Shopin Token Swap Update — Blockwell partner to bring retailers new functionality on the blockchain

Happy Sunday!

It’s an exciting time as we gear up to re-distribute Shopin tokens to participants of our TGE.

If you’ve been following the story closely (https://medium.com/@ShopinApp/blockwell-and-shopin-partner-to-reissue-tokenswap-d1cd8d71cb8c) you will know we have been working hard to ensure there is a smooth process ahead.

What’s become more prevalent is the opportunity to include new functionality on the blockchain, that we are planning for the retailers and brands in 2019 and 2020. These include:

1. The universal shopper profile (2019)
2. The Shopin Brand Intelligence Engine (2019)
3. Ad exchange (2019/2020)
4. Branded Tokens for the retailers and brands (2020)
5. A peer-to-peer token exchange for shoppers to swap branded tokens (2020)

This kind of foresight is enabling us to think ahead, as the contract is non-upgradable.

In tandem with this, we have had some delays getting in touch with the major syndicate leads and aligning all the distribution data. These are incredibly complex distributions, which we are taking special care to ensure excellence in distribution.

These opportunities are rare and often come at unusual and unexpected times. We’re taking full advantage to integrate these features into the contract, as well as make sure a high standard of compliance.

We’re wishing everyone a superb New Year, wherever you are and whomever you are with. Here’s to a powerful 2019 for us all.

Eran Eyal — Founder and Co-CEO of Shopin

It’s Josh from Blockwell. Those of you that follow the Telegram channel know that we’re pretty much ready to hit the swap button on the updated Shopin token. I know there’s been some concerns about how long this has taken, which is fair given the idle time you all experienced prior to our engagement.

The typical token distribution is as simple as having a list of wallets, a list of token amounts, and queuing things up en masse. Sending the actual tokens is the easy part as we demonstrate here: https://rinkeby.etherscan.io/token/0x4e0a5b4271049f98ca7b6932eca7113b44720129

The real difficulty with your situation was the nuance around syndicates, individuals, KYC and the lovely challenge of syndicate members who were secretly acting as their own syndicate and whose members filed as individuals thus causing a situation where we almost hit the button a couple weeks ago on what would have let those guys collect twice the tokens they were owed.

We’ve since solved all of those issues, and as we were preparing to queue things up Friday morning, I had the time to think through the token from your side of the equation. See I’m quite pleased with where it is from my side, with regards to the compliance tools, the ability to sort out things like the double pay problem, and the ability to hand this off to Shopin and their counsel and know that between the admin controls and the attorney controls they have everything they need to keep this thing alive regardless of where the regulatory climate heads.

As I got to thinking about it from your perspective though, I got a tad less happy with where the quality of the crypto product is. This is why you don’t have tokens sitting in your wallet at this very moment. I reached out to Eran and company for some ideas on additional holding variables and “hooks” we could put into place for Georgi (Shopin CTO) and the tech team’s ML and web interfaces to interact with the token in the coming months and years.

Once these tokens go live they will not have an upgrade function. They can be shut down, re-swapped, or sent to a wallet that gets frozen for a crosschain atomic swap but ERC20 is permanent. At most it can be locked up and swapped again in a few years. This led to an idea which I’ve explored with some of you in the Telegram and am now presenting here.

But first, a stark reality for those of you who haven’t grasped it: It will be a while till your tokens are liquid. This is not 2017. The world knows that this is more complicated than it was both for projects and for people like yourselves. Those projects that don’t address the missteps of their rush head first into an emerging technology will have them addressed by authorities eventually.

There are The kind of boxes the Shopin team is dedicated to checking, on the compliance and product integration side, to remove the lock timer and/or turnoff pause. This is being done by their counsel, we give no legal advice and offer no legal recommendations.

Blockwell believes that great solutions to the world’s challenges can accomplished with token technolgy. Viewing the current Blockchain industry and marketplace we see a misunderstanding of the potential and capabilities of tokens. The current industry has a myopic view when categrizing between only security or utility tokens and there’s a lot more potential then what’s currently been attempted.

Regardless, any token within our ecosystem that has raised money or is planning to raise we mandate an attorney and we put the issuance controls in the hands of the people who are trained make those calls. Our expertise is in the deep tech and the fundamentals of product design. We have tools to make compliance easier because we try to think about all sides of product design and usage which brings us to the choice I’m presenting to you today:

1. We can hit the button and send you these tokens as they already are, locked but securely in your hands.
2. We can continue to release Rinkeby iterations with “small” tweaks that we (meaning Blockwell, Shopin, and most important of all you guys) come up with and want to test.
3. We’ll finalize feedback on this coming Friday and deliver on Tuesday 8 Jan instead.

I’m open to either scenario, Shopin was a fixed bid and designed for us to solve one last really big problem before we move into our own compliant fundraising and scaling mode. I’m happy with where the product is on my side of the table, and I’m confident that with what we’ve learned from this we can take on any challenge the world of tokens has to offer.

That said, I’m committing another week towards experimenting on the ways to make it better on yours. From a business perspective we are far more on your side than we are on Shopin’s and they’ve known that since the beginning. We don’t pull punches but we also don’t believe in wasting time with blame, regret, or distractions. We prefer using our collective minds to turn dark clouds into silver lining.

The better economical move for us is to just send out #1 and be done with this so we’ll certainly respect that decision. We will be dropping a version of #2 on Rinkeby (which you can view at Rinkeby.etherscan.io) to all wallets which are on the list for Shopin tokens shortly. It has the ability for you to set a minimum price for Advertisers and Brands to be able to engage with you and for those entities (who have their own role associated with the token) to pay that price even through lockup.

Here’s a rudimentary example of that concept in action: https://rinkeby.etherscan.io/tx/0xcb7542e5ef07a4ffe231d74f8da436b385ed49b58a3a6758bba4d10d1285d584 — Notice it’s a transfer but it’s also a function call from the input. If we go with option 2 we’ll do a few of these tests based on your feedback. This is a tokenomic model refinement and it’s something we are building into the core of the Blockwell product.

The BrandBidding concept isn’t speaking for the future of Shopin or their business model. It’s an experiment to get your minds going as the only way this is valuable to us is if we have a user directed ideation cycle. We’re more than clear on how top down token designs look but we’re open to an experiment in what giving the community of token holders a platform to experiment creates.

Regardless of the path we will need to wrap by Tuesday 8th January 2019 at absolute latest so please bear in mind. On the Rinkeby delivery, we’re working out a final piece of functionality to allow us to properly destroy the Rinkeby tokens after testing is complete so there can be no consideration of them as securities or taxable transfers.

To keep us efficient on processing which option to go with, please give your direct feedback to us here: https://goo.gl/forms/veAuTBYS1aQJ1Dhr2

Our mission at Blockwell is to raise the bar of quality while lowering the barrier to entry for businesses and early adopter as the industry as a whole moves into the “Early Majority” of the Technology Adoption Curve. We’re happy to have stepped in to help solve this problem and hope you’ll be as satisfied with the end result as we are with the insights we’ve gained working for you.

Here’s to a happy New Year.