SIMDAQ Project Development Report/ May 2019
Dear friends,
We’ve done a huge amount of work for the last several months backstage and there were no preliminary results or ideas to approach you with, however, after spending numerous nights on it we are ready to provide a big update that contains both information about development progress and certain strategical solutions that we see for the future of the project.
The main development effort is still focused on the Trading robots module. As we previously informed, this task is complicated, actually more complicated than we expected; but just imagine how ambitious the goal is — we are building a solid programmable language that will be executed right inside your browser and will allow to create custom indicators, fully formalised trading strategies and feedback on the huge amount of historical data already collected providing you with extensive performance statistics. The software that allows you to do similar things was built by teams of 100+ people and the task itself consists of not only providing functionality but keeping it secure, linguistically easy to use and fast performing. We are happy that we are about to introduce custom indicators. You will notice no difference initially but technically the indicators we have now will be transferred to our own language and shortly after that, we’ll provide the interface for you to build your own ones, sharing it inside the platform and even selling the ones that are most useful. We do have funds to finish this part completely and even in a very unlikely scenario if we face some major obstacles and funds dry out, our team is 100% dedicated to finish this as we believe that having such an advanced technology will eventually pay back in one way or another.
We also have certain ideas regarding the whole strategy. So far we’ve conducted a huge effort approaching exchanges trying to make a deep integration providing our technology to their users. We believed (and still do) that it would be the best possible way of getting the audience we need on board and exchange will be able to benefit from providing our tools to their users. We had a couple of very -I mean VERY- fruitful discussions with giant exchanges and for the last two months every day we’ve been waiting when we would be allowed to announce some great news. And I can’t tell you how disappointed we were when we were told that there was a major problem from legal side as exchange can’t integrate third-party solutions into sensitive licensed trading software. We are still working on it, but now it seems that it could take ages before we can solve this and move forward.
Anyway, we have to do something and we started to think of possible outs keeping our minds initially opened and clean from funding restrictions. In general we can see two viable ways of how we can proceed. The first way is to focus on getting listed and doing it ASAP. That means that this would be a paid listing and we skip the integration part we’ve been looking forward to do initially. The goal is to increase token liquidity and sell certain amount of tokens on market to get additional funds for project development and servers maintenance. In order to achieve this goal this should be a truly big exchange with high amount of active users. From exchanges that support Waves tokens our best bet is HitBTC or OKex. We’ve got preliminary project screening and it seems we can get listed for about 20–30 BTC. We can consider switching to ERC-20 token that would give us more options but generally pricing for exchange with enough of real active users would be similar. Moreover, we are 100% sure that simple listing will not solve the problem and we need to organise a serious marketing push for 3–4 months. To be sure that we are making everything possible the best option is hiring a marketing agency with certain track record. We’ve already contacted some of them (including the one that serves Waves itself) and estimated the budget of 20 BTC including both marketing budget and agency fees. So, the total budget for such project is 40–50 BTC and we need to remember about risks involved as we can’t make any forecast if the marketing push we create would be sufficient or not to attract new buyers.
The second way is to convert utility token to security, detokenize the product, build it as normal regular business and pay dividends to token holders. We’ve made a very big research of this opportunity and we believe that it is possible to convert Simdaq into a viable business. Traditional trading markets are much more mature and similar projects are successful with these markets. Comparing to competitors like tradingsim.com, ThinkOnDemand and professional software Simdaq is much more advanced in every aspect including data availability, variety, functionality and technology. Assuming that we can do a similar subscription model, for the business to take off, we’ll need to invest around 25 BTC in traffic generation creating a subscription base big enough to maintain our team and infrastructure with ability to grow further. We also think that on the initial stage pretty much same marketing and PR push will be required as for the first plan, making the total budget of the project to reach around 45 BTC. We’ll be happy to share more details regarding the financial model of this approach. We have it all carefully calculated. The benefit we see in this approach is that the whole process would be much more controllable but reaching the result could take certain time.
We do experience funds shortage and we don’t have the amounts required to execute these plans. We’ve already started active search for potential investors with these new offers presented above.
Please share what you think about it, if any of you can support us with any additional funds for particular plan execution we’ve created a special google form we would ask you to fill and we’ll get back to you sharing all the additional information that you may be interested in:
https://forms.gle/uqxkcMQHPSYz1esZ8
We have completely dedicated several years of our lives to Simdaq. We do believe that the destiny of Simdaq is to become successful one way or another and we’ll keep fighting for it. Every project passes hard times, but we stay strong no matter what happens and keep doing everything we can. Thanks for your support.
