Flickto Announcement: Hibernation

The market crash that occurred last week has left many crypto projects and ecosystems in difficulty. The reduction in trust and reliability within the industry coupled with an uncertain economic environment has led us to where we are today at Flickto.

I will start by outlining the decision that was reached by the board of directors and to lay out a solution to achieve DeMe and Flickto’s core missions in a revenue generating and profitable manner.

The board of directors met on the 16th May 2022 — The board members were all present with only one member out five abstaining from the vote.

It was determined that the most appropriate solution for Flickto to follow would be to hibernate the main project. The main reason for hibernation is that lack of funds to invest into media projects coupled with poor market sentiment meant that our alternative routes of funding like private equity, NFT sales and ISPO had limited scope for success.

What does hibernation mean?

Hibernation means that the Flickto voting platform will not undergo its rounds of voting until the market is in a better place and Flickto has sufficient revenue streams to maintain and grow a sustainable business. Furthermore, it’s been a difficult few days at Flickto HQ as since the decision has been made, the entire company has had their employment contracts terminated to help reduce costs and avoid insolvency.

The beauty of a project like Flickto is that everyone wants to continue working on Flickto, DeMe and Changemakers but they understand the issues that have presented themselves can be overcome if we are able to tackle them early.

However, this does mean Flickto will re-emerge during the next bull market and that our underlying mission and purpose will still be achieved. Hibernation means while the legal structure of Flickto limited takes a rest, the team will be hard at work, up skilling themselves, building connections and preparing for to ensure that round 2 of Flickto is a success.

What will the team work on in the meanwhile?

Flickto has recognised strengths in its organisational teams — firstly, our marketing team and our media team have managed to consistently create high quality, engaging and innovative content and campaigns for the crypto-ecosystem. This has been a compliment shared with us by other projects and businesses who have observed that our desire to market crypto to improve adoption is a great way to engage diverse audiences. We want to capitalise on this and therefore will be working on Trio Marketing, a business whereby we’ll be bringing Web 3.0 to the masses through marketing, implementation and digital transformation services for legacy businesses and industries. Since the board meeting, we have managed to find 3 clients each in distinct spaces such as in media projects, magazines and in the NGO space.

This approach enables us to understand how to create Web 3.0 content while educating and raising awareness about Cardano with individuals who would benefit from it in their everyday lives. Our aim is to utilise our expertise and skills to build upon our current momentum to ensure Flickto survives through us remaining adaptable.

How did we get here?

There are a variety of reasons we ended up here and I’ll endeavour to list them below, for further clarification please do get in contact with us on our community channel or social media:

• Poor market conditions from the early days. The recent further market downturn has made the situation untenable. If we did not act fast, Flickto would have been forced into bankruptcy.
• Sub-optimal fiscal planning on the assumption of a successful ISPO that failed to materialise [which led to the implementation of a finance department, once the interim board was established].
• The illegal transfer of 200 million $FLICK tokens to a former co-founder on exit, which led to the $FLICK price crash and further reduction of our ADA reserves via impairment loss as said individual tried to sell. This is the main reason we reduced our liquidity on the Cardano DEX’s (to avoid reducing our ADA reserves even further).
• Around 300,000 ADA was lost via ADAX as a result of the initial $FLICK price crash after CEX listing (split amongst ADA and USD-T). As holders sold their tokens and as the sole provider of liquidity we were in effect buying back $FLICK and losing ADA in return. This is not a fault of ADAX CEX, but more so the result of a rushed CEX listing due to external pressures before enough market interest was present to encourage buy orders.
• In April ownership of Flickto was transferred, but there was a lack of awareness of the financial situation from the previous senior leadership team until the company was transferred. The new owners took prompt action to set up a proper finance department and start reducing costs, but the historical financial situation of Flickto meant it was always a tall order to be able to recover, and the recent further market downturns have made this now impossible.
• The CTO and co-founder had invested his life savings into Flickto to keep it alive while the project lacked product market fit or revenue-generating activities, running it at a loss. These funds eventually ran out. While the team did begin to undertake external revenue-generating activities, the core business model of project voting and financing is not attractive to investors, especially during a bear market, so a project pivot is required towards a more investable business.

What are the next steps?

1. Our partnerships with Bazooka Bunny, other Cardano projects and media companies are still intact. We were on the shoot of Nemisis Rain for the last few weeks with our very own Laquarn Bishop starring in the short-film. Check out the link here [ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18258792/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_2 ]
2. We’ll be releasing The Cowboy NFT project marketing over the next few days and weeks with the intention to mint and release the project once the market is in a better condition.
3. Collaborating with the Flickto team to hibernate current activities and focus on revenue-generating activities like providing marketing, web 3.0 integration and media services.
4. Sharing details on the new organisation and how we will implement Cardano and web 3.0 into the venture while ensuring Flicktonites stay at the heart of what we do.

We’re acutely aware that such decisions impact not only our Flickto employees but all existing FLICK holders, ISPO Remastered participants, IDO participants and investors. The decision to Hibernate the main Flickto project has been taken in the interests of all of those stakeholders so that the possibility exists of something in the future that can deliver value to all of those groups rather than permanently shutting down. We owe it to our communities to try and survive these tough market conditions and thrive once we get to the other side.

More information will be shared over the coming days and weeks- please feel free to ask any of us questions on social media, telegram or discord.

We’ll be holding a live today at 17:00pm BST on Discord for a conversation with our community.