CanYa Monthly Update March 2019

CanYa

Published in

CanYaCoin

6 min readMar 6, 2019

In this update we talk about CanWork developments, plans to accept fiat payments, marketing & community promotions.

What’s happened since the last update?

Since the last update the engineering team:

Continued to maintain and support CanWork.io
Optimised the cloud infrastructure to reduce the risk of cloud compute costs spiking as CanWork scales
Migrated the price feed (CAN to USD/ETH) for the hedged escrow from an outdated API.
Automated activity reports so the team can monitor usage stats without manual input from the developers.
Introduced a ‘Cancel Job’ function for Providers which terminates a job and releases the pre-charged funds held in escrow back to the Client. The function awaits testing in our staging environment and will be deployed in March.
Completed the CanYa Decentralisation Paper draft that details the path to decentralisation with the CanYa DAO and DappNodes. This is awaiting feedback, revision and release to the public.

However, the team did not achieve everything set out in the last update and for good reason.

Pivot to accept fiat payments

The CanYa team reprioritised some decentralisation development goals and made a strategic decision to focus on fiat integration.

“We need better product market fit before rushing out too much more cutting edge technology features,” says CanYa founder, JP Thorbjornsen. “A few weeks ago we pivoted hard to get proper Fiat money on-rails so we can massively increase the size of the drag net we can use.”

The current idea is to finish the fiat integration and spend some time promoting and getting a strong base of users before experimenting with more decentralisation features.

LimePay Integration

LimePay.io is a SaaS platform that enables end-users to freely execute transactions for decentralised applications (dApps) with fiat money. No need for registration or creating a crypto wallet. Just a credit card. LimePay takes care of the rest.

Limepay is a big deal because it will lower the entry barrier for clients and bring new money into the ecosystem.

CanWork already has hundreds of talented Providers ready to accept cryptocurrency for digital services using a simple wallet. However, there is still too much friction for individuals and businesses who want to pay for freelance jobs.

LimePay integration will work something like this:

New user signs up
(No Metamask/Ether address required!).
Browser generates ether wallet
New user pays with Credit Card
(only name & address required)
Credit Card remits to our LimePay Merchant account service
Limepay tech sends CAN tokens into the user wallet and signs the approve and transferFrom transactions on behalf of the user into our Hedged Escrow
Normal job process for client and provider

“The user — who has never touched crypto before — will be able to transact with the same ease as buying a T-shirt at an online store”

The fees will still be only 1% and payment will still be hedged on-chain for the provider.

Integration
We are happy to report that Limepay integration is going well. The tech spikes have been completed but there is still a significant amount of work to do as it involves the front end, back end, UI and smart contracts. The CanYa team is working closely with the LimePay team who provide amazing support!

The integration will consume much of the March developer output (in addition to BAU CanWork support). But once integrated it means a much more relevant and marketable product that we can promote widely.

Marketing & Community

This month saw a continuation of growing our user base via advertising and community campaigns. Now that our MMP has had about 2 months worth of data collected some trends strategies are beginning to emerge.

For example, our marketing has cast a wide net in terms of geography as we are a global platform. Therefore, it is no surprise that our freelancers are from all around the globe as can be seen by this breakdown:

Our monthly overall users look as follows:

With this in mind, and the imminent release of LimePay (which will reduce the client side barriers to entry significantly) the marketing efforts will start to focus on those geographies that are more likely to put work through the platform.

Our social media campaigns are also reflecting the above with certain geographies performing better per dollar spent than others. You can see a brief summary of our Facebook campaign this month below:

Another interesting development has been the growth in traction with the CanYaCoin Instagram account. Re-posting some of the great work done by freelancers on CanYa platform has generated a growth in engagement and proves to be a visually appealing way to share our story.

February Competition:

This month’s competition was a great success with a great number and quality of entrant’s competing for the 15 ETH prize!

The premise was to create a piece of content that addressed the following:

“Cryptocurrency and decentralised applications will revolutionise the freelance economy”

The winner was to be judged on:

The quality of the content
The creativity of the content
The amount of exposure it gets

This competition generated a lot of exposure for the CanWork platform with our Facebook post alone reaching over 30,000 people and garnering 12,000 likes. This was complemented by over 20 submissions to the competition (which was listed as a public job on the CanWork platform).

Check out the winning submission and the other worthy efforts:

The Winning Entry of the 15 ETH competition

March Focus

March will be about ensuring we have a good quorum of high quality providers. This will be important as we will then be heavily targeting the client side of the marketplace following the LimePay integration (clients will be able to pay our providers with a credit card!). This will mean a steady increase in the job flow through the platform. In addition our on-boarding emails and documentation needs to be comprehensive and detailed as we look to start bringing in users who may not be familiar with the intricacies cryptocurrencies and dApps.

Additionally we will:

Continue refining the advertising strategy & spend based on the data collected to date
Launch our ‘Freelancer of the Month’ campaigns to celebrate our best freelancers and share the message about our platform
Co-operate more with existing freelancer communities
Launch our new “Help us build the future of freelancing” marketing campaign and branding

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