to say some words. Thank you very much Alina for helping me out with this! Finding questions, and asking me those questions. Your help is always appreciated. Dear community, I’m so sorry about the technical hiccup that we’ve had. Those things happen, I think we’ve managed to mitigate that problem quite quickly. I hope I answered most of your questions. We have two new products PointPay Talent and the PointPay escrow. We have a fully working crypto exchange, we have an exchange in our mobile apps, which wasn’t available before. We have a new design for our mobile apps as well as a new design for our main website. It was a huge month. We worked incredibly hard. Many, many, many sleepless nights and weekends. Hard work really pays off. Thank you very much for joining us. I will see you all again on the 26th of May — in a month’s time. Thank you very much! I love you! Thank you very much to the community! I will see you again tomorrow during our traditional Friday weekly updates. Thank you very much and Goodbye!
