A 4/20 Perspective in 2023
Recently a small group of us community members requested and were granted a zoom call with Divi Labs C-Suite Members to get some better insight to where the future of Divi was headed. Renuke (CMO), Rob (COO), and Niegz (Mobile Dev Lead) were happy to oblige, and really filled us in as much as they could on the Grand Vision for Divi. Following the meeting, I knew it was paramount that I share with the community my own thoughts on the state of Divi and where we’re going. What I’m about to say are my views alone, enhanced by some added perspective from the information received.
WTF got us to Half a Cent?
1. Telecom: This is the deal that really kicked off the tail end of our bull cycle top run. We’d just gone through a multi-month downtrend since the wallet release and Kucoin listing. This was an amazing use case for Divi and our now patented staking vault tech, and would give Divi Labs $52mil over the terms of its agreement.
The ugly — Fast forward 18 months and the Teleco has still yet to start making its payments to Divi Labs. IMO, this is the singular most destructive thing to happen to Divi leading into the bear market, when that capital would’ve been instrumental in keeping the ship afloat and given us the largest operating budget we’ve ever had.
The good —
a. This deal financially enabled our La Liga partnership.
b. It gave us the idea of changing from being simply another crypto wallet to instead rescoping our whole Crypto Made Easy philosophy to bring web3 into the non-crypto world.
c. Our CEO Nick Saponaro holds weekly calls with the Telecom, so we still have hope this eventually comes through once their own funding is secured. Game over for the Bears if/when it does.
2. La Liga: A huge 3.5-year regional sponsorship deal with reach of over 1 billion customers in our regions, with the right of first refusal in the case of expansion. And today, we are STILL the official crypto wallet of the second biggest futbol league in the world with 2.5 years remaining.
The ugly — See this thread from BWM. Further, because the telecom deal did not come through as expected, we eventually had to pause the La Liga branding campaign and activations. Thus, La Liga became more fud than good in the eyes of many community members.
The good —
a. Our branding efforts and activations with La Liga will come back once the budget gets rectified. Renuke has an entire plan all set and ready to go, and this will happen heading into the next bull market, not after its peak like last time.
b. Just like the Telecom deal made La Liga possible, the respected name of La Liga is now bringing Nick meeting after meeting with potential business partners in Dubai and greater MENA, and these multi-billion dollar companies are truly the key to the Grand Vision.
c. As of the 2023/24 season, EA Sports takes over and Santander will no longer be the primary naming rights partner of La Liga. From my perspective, they were a primary contributor to stiffing many of our collaborative efforts with La Liga…which of course they did, banks don’t tend to like crypto.
3. The Wallet: We finally got the fiat onramp in May 2022…beautiful timing and right as the crypto market crashed with the Tera Luna disaster.
The ugly — The wallet still had lagging issues and code that needed to be fixed even without the larger market crashing. The KYC process with the new provider was slow, they failed to allow direct Divi buying, and they proved to be an unreliable partner. So Divi Labs eventually made the call to drop them in October 2022, once again, leaving us with no onramp up until now.
The good — It was a brutal bear market anyway, so Labs got the pain out of the way and essentially built the wallet back up from scratch during this time. Additionally, they onboarded Simplex as our much-improved next fiat onramp partner.
4. Liquidity Bomb: Divi’s semi-hyped addition of two new market makers (GSR and CLS) as well as our long-awaited foray into DEFI.
The ugly — The cross-chain staking farm did not launch with the DEFI protocol as was anticipated, and still has not launched as of this moment. This is the main unique selling point to Divi’s DEFI protocol, and without it, DEX liquidity providers lose versus regular staking.
The good —
a. Even without the farm added yet, we have deeper liquidity and more consistent volume than we’ve ever had in our five-year history. We’re also now directly connected to the EVM world, a vital component to the “Divi Everywhere” philosophy.
b. GSR is the #1 Market Maker in the crypto space. Besides the deep liquidity, they also fast track us on to the top exchanges.
5. Kucoin: Our primary exchange
The ugly — Geo-blocked for US customers in January at the request of GSR so their lawyers could conduct a routine Securities review of Divi. While there are many workarounds for this such as VPN or using Changenow, it still added another gust of wind to our brewing fud storm.
The good — Divi has been through many Securities reviews in the past and has always passed. This step with GSR is necessary to get us onto US exchanges in the future. It’s already been three months so this could resolve any time now.
6. Other developments in Q1: a. The beginning stages of DAO governance; b. New Web3 Advisor Ryan Horn (former Binance Head of NFTs, sports, and gaming); c. The Divi L1 Series and Community Vision Series. These are all key signs that indicate the new direction Divi Project is heading… if you’ve been paying attention.
In the end, the ugly parts outweighed the good parts in the eyes of investors according to the price chart, helped greatly by the broader market downtrend. But even when the market started to recover in early January, Divi didn’t take notice and wanted to play with the bears a bit longer.
Short Term Outlook (The Shift to Greener Pastures)
It’s mid-April. You’re looking at the price with dread. Your fellow Divians keep dumping their bags. Every time you think the wallet update’s coming out, it gets pushed out another week. On top of that, you’ve been trying to hold out but the toilet fud is starting to actually affect you. If you’re really unlucky, you took out loans to buy the La Liga top and your wife’s giving you shit.
Okay, let me try to calm you. The paper hand guys with serious bags already dumped. OG diamond+ holders capitulated and gave up their coins for pennies. But 80% of you stuck around. The top 20 wallets held 24.5% in November 2021, and now that’s down to 22.5%, okay big deal. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong as listed above, and it brought us back down to $20mil market cap territory. It’s not getting any worse. So let me tell you how it starts getting better.
What’s Next in Q2?
1. The wallet update is coming out on Monday, April 24th. It’s done. It will finally be easy as hell to go from your bank account to your staking vault (and soon validator node), as we’ve always envisioned. What you’ll see next week is a much cleaner, smoother UX along with restored fiat onramp, this time with the ability to buy Divi directly (and no KYC under $1k). What you can’t see is what’s under the hood. In addition to cleaning up the code, the wallet has been modularized to enable our VSAAS vision, where components can be easily swapped out and rebranded for whatever a company needs to facilitate Web3 for their business. One feature you won’t have as a US customer immediately is the sell function. This will come with the additional trading partners that we onboard in addition to Simplex. Who in their right mind is selling here anyway?
2. The marketing team is releasing the first of its “Let’s Learn” series on WEB3 shortly after. If you truly want to start understanding the Grand Vision for Divi as an ecosystem, this will be a must-read.
3. Next up, we await the new roadmap, light paper, and Divi Project website rebuild. Of these, the roadmap is done (I looked at it), the light paper is close to being finished, and the website looks to be the longest wait, but also actively being worked. These are the key milestones before the paid marketing button gets pushed, which we all know is the essential ingredient to get new users into our ecosystem (not withstanding The Grand Vision). And yes, of course the budget. This last part is in the CEO’s hands to acquire funding.
4. The DEFI farm could drop at any moment. Josh Caleb’s (CINO) latest update here on 4/20: “The current bridge custody provider couldn’t craft the necessary staking vault transactions within their custody infrastructure so we pivoted to our other institutional custody provider that already had staking vault support. We just finished KYC process with them last week and we’re going through the onboarding this week. Aside from that, the farm has been done for a quite a while. Smart contracts, front-end, and backend for the farm had already been tested live on mainnet — just needed the custodian to do their small part. Per usual, it’s been a third-party delay holding us back.” In addition, I expect our growth hacking that’s been on retainer to follow this release, but purely my guess.
5. The wallet was refactored for many reasons, one of them was so that we could start building additional features without accruing more tech debt. That’s now done so we can start expecting wallet updates with more regularity. One of the most long-awaited features has been Performance Mode. We expect to be able to see the prices and charts of the coins in our wallet and that’s coming this quarter.
6. Divi’s next EVM is Polygon. In reality, our token is already there. However, there’s not any point to using it until Josh gives us the thumbs up. So as of now I’m wagering June before we’re actively providing Divi-Matic liquidity on Polygon network. If you’ve noticed, Ethereum gas fees are getting back to painful levels. Polygon provides cheap gas fees, and is the best money saving option until we get functional gasless relays as part of our new roadmap…but we’ll save that discussion for the next article.
So I think we pretty much covered the current state of Divi. My summary is: We’re down a ton, nearly everything went wrong that could. We’re finally getting releases, and shit’s about to get fun again. There’s way more being done than we covered. But we’re going down that rabbit hole next week as we start looking at how Divi is just now beginning a major shift into something much bigger and grander than we ever imagined. It’s time to find that old bottle of enthusiasm and chug that bastard.
Coming After Roadmap Reveal — Part 2: THE GRAND VISION FOR DIVI
Check out DIVIROADMAP.COM for more great info.
