COTI 2019 in review

Published in

COTI

8 min readJan 1, 2020

We would like to start this year’s review by thanking our community and our supporters for supporting COTI through its journey. COTI has been building up for a while now and, lately, we have seen a lot of people taking an interest in what we do and believe in. Another year, filled with important milestones achievements and successes, has gone by.

From important technology developments and merchants acquisition to strong partnerships and community growth, COTI is giving you an overview of this past year and its path to adoption. Looking back at the road we’ve travelled so far, we are confident 2020 will be even greater.

We wish you all a Happy New Year and success in what’s to come!

COTI Technology

2019 started strongly for COTI with the Trustchain TestNet that went live. We introduced a number of COTI R&D team’s key innovations including the Trust Score Update Algorithm (TSUA), one-click payment requests, DSP consensus, MultiDAG, node managers and more.

The private version of COTI Trustchain MainNet didn’t take long to follow. It allowed users to set up a COTI wallet in time before the token distribution on June 4th.

The token distribution and IEO on KuCoin along with the public MainNet launch were the key happenings of a successful one-day event that marked the official entrance of COTI into the market.

Shortly after the successful launch of COTI’s MainNet, Dr. Nir Haloani, COTI CTO, introduced for the first time COTI’s interoperability and cross-chain bridge, which allowed users to swap their COTI native coin to ERC20 and BEP2, thus making COTI storable in cold wallets. Thanks to COTI’s interoperability, made possible by the cross-chain bridge which allows seamless integration with almost any blockchain in existence, we have been able to list COTI on Bithumb Global, and Bitmax (as ERC20 tokens) and on Binance Dex (as BEP2 token).

Later this year, we introduced the COTI Universal Payment System (UPS) which represents a breakthrough in cryptocurrency and fiat payments for both merchants and consumers. COTI’s UPS is the first network enabling: instant payments for merchants, universal processing of fiat and cryptocurrency, low fees, buyer-seller protections, gaining Interest, prepaid cards, COTI Whitelabel and more.

COTI’s UPS is making cryptocurrency functional. Take an in-depth look at it.

The development of the UPS together with COTI’s cross-chain bridge marked an important milestone; probably one of the most important to date.

This has been the starting point for COTI to develop its Crypto Gateway launched in November. It allows merchants to accept Bitcoin easily and directly via their websites, thus forming the first piece of our all-encompassing payment solution, the COTI UPS.

Merchants interested in this payment solution are invited to sign up here.

The launch of the COTI Crypto Gateway opened the path to exciting partnerships such as the one we have with the Cardano Foundation, by developing the ‘pay with ada’ solution, offering and further extend the utility use case for the token. On the same note, COTI has also announced that it will be strengthening its collaboration with Fantom, creating a payment solution for Fantom-based networks, and to make collateral stable debt tokens (CSDT) usable in daily life.

A month after the UPS introduction, COTI’s Global Trust System (GTS) was presented. It is an advanced layer of trust for any blockchain which is now offered as a service on other chains. COTI did just that by deploying its GTS mechanism on Chainlink, thus initiating the process of integrating it into Chainlink’s oracle and smart contract framework, as part of our endeavour to introduce more trust and adoption to any blockchain system.

In mid-September, as part of the MainNet’s continuous developments, we were finally thrilled to share COTI’s staking model to run Full Nodes in the network.

After they were created, it did not take long for COTI’s History Nodes to start handling all forms of transaction data storage and retrieval in the COTI network. This was a major breakthrough for users as it was destined to allow them to run Full Nodes on COTI’s network.

Following our announcement on the staking model, we received a lot of feedback and interesting suggestions from the community. We’ve then decided to take this staking model to another level: the “staking as a service” model, with the Community Node introduction. This would enable the inclusion of more community members in the operation. It is worth noting that Community Node registration was overwhelming in numbers due to an important demand.

NOW LIVE is our first decentralized MainNet node to run on the Trustchain!!

COTI partnerships

Partnerships are key to any rising company. The kind of partnerships you conclude may influence your path and determine your success. That is why COTI cares a great deal about partnering up with the right partners in COTI’s fields of interest.

You can see below a list of some of COTI’s key partners.

COTI & Cardano Foundation

The collaboration with Cardano Foundation of the past months has been successful in developing a ‘pay with ada’ gateway for merchants. It aims at simplifying payment processing as part of COTI’s Crypto Gateway solution. The Cardano Foundation will leverage COTI’s Universal Payment Solution (UPS) to power the ada payment gateway offering as well as further extend the utility use case for the token.

COTI & Chainlink

COTI has initiated the process of integrating its GTS mechanism into Chainlink’s oracle and smart contract framework. This will add support for trust-based events in smart contracts, and enable user-incentivization in line with a predetermined trust score threshold. For example, users will be eligible to receive tokens if their Trust Score is above a given threshold for one year or, alternatively, users could receive a bonus for transacting in a trustworthy manner.

COTI & Fantom

The main purpose of COTI’s teaming up with Fantom in May 2019 was to address the issues of the blockchain with a new technology based on the directed acyclic graph (DAG). It was developed and used by both COTI and Fantom to provide scalability and low fees among other things.

We have since then strengthened our mutual and fruitful collaboration.

Recently, COTI and Fantom jointly announced the strengthening of their collaboration. COTI will work on integrating Fantom-based MainNets such as Xar Network into its existing payment rails on the back-end, allowing Fantom to build FantomPay and XarPay on top of COTI’s infrastructure. It will support merchant onboarding, fiat off-ramps, and consumer applications. All transactions data will also be put into COTI’s Trustchain. This will open up further usage and financial services, and add more utility to COTI’s native coin.

COTI & Simplex

Simplex is an EU-licensed financial institution that enables users to buy crypto from exchanges using their credit cards in a fraud-free environment, increasing conversion rates and enabling merchants to focus on their business growth.

As part of this partnership, Simplex is also considering adding COTI to its limited lineup of supported currencies. They include BTC, ETH, and 5 others.

COTI & Constellation

Together with Constellation, ORBS, Wanchain, BXB Capital and Mido Play, COTI announced the formation of the Scalable Protocol Alliance (SPA), a consortium of leading companies that are building next-generation Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) for business intelligence and real-world solutions.

COTI & Recruit

Recruit, a major global enterprise with a market cap of over $50 billion, has invested in COTI through its funding division RSP.

RSP has joined COTI’s list of notable investors, and their extensive portfolio will enable COTI to break into the Japanese market and amplify its user base in Asia.

COTI in the news and reviews

COTI has made the front page on multiple occasions this year in leading media platforms such as Yahoo! Finance, MSN Money, APnews, Zero Hedge, CIO Review, The Bitcoin News, ZY Crypto, Finance Magnates, Coin Telegraph, and many more. Shahaf Bar-Geffen, COTI’s CEO, was also interviewed by D.street earlier this year.

In addition, COTI was reviewed by well-known and high-regarded influencers and rating agencies such as OhHeyMatty, Token Insight, DPRating, Wolf Crypto, and more.

You are welcome to check out our news section on the COTI website for all the COTI news.

During 2019, we’ve conducted many AMAs in our own Telegram group and made it possible for the community to ask questions directly to the leading team. Moreover, COTI was invited to participate in dozens of AMAs on other channels from top influencers from the crypto sphere including Wolf Crypto, Fantom, Crypto Daku Robinhooders, Crypto Differ, Atomic, and Binance (17 AMAs just around the Binance Community Voting Round), and more.

We are honored to be on BINANCE’s radar.
We’ve started by joining Binance Info’s V Label Transparency Initiative. This provided Binance community trusted information on the project. Later on, we’ve been listed on Binance DEX, and have since issued a BEP2 token on Binance Chain as part of our interoperability solution.

Our last event with Binance was a Community Coin Vote Round which gave COTI a real boost and an incredible exposure. This reflected on a growing community, interested in what we do and believe in.

The Binance community showed us real support and we would like to thank Binance for this opportunity and exposure.

What comes Next: a few words from Shahaf

“I would like to personally thank all those who have been part of this exciting adventure so far.

There is still much to do, and with the extraordinary level of motivation shown by all, I am confident that many more successes are to follow next year.

COTI will continue to build and ship

Below are some of the developments expected for 2020:

1. Nodes and staking will scale-up to support the growth in our processing volume, allowing great rewards to all those involved directly or through a delegate

2. COTI’s MultiDAG, the first-ever DAG that lets you issue tokens on top of the base protocol, like ERC20 on Ethereum, will soon be released

3. With monthly transactions grossing over $5M (as you can see in our block explorer), the Credit Card processing will be live soon to grow the volume of processing a lot

4. In early 2020, we will announce a DeFi partnership with a crypto lending bank

5. Future releases of the COTI Payment Gateway will also include support for Credit Cards, ETH, USDT, USDC and other popular cryptocurrencies

6. We are working on a Tokenomics revision which will be revealed soon

7. The block explorer will be improved to include more features

8. The COTI Pay app for consumers will be released

9. Features for COTI Pay Business will be added

10. Exciting new partnerships and liquidity venues are to be expected

I wish you all a Happy New Year, full of joy, friendship, fruitful partnerships and especially success!”