Welcome to The Understory Series — a series dedicated to projects that we believe show innovation and quality level far surpassing known crypto standards. This article is a recap of a discussion panel conducted in the Jungle Discord where the team answered questions from the community throughout a several day period.
CryptOrangutang: Could you please do a very short introduction to what MITx is and what‘s your USP (Unique selling proposition)?
Tommo: We’re a BPaaS (Blockchain Platform as a Service), blockchain agnostic platform, aiming to bridge the gap between blockchain and the real world (companies, devs, students). Realistically, we hope to have as many blockchains connected to us, where developers/students (Tsinghua University, National Taiwan Normal University, etc) get to use the blockchains, deploy DApps and sell them on a marketplace.
We already have a working product, revenue and a lot of students connected to our platform.
Currently we’re connected and partnered with NEM, NULS, Hyperledger, CPChain, Quarkchain, Vechain, Tomochain, Wanchain, EOS (Cypherglass), NEO (and a few top 20’s are coming). Besides blockchain related partnerships, we’re talking to several enterprises and more universities.
We’re actively working on our triple helix model, where we want to ensure education facilitates adoption for blockchain growth. We’re working with said governments, enterprises, universities and other partners to foster adoption at a fast rate.
We’ve been fairly silent, and currently sitting at a market cap of 3.6m, but we’re ready to throw out marketing full-force in the coming months. With our new website facelift, our new upcoming partners and our self sustaining educational marketing ideas, we’re certain we will place our footprint in the blockchain scene.
We’re connected to Hanwha Dreamplus on their blockchain academy, on which we develop their blockchain curriculum.
Our USP is fairly easy; We’re making adoption easy, cheap and fast. Any big enterprise or small company can develop on our platform, or buy a DApp from our marketplace and iterate on it so it fits their goal. If they change a DApp (let’s say a financial company changed it to work for their company), they can re-sell the DApp under a different name, since it serves a different function. The more DApps we have on our marketplace, the more companies will flock to our platform for blockchain-adoption.
Chase S: Thanks for being here Tommo and Robbie! Could you guys dive into the token itself? What are its uses? How does Morpheus Labs make money? Circulating supply vs total supply? Are there any locks on what isn’t in circulation? Was there an initial round of funding via private sale or ICO? (Sorry I know that’s a lot).
Robbie: Hi Chase, good questions.
The token itself has several functions;
Platform subscriptions
In order for customers to use the platform, they’ll pay in USD via traditional payments or opt to pay in MITx tokens — in both scenarios, the fee will be bought from the open market, whether customers own MITx or not.
AppLibrary
The AppLibrary is an open marketplace where enterprise, startup and individual developers can develop and publish applications that can be utilized and purchased. Morpheus Labs will charge a commission on fees. MITx will be used as a discount token for application publishers and application users.
Blockchain protocol partners
Blockchain providers are what drive the success of Morpheus Labs — protocol partners will be required to pay a listing fee which is payable only in MITx. Meanwhile, MITx tokens will be used as ‘gas payments’ for the underlying protocol.
Community nodes
While token circulation within the platform is imperative, ensuring adequate useage of the token outside the platform will enhance the utility of MITX. This is where community nodes come into play. Avid supporters (devs, marketing, community managers) can set up a node tasked with hosting meetups, drumming up support and engaging with other blockchain enthusiasts. Partners will be required to stake a specific amount of MITx as long as they’re running the community node, which makes them eligible for rewards.
Product Council
The product council will be a closed group of community members comprising of developers and non-developers, tasked with assisting and engaging with the Morpheus Labs development team as new updates are released. They will be tasked with assisting in the debugging process, providing feedback and suggestions on new features. Top developers may also be part of the DApp listing approval process on the AppLibrary, depending on their skillset.
Proof of Alliance
Proof of Alliance is a mechanism used to effectively regulate the token velocity across the platform and all involved stakeholders. It’s an incentive structure that aligns the need for adequate token circulation while still being biased towards reducing velocity in a sustainable fashion. These will mean a staking mechanism for developers and a staking mechanism for subscription-based discounts.
Morpheus Labs has designed a token economics model to ensure efficient token circulation across all stakeholders within the ecosystem. This extends beyond the confines of the platform to our global community partners and liquidity providers. Managing token velocity, frictionless onboarding and maintaining demand are key design considerations throughout the entire process, as such our token model has a bias towards reducing velocity and increasing value capture.
We make money through the subscription model that we use on our platform. There are several packages people can choose from
The ICO took place from February 2018 to April 2018 and managed to got us 9,6 million USD
For the token supply -> 205 577 285 MITx circulation supply vs 749 999 995 MITx total supply
However, every month for the coming 42 months, we burn 4M tokens. So at the end of all the burns we will end up with around 550M MITx in total supply.
More info on that can be found here:
ShillME: Are you guys generating any revenue yet? If not, how soon you expect to do that?
Tommo: We are. Our current revenue mostly comes from Dreamplus and a few other smaller sources, we’re ‘yearly’ at around 6 figures, though we should be posting an update on this in the coming month(s). We’re not nearly there yet though; it’s a bit of a catalyst, currently we’re talking to a big number of universities that are either connected to our partners or to a coalition, on which we aim to let them utilise our platform for all blockchain education curriculums.
ShillME: How well hedged are you guys on a scale of 1–10?
Tommo: We have a healthy reserve in our pockets, and we’re hedged across different currencies (including fiat). I’d say 7–8. The bear-market definitely took a toll on us, as it has for most other projects, but we’re financially healthy and with our growing revenue we can go on for a longer period of time.
Chase: Seems like there’s a lot going on right now! Based on the info above, it seems like exchanges aren’t part of the ecosystem outside of being a means of transacting MITx. How important are exchanges to making the system work (i.e. is there a certain level of volume/liquidity needed)? Are you guys exploring additional exchanges at this time or are you continuing to build before trying to expand on that front? (I realize you may be limited in this response due to NDA’s).
Tommo: One of the things we’re very well aware of is that MITx isn’t attractive from an investor standpoint right now, because we’re mainly traded on two ‘semi-active’ exchanges, being IDEX and HitBTC. Investing in the MITx token with a larger amount, at this point, turns you into a ‘bagholder’ where getting out is equally hard to getting in without a drastic increase/decrease in price. Without volume/liquidity, it’s going to be very hard to sustain growth and adoption.
“In light of these points, we have decided to go against making MITx a simple payment currency for Morpheus Labs services. Based on our decades of experience in the enterprise software space and consulting our partners during the design process, it was concluded that forcing customers to directly buy MITx tokens for the open-market will add unnecessary friction to the onboarding process. As such, we have developed a model with our treasury and liquidity partners to purchase MITx on behalf of our customers in an automated fashion. It is important to once again iterate that the MITx token is not a settlement or payment token. The design of MITx is centered around the access/work token model.”
The above shows that subscriptions will be turned into open-market buys via our treasury. If our demand would grow drastically now, while being on IDEX/HitBTC only, it could mean there are going to be liquidity issues. We want to avoid that on time.
So in short; yes, we are actively working on new listings, which is important for our business and for our token-holders. As mentioned in our previous AMA (2 weeks ago), we’ve already agreed on a listing with one extra exchange, while several others are being worked on. It’s not that far off.
Speedy: Hello guys, thanks for joining us. Really glad to have you here in Jungle. I personally appreciate your transparency with community and confidence in your own product by several actions you did during hard times of bear market.
In regards to token vesting:
Prolonged lock-in period is for the Team stack only? Which represents 10% of total supply, is it correct? What about the other allocations of 10% Foundation, 15% Ecosystem & partnerships, 10% Reserve (can you please also explain in detail for what reserve allocation is used) and the biggest stack of 30% for Listings (this goes together with recent question of @Chase S regarding the liquidity providers) Has these allocations been unlocked and if so how many of those has been used?
Robbie: Hi Speedy, glad to be here and thank you for the kind words!
Regarding to the token lock-in period, this counts for our CEO Pei-Han and our COO Branson Lee. So instead of 10%, there is still 5% that is locked until mid October 2019. We have made all our wallets public as well so let me share them here:
ML-Foundation / Wallet Address:
0xf7319ed0f5eba1f0acb2726fa8ad61628546e13f
ML-Team / Wallet Address:
0xe2176a7902c5b98a08b7834d429df9439e1b5578
ML-Reserve / Wallet Address:
0x88bd4f34cfad4a61889eb54f65fcdb66797c420f
ML-Exchange (For Exchanges Related & Token Burn) / Wallet Address:
0x3946964de44f51cba79ca5dcf00782a3050bab3a
Here are all Morpheus Labs wallets that everyone can monitor if they please. The only wallet that has been active is the one for listings. When it comes to the reserve allocation, this is really as a reserve for unforeseen situations and in need of funds.
Speedy: and regarding the token burns… as this function can cause regulatory issues, do you see it as a barrier for some projects, particularly in the US and other countries where regulators are very strict?
Robbie: We don’t see it as a barrier as we are following the necessary regulations. Our burn mostly keeps the supply and demand in check, which helps keeping the market healthy.
Unnecessary tokens are burned, on which we will regularly evaluate to monitor scarcity and usage.
CryptOrangutang: How many people are currently connected to the platform? Are there any data for the number of users, developers working on the platform etc?
Robbie: We have several clients using the platform as we speak. Clients like VeriTag, Sure International, Hanwha Dreamplus, SmartMinds, Developers, and soon others we can not discuss yet. We have no specific data yet but we are working on this. We currently have around 800 subscriptions from developers/students using the platform.
CryptOrangutang: Are you looking to expand the team? If yes, in what ways?
Tommo: Yes, we are. We’re growing at a rate we couldn’t predict a few months back, and we are actively hiring more people for several things.
Business Development, split into 3 sub-branches:
- Enterprise focus
- Education focus
- Blockchain focus
The problem with having an educational pro in Europe is that it’ll be hard to cover each continent, since our goal is to go worldwide. Language- and cultural barriers are a thing, so we’re trying to find the right person for the job on each continent. We’re doing well to fill these gaps already. Besides BD, we’re hiring new developers, advisors and marketeers.
CryptOrangutang: Could give a bit more detail on your marketing plans? Which channels will you target the most, with what tools? By what metrics will you judge the success of the campaign?
Tommo: Details we’re focusing on:
- Show the world why we are the go-to solution for adoption visually and in text. This means we’ll have university decks/enterprise decks/blockchain decks, all with different animations/presentations/messages. We’ll share these across social media as well (or on our website).
- Create easy to share one-pagers/graphics
- Use our community to help us spread the word.
- Reddit/Twitter/Medium/Telegram/Discord and forums are to be targeted, but also using news-outlets who are willing to pick up our news.
- Technical articles (tutorials) on how to use our platform
- Developer reviews of our platform
- Hackathons with partners
- Hackathons with universities
The list goes on and on. Part of our metrics are:
- Views (news outlets/posts)
- Interactions (retweets, claps, likes)
- Website traffic (follow-ups)
- Subscriptions (we offer free test accounts for example)
- Wallet addresses/buy-pressure
CryptOrangutang: Is there any other project out there that you would consider your competitor?
Robbie: At the moment we are the only BPaaS. There are however a lot of BaaS and SaaS solutions coming out as we speak. We don’t see competition as someone to fight against. We can also see competition as a possible future partner, why not? Let me elaborate with an image:
CryptOrangutang: Are there any regulatory risks that could impact your business?
Robbie: Not for the moment, we do however make it able for companies to create their ICO or STO on our platform. These kind of actions require to be in line with local guidelines, which we are.
Chase: What incentive does a company have to go through Morpheus for blockchain needs rather than going directly through an EOS or NEO? Is it mainly the dApp marketplace?
Tommo: Our platform offers several blockchains already, meaning you get to choose on what blockchain you want to develop. If you’re unsure which blockchain is best, you’re free to write a DApp and switch blockchains (for example if NEO offers a higher TPS than Ethereum or Vechain, and that’s what you need for your solutions, you can switch between them in 2 minutes). With complete interoperability slated for the end of 2019, you can ideally seamlessly migrate DApps to any blockchain you want.
Our platform is easy to navigate and easy to learn. We offer:
- In-depth tutorials on how to use our platform
- Turnkey solutions
- Live help
- Work-place(s) — depending on subscription model
- Subscription model is based on your needs and wants
- 7 programming languages (Solidity, Python, Go, NodeJs, Java, PHP, .NET
- Marketplace
- Development tools,
- Constant improvements/iterations on our platform to make developing easier
Right now, we’re ‘new’, meaning we don’t have a big number of developers utilizing our marketplace yet. The idea however is to create an environment (through help and gamification) that is a tight-knit community on which developers aid each other. The more they do, the more they get rewarded, which in turn helps finding the right developers for the job.
Education also plays a big role in this. The students of now are the developers of tomorrow. By showing them how to develop our marketplace to access all the blockchains (centralized), they’ll stick around. Having experienced developers on our platform who they can cooperate with will help them improve faster. Finding all the DApps on our marketplace can aid them in creating new ideas and iterations to improve those DApps.
For companies, creating a DApp on any of the above chain is a costly endeavor. If you have 10 employees, you’re unlikely to step towards the blockchain for solutions since finding a team of developers to make your DApp is expensive. If we have teams of devs on our platform that talk to your company, then decide on what blockchain they’ll use based on your wants and needs, the process gets faster, cheaper and more efficient. Besides, once your DApp is ready, you can sell it on the marketplace for extra revenue. There are bound to be similar companies as yours looking for a solution, meaning you’ll — at some point — earn back your investment costs.
Blockchains are mostly focussed on improving their mainchain. We are focussed on creating the necessary tools to develop with.
Chase: Your infographic shows a lot of similarities with Azure. What would you say is the main thing that sets you apart from Azure (aside from centralized vs decentralized)?
Tommo: I think the above answers already show a big part of the differences. While both provide ‘blockchain platform and DApp development service solutions, Azure’s business focus is still its Cloud service, blockchain is just an add-on service on Azure, we are more blockchain focused and are rapidly and constantly on boarding new blockchains with specific business focused solutions, development tools/features needed for platform users.
Chase: What happens to MITX if one of these “ETH killers” actually manages to take a material portion of the market share from Ethereum (not saying that’s likely)? Would that have any impact on you being an ERC20 token?
Tommo: We’re ERC20 simply because our tokenomics revolve around utility and it’s unnecessary to create anything else. It’s easy and it works. If any ERC20 killer comes around, we are able to either go to our own token (own mainchain) or transfer our token to the new ‘flavor of the month’.
Chase: It seems every chain at some point or another is going to have their own “DEX” (or so-called DEX). Is there any consideration in the Morpheus plan for using the blockchain agnostic capabilities to create some form of aggregated DEX that could be a one stop shop or could that get too murky on a regulatory front?
Tommo: For now, no. We do have ‘internal milestones’ that touch this subject somewhat, but it’s a bit early days to elaborate on that. As you mentioned, regulations could make it murky. That said, we do support partners with DEX ambitions or existing DEXES with help regarding development. More of that will follow in the coming months
Chase: You’ve shown a lot of transparency with the team wallets. Do you plan to provide reports of spending related to tokens controlled by the team on a consistent basis?
Tommo: These wallets will remain transparent. If we have big purchases via tokens, we’ll clarify as long as it doesn’t hinder any NDA’s.
CryptOrangutang: Is there a general interest in Singapore for companies to move part of their operations on the blockchain? Or are they preparing to a speculative future demand?
Robbie: In line with Singapore’s goal of becoming a Smart Nation, the country is gearing towards integrating blockchain into the daily lives of Singaporeans. Also, they will be putting a lot of effort into Blockchain education as they are setting up several blockchain courses together with educational institutions and the Singapore government. So, they are definitely not speculating on this new technology but actually implementing it into their daily lives. It is actually pretty exciting following their developments and how they are managing this.
CryptOrangutang: A part of your community was upset with how the Smartdrop campaign was managed — could you tell us why did it cause so much trouble? How hard is it to manage expectations of investors in this market?
Tommo: Correct, we didn’t exactly handle that as we should’ve honestly. A part of the disgruntled people came from the fact that we found multiple bot submissions, people using a few hundred fake emails, duplicate IP submissions and low effort, plagiarized work among unverified submissions. So we decided to reward the people that genuinely contributed to our campaign and have shown interest and support for Morpheus Labs. The other part came from us not exactly sticking to previous set deadlines, for which we have no real excuse. We’ve learned from the Smartdrop, and while it did garner us some short-term attention/exposure, we won’t be doing something similar on this in the near future (or ever at all). It mostly creates sell-pressure at distribution. Another part of the delays from our side was because we’ve been getting a lot of attention from other blockchains that want to join. With a smaller team you then run into time-issues.
Managing investor expectations is always doable as long as you don’t pre-hype things that might not be as good as people make it in their mind (it’s logical behaviour, people see ‘pre-hypes’ and immediately hope it’s the biggest partnership alive that will bring their investment to amazing new highs. The longer you keep them in the pre-hype state, the bigger they make the news in their head. In the end, it often doesn’t have the impact people want and it turns into a negative cycle). So we avoid this; news gets there when it gets there, sometimes we share tidbits more to the general public if we’re 100% sure things are getting done in time or are in an advanced state (integration, development, exchanges). Investors are critical for a reason though; it’s our job to make sure their investment remains healthy and we keep working to improve ourselves, our product and our market constantly. I’m glad the smartdrop is concluded and we have a system in place to give people their rewards. Another thing that I feel we do really well is keeping the social media channels active and take the time to answer questions (which this AMA helps with too).
CryptOrangutang: What would you say were your biggest mistakes up to this point? Is there anything that had long-term consequences?
Robbie: Good question. I would not say mistake, but looking at we raised around $9.6M during the ICO while Ethereum was around $600–700 and the market started falling, it gave us less flexibility when it came to spending funds. So the team decided to put a full focus on building the project and delivering within the set timeline, which they did and they have an amazing platform to show for. Unfortunately that came at a cost when it comes to marketing which gave us less exposure compared to projects who raised like +$20M. If the timing would have been different, the whole process might have been slightly different as well.
johntradez: Can you elaborate on how much help you will provide to businesses that are using Morpheus Labs? Will you be actively training and assisting as long as they have their subscription?
Tommo: We’ll help as much as we possibly can. As we grow in subscriptions, we’ll also have the ability to hire more developers who will be focused on this task exclusively. If a company needs hours upon hours of help with their DApp, we could negotiate sharing a portion of revenue of the DApp, if they sell it later. Besides that, if our dev-community grows (externally), they can also do the same. Having visible rewards for developers who are actively contributing on our platform (for example badges or achievements) might help businesses find the right dev for their product, on which they can then decide who owns what portion of the finished product.
Chase S: How do you see the various regional dynamics impacting the speed of development/adoption? As much as getting integrated with “universities” and “businesses” sounds great, those words have very different implementations around the world. I would expect colleges/universities in the US to have a different set of challenges than university in Europe and even more differences when you get to places like SE Asia. The same can be said for businesses. In the US, it’s very capitalistic, but then you have business in China that (seemingly) is very closely tied with the government. How do you plan to handle these differences across global regions?
Tommo: Good question. To avoid these regional dynamics, we’re opting to have business developers (and university specialists) all across the globe, while the Singapore headquarters mostly acts as a place to combine all of these ideas/suggestions and makes sure it will be feasible from a platform level. You can’t make one curriculum and push it across the globe. For now we’ve placed ourselves in Europe, China, Taiwan and Singapore, and we’re actively looking for USA candidates (we do have contacts with universities there, but having someone that can easily fly over and understands the cultural preferences is mandatory)
CryptOrangutang: If you Robbie or Tommo got any closing words on what should we look out for with MITX the upcoming weeks, feel free to do so.
Tommo : We’re excited for the coming weeks-months, since we are going to be pushing bigger partnerships out on a weekly or bi-weekly level. This AMA has been excellent, and we’re both humbled by the high level of questions that have been asked and the overall attention we’ve gotten for Morpheus Labs. If anyone has questions after this, we’re still on Discord/Telegram, feel free to ask.
Chase: Thanks for coming and doing this Tommo and Robbie! Very interesting project that I’ve enjoyed learning more about. Looking forward to the coming weeks/months to see how MITX grows.
Jungle’s take on MITx:
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