Major Update: Add.xyz Roadmap update on Mobile App, Privacy Mixers, Mobile Credits and more!
It’s been a busy few months for the team. We have been cutting through our roadmap like butter!
We will be giving our community an update on our mobile wallet build, V2 platform, privacy mixer and more!
Firstly before we do this, we wanted to give our community an insight into the trials and tribulations of the project over the past few months. Together with our marketing team, we have decided to launch a quarterly ‘inside the team’ opinion piece.
Founder’s Thoughts: Inside the Team
We started in 2019 as a small project aspiring to make users’ lives better through innovation in UI/UX while focusing on niche aspects in the space soon to become crucial in the fight for decentralisation; Privacy.
Their journey has been an eye opening experience, as a small project with limited seed funding only to experience the depths of a bear market towards 2019, making sure development could push ahead aggressively without compromising the runway of the project. It’s a dilemma that every founder faces, the balance between responsibility towards sensible decisions in expenditure and costs while also satisiating the demand of investors and the community to develop aggressively and somewhat compete against the clock in the race to build more composability.
Add.xyz’s team faces unique challenges and our community will learn and see the insights into the daily challenges and tasks faced by them.
Small Cap Projects
One of the biggest challenges for Add.xyz is that our initial fundraise was very small compared to DeFi projects with no MVP’s and some which failed to show any sign of development after 12 months from their raise. While in the traditional fundraising space, this can be substantial, in DeFi and blockchain, fundraises under 4m or 5m US Dollars are considered relatively small and limiting due to the high costs of developers, marketing, maintenance and service provider costs in the space.
Projects with very large fundraises can effectively deploy funding to increase resources with very little consideration needed for expenditure controls or the worry of compromising a companies runway and running out of funding.
Ironically, very few of them go beyond deployment of a simple blockchain and mostly exist to market themselves. This is not a strategy which we can afford to do, as we do not have millions to burn in aimless marketing.
Racism in the industry presents new challenges
Another challenge that the team faced, but was not expected early on was the fact that the team was predominantly asian in origin, while operating in a western atmosphere. Such is not unusual, but does pose challenges. We can highlight real examples of more difficulty when trying to reach out to larger DeFi projects (often US based) and trying to form relationships, while also trying to combat their skepticism around racial composition of the team. We have found that there is significant racism within the blockchain space, from the grassroots users up to the top of the hierarchy with exchanges and other projects.
The dynamic was a strange one, as often upper or middle class founders and teams with former centralised banking experiences were preaching to the masses about their blockchain and defi products to low income user backgrounds situated in countries worlds away from the experiences of professional ex bankers.
The key difference here is that our team, on an individual basis; are the very people who have experienced profiling and challenges in financial access their whole lives. Furthermore, this is often not just experienced by them, but entire families, communities and countries - due to political, economic and social restrictions imposed from monetary organisations like the central bank, or national restrictions for sending and accessing currencies, or difficulties in opening and accessing finance due to their lack of documentation, history and being deemed as ‘high risk’. There is a sweet irony here.
Our only approach can be to keep trying when attempting to form long-term relationships with other projects, like DeFi protocols, service providers or exchanges for example, because of the fact that the team is asian. We are often not taken as seriously and due to having a token utility, there is added anxiety of being associated with projects which are new or early in their development.
Nevertheless, the only strategy forward for founders facing this difficulty is perseverance. While we might not have been able to form early relationships with top projects initially, over time, something like ‘proof of existence’, whereby projects weather the trials and tribulations of operating in a difficult industry prove their resilience and gain recognition for this. We aren’t going anywhere.
Unreliable Partners in integration — the limitation in aggregation speed
In our early days, as with most DeFi projects, we were open to the world of web3 solutions and API tie-ups with any projects which made sense. We were passionate about what we were building and the potential around composability for layers of defi tech to sit above each other, interacting fluidly. It was to our detriment that we went into relationships with other projects without equal commitment from the other side. As we continued to integrate very quickly, it was an unforeseen issue that some would not intend to continue with their ‘main’ defi product, as they pivoted as the market moved and changed.
This resulted in us having spent considerable development resources (albeit within a small amount of time) mostly waiting for partners to response with documentation and information on their side, which never really came.
Its made us think about implementing a criteria that we need to fulfil in order to mitigate the risk from other projects ceasing to develop, moving away from their initial or main product focus, or simply having their own development limitations. By installing this criteria we hope to limit the exposure to risk in loss of development time. This has been a pivotal lesson especially when we are heavily reliant on these features being rolled out to our community.
Hostile attacks from trading groups and paid fudding
As some of our community members will have also noticed, around the time of post-listing of the PLT token, we discovered a number of paid trading and signal groups using telegram marketing services to discredit and fud the project, in order to cause negativity in the community and a bad sentiment, thus decreasing the price of PLT. As a small team in relation to our large community, dealing with the constant daily pressure of traders and investors who only have a short-term vision for PLT is very difficult. If this is you, you should pick another project!
The team decided long ago not to pander to the wants and needs to short-term speculators only looking for pump and dumps. We’re not interested in providing constant minute-by-minute, hourly and daily updates for speculators who provide no value or have no understanding of DeFi, no interest in our products and also cause daily stress to members and advisors of our team.
While the entire market pulled back by 70–90% across major DeFi projects, there was an unrealistic expectation that the add.xyz team could operate against the grain and execute magic. This isn’t reality and nor are we interested in these metrics. We are solely focused on the technological development of providing more access to decentralised financial solutions to a wider audience outside of the crypto niche, by utilising and creating perfect UI/UX.
With this said, we hoped this has shared some of the insights and feelings inside of the project team and how we see our past and future in the coming months.
Onto the roadmap progress!
You can find the roadmap here.
Privacy
Originally, our privacy research, architecture and build was planned to be completed by the end of Q3 2020 with audits and deployment at the end of Q4, we’re happy to announce that all of the planning, development and building has been completed within the specified time on the roadmap. We are carrying out audits of all our smart contracts beginning in November, which means that the deployment will be finished ahead of the head of Quarter 4 as originally planned.
We have also completed the integration of Tornado Cash into our privacy mixing flow. Effectively, users will be able to choose ADD.xyz’s mixer or tornado cash, and in the future mix between both services, increasing anonymity and the anonymity set; we are still working this one out.
Now onto the juicy exciting stuff that no one else has done before… mobile money into DeFi
Mobile Money
We don’t want to give too much away. We know that the leading DeFi protocols in the space and other aggregators are copying our ideas and are sometimes able to execute limited versions sooner than us, but this is something unique and that other DeFi projects will struggle to achieve due to the teams backgrounds.
We have cracked the way for people without bank accounts to send fiat into DeFi lending protocols, in a fully decentralised manner.
Users with mobiles in African countries will be able to text us mobile credits into our local mobile money accounts; our protocols will do the rest. You’ll be earning interest in lending protocols and be able to withdraw your principal and interest amount instantly, straight back to your mobile.
Initially, our Mobile Money roadmap was:
- [Research] DeFi lending into Africa via Mobile Credits — Add.xyz to M-Pesa (Tanzania) — Completed Q3 2020
- [Integrate] Add.xyz to M-Pesa (Tanzania)- Q1 2021 / Completed by Q4 2020
- [Build, Test & Deploy] DeFi lending into Africa via Mobile Credits — Add.XYZ to M-Pesa (Tanzania) — Q2 2021 / Completed by Q4 2020
We have steamed through development the first two milestones and we are just at the beginning of the building phase, with our design and flows completed, 2 quarters ahead of the roadmap. Our mobile money solution will be completed 6 months ahead of the original deploy date in Q2 2021.
The key difference is that we are not limited to just M-Pesa anymore, and we will be initially launching with Nigeria and Kenya first, with multiple local currency options. More will be revealed sooner to the time.
Country Rollout:
Phase 1: Nigeria, Kenya
Phase 2: Tanzania & South Africa
Phase 3: Ghana, Zambia & Uganda
Users can send Nigerian Naira, Kenyan Shilling, Tanzanian Shilling, Ghanaian Cedi, South African Rand, Zambian Kwacha & Ugandan Shilling.
Mobile Wallet App
An example of when something isn’t planned but is the right thing to do would be our mobile app. We initially were not in favour of a mobile app being built as soon as possible because of the limits connectivity and syncing between different platforms. That issue has been solved somewhat through web3 wallets and other methods like mobile sign-ons and logins. We recognise that the biggest use case of DeFi exists in a world where bank accounts and cards are not in reach of the majority of people, but where mobile phones are the access point to the rest of the world.
We started researching in September 2020 the best DeFi mobile apps, portfolio apps and banking apps in the space. With this research, the team looked into pushing the feature limitations of these apps with our own integrations already on our web platform.
The original roadmap for our research and design phase was due to take place in Q1/Q2 2020
- [Research] Add.xyz Mobile App — Manage multiple wallets, assets & protocols — originally planned for Q1 2021 completed in Q3 2020
2. [Design & Architecture] Add.xyz Mobile App — Manage multiple wallets, assets & protocols — originally planned for Q2 2021 completed in Q3 2020
3. [Build, Test & Deploy] Add.xyz Mobile App — Manage multiple wallets, assets & protocols — originally planned for Q2 2021 — to be completed in Q1 2021
We have completed phases 1 & 2 in September and October, with the main production having been started by the development team. The initial features of the V1 mobile app, due to be deployed at the beginning of Q1 2021 will include the following;
V1: User Management Module, Wallet Management Module, Settings Module, Contact Management Module, Lending Module, Protection Module, Token Swap Module, Portfolio Module, Blockfolio Module, Staking Module, Stream Money Module.
This is a limited but highly aggressive development phase for mobile as we understand that we have many competitors such as Argent, Metamask, Blockfolio, Frontier and others. V2 will include features which we won’t reveal just yet.
Stay tuned for more development updates and beta testing rewards over the next few weeks
For any questions please feel free to reach out to us on:
Website: https://add.xyz/
Telegram: https://t.me/ADDXyzpublic
Twitter: https://twitter.com/adddotxyz
Medium: https://medium.com/@Add.xyz
