AMA w/ CEO, Zan Wu
Dear Atlas Community,
As stated in our previous ‘Message from CEO’ post back in November, the Atlas team has spent the majority of 2019 focusing on R&D into making the best possible travel app that we possibly can. We understand that this has come at a price, mainly in lack of communication. With the start of a new year and decade comes a chance to rectify this. We’re heading into 2020 positive that Atlas will change the travel industry for the better!
With that said, we wanted to provide a quick update in a way of an AMA with our CEO, Zan Wu. This will hopefully provide more clarity of what we’ve been up to, and bring back some positive sentiment to our communities.
Let’s jump in!
Atlas has been quiet for the last half year. Could you tell the community what has been going on? Is Atlas progressing forward?
As mentioned in quite a few posts throughout the last year, Atlas team has been very busy developing our revolutionary DApp, as well as completing integration with the Klaytn blockchain. I am happy to announce that we recently completed the integration and will be issuing the Klaytn compatible ATLS tokens soon (stay tuned!). As the market has been slow, and the Chinese government has been putting more scrutiny on blockchain and crypto projects, we also felt it was in our best interest to be more patient regarding the progression of Atlas, waiting for the market and blockchain industry to have more clarity.
We are in the process of uploading the DApp on the iOS Appstore pending Apple approval now. Once this has been approved and our users are able to download, we will let you all know!
What can the community expect from the DApp upon release?
The Atlas DApp will allow users to create travel content and write reviews about hotels and restaurants, whilst at the same time being able to read and comment on other people’s reviews. Points will be awarded for contents and interactions that enriches the community, which can be converted to $ATLS. The DApp also allows you to store and transfer $ATLS. In the near future, we will also be adding booking and e-commerce functions so that people can book hotels and activities, allowing for more rewards in ATLS!
Could you elaborate a bit more on the Klaytn integration? What does this mean for Atlas, and the community moving forward?
Atlas is an early travel DApp partner of Klaytn. We are bullish on the Klaytn ecosystem. As the Klaytn ecosystem develops and flourishes, Atlas will benefit from its users and traffic, with Atlas being able to provide real-life travel related application to the Klaytn Ecosystem.
In more of a general sense, what can we expect from Atlas short term + long term?
I think in the short term, the Atlas community can expect the release of our DApp, with the Atlas team continuing to make improvements and evolve the DApp to be bigger and better following the initial release. Klaytn will play a big part in our short term growth, allowing us to leverage their user base, along with our own, allowing us to hopefully have a great launch. Partnerships will play a huge role in the upcoming quarters, leveraging our already known suppliers and generating new, allowing us to integrate even more hotels & restaurants into the Atlas ecosystem.
I think for the longer term it’s going to be pretty much the same as the short term, except focusing more on the ‘longer term goals’ such as developing more fruitful partnerships that specifically targets to longterm growth, along with continuing improvements of our DApp to give the community even more rewards and the ability to use Atlas as a one-stop shop for everything travel!
Could you comment on the current price of ATLS and what Atlas will be doing to try and help that in the future?
Everyone can see that ATLS was down in the last few months, this could be because of the general market conditions for alt coins which has seen over 98% of coins going into the negatives. Saying this, Coinsuper exchange where ATLS was listed, also went through some turmoil following the sudden and unexpected passing-away of a high-profile owner of its parent company. This had a knock-on effect and created liquidity and confidence issues on the exchange, unfortunately also affecting ATLS. We plan to expand onto more exchanges in Q1 2020 to address this issue.
Funds raised from IEO, how are they currently being used?
As everyone knows, Coinsuper were our choice to do our small-scale IEO in April, of less than 1MMUSD. IEO is different from ICO. IEO is actually launched and issued by the exchange, so the IEO proceeds went to the exchange and is locked for liquidity purposes. The money is used to buy back ATLS from the IEO investors on the secondary market. Only 20% of IEO proceeds can be taken out by the project, which is only about 150K USD, which is currently being used for DApp development.
Most projects are going bankrupt these days, with many blockchain projects laying off staff. How is Atlas currently positioned to continue long-term growth?
Given the bearish market for blockchain projects, it is not surprising to see that. It is very difficult to raise money and projects are having to scale back to preserve capitals. Atlas is experiencing the same challenging market conditions. With that said, we are operating a lean team on the development side and our aim is to continue on development during this time, with the goal to list on a new exchange in the coming quarter and wait for the market to show more clarity.
As a final statement and point to the Atlas community. I want to thank every single one of you that has stuck by us during this time of absence. I can assure you the Atlas team is more determined than ever to make our project a success, and the development continues with limited resources. We truly believe in our goal and will stop at nothing to make sure it succeeds! We hope you’re there with us when it comes to fruition. Thanks again and see you soon!
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