Published (originally) by: Bio_Logik
Date: 24th May 2019
Wehave a great project, offering a rental marketplace for everyday unused assets, hence providing passive income for the owners while giving users a chance to ‘test before buying’ or/ and a one-off use. It has an economic and environmental benefit, but also an educational purpose, fighting over-consumerism. We will dedicate a full medium article on all the details of the app. (you can follow me to stay up to date with the latest info ;) )
Our tokenis a Waves token, which is a great asset considering the upcoming development of the Waves community (they just started to offer web3.0 courses for developers). A swap was made recently to reduce the supply (ratio 10:1) so it has now a healthy supply of 3.5B. Our token is on 3 exchanges: Crex24, Stex and WavesDex. Amongst the plethora of platforms it is listed on for better visibility (delta, blockfolio, coingecko, etc…), Coinmarketcap is the one most sought after by the general crypto public. The application for it was completed and submitted, then CMC asked for more info, so the application was finalised this week. For the time being, the token is one of the payment currencies within the app, alongside $BTC and $LTC and fiat currencies such as Euros and Dollars. In the future, and with the development of Waves smart contracts, the aim for it is to be used to ease and secure the rental process (rental contracts, escrow services and more). Coupled with ID verification, it can be a fully blockchain based platform. For now, let’s walk before we can run.
While walking, we can reduce to a slow pace sometimes, which allow us to take a deep breath and reflect. This is exactly what happened. The project is going well so far, but at some point, it is bound to hit a bump; luckily, it is a small bump that will be easily and rapidly flatten to make way for an even smoother path. On the 17th May 2019, we received a letter from TaylorVinters associates, a law firm specialised in branding based in London. While the content of the email cannot be disclosed for legal reasons, the outcome of it resulted in a reshape of the branding for us. Indeed, a company registered in England and Wales, is asking to not use ‘their’ name anymore. They have also filed for trademark of the our name through the EUIOP website. Whilst the application is still ongoing and undertaking a 3 month examination period, during which cancellation and opposition can take place, they feel that we are discrediting their business and marketing operation (they have been operational since 2016). The email from their solicitors also points out as one of the arguments that confusion was made between the 2 entities many times on our Telegram channel (providing screenshots of some conversations happening within the group).
Where many projects will be bummed by it, well, let’s face it, we were at first, during maybe the first hour or so. Then, it became clear and logical: and so what? We change our name, we rebrand but the core of the project (the app) is still in development. Yes, we will have to work much harder and yes, there will be some delays, but not in the app development as this is separate from the branding (we will just have to upload our new name in it). Our main concern is our community. We pride ourselves of having a cosy yet great community, and how they react will be very important. We had different reactions but overall very supportive members which motivates us even more to deliver a great product. Regarding the token, we will have yet another swap, once the new name is found. We will do our best for the swap to happen on exchanges, to make it easy for everyone (as long as they transfer their tokens to Crex and Stex). We will of course update our community in due course.
Weare spending our time on finding a new name, this is exhausting and not as easy as it sounds. Firstly, and on top of having a really good name marketing wise, we need to ensure that a domain for it is not taken (all the great names we found so far were taken, like amazon or ebay ;) ) but also that it is not on the trademark database as we will register the name as our own. We will become one of the very few projects having our own trademark. Once we have found the gem name, we will need to either keep our current logo or design a new one. Then it will be the long series of emails to all platforms where [new name here] is listed asking them to update our logo and name.
Lessons learnt: this is an overall positive phase that we went through. While it is always annoying to have to work harder and longer, we have to appreciate our mistakes and bounce from it. We checked trademark back in March, and nothing was filed at this time. Why didn’t we do it then? We honestly don’t know, it could have been the cost (over a thousand euros), the time, or ‘we’ll do it once we have the app done, let’s get our priorities right’ or simply the fact that we don’t know projects filing for a trademark. It can be difficult to know what is more important or what should be the focus of action. A benign action like trademarking a name may seem almost irrelevant but we have just demonstrated that, depending on the context, it could be the most import and first step to take. There is always a positive aspect to any situation. Let’s imagine that the name was trademarked without informing us. What would have happened? We would have released our app, started to see some market growth, and hired Waves developers to do a full blockchain integration. And then, we would have received a court proceeding for trademark infringement. This would be the end of our project as we know it. We should be grateful that this event occurred now, before we release our app and before the full marketing campaign.
Our main challenge now is to find THE right name. Once done, we will resume our roadmap as planned, with the whitepaper and business plan, which will now happen during June. The website can be ready for the end of the month, although we will wait for our new name to put it live. And finally, and most importantly, there is 0 delay in our app release as we mentioned before.
Business as usual on the outside, more work on the inside
***UPDATE***
Like everything, there is a silver lining to see. Ours came on Thursday 23rd May as we received the great surprise of being listed on Coinmarketcap.com. While projects can wait weeks or even up to 6 months to be listed on the crypto reference platform for many people, we were able to be listed in 3 DAYS! We are unsure why, but this news is most welcome to counter balance the need of changing names. And even better is the fact that in the last communication we had with CMC, they confirmed to us that the change of name/logo would not pose a problem.
Rentall App project (please note that all documentation or platform mentionning the old name will be amended with new name soon)
Website: rentapp.io
Litepaper: https://t.co/0dzQRmumGc
Telegram: https://t.me/rentapp_tg
