We would like to start this year’s review by thanking our community and our supporters for supporting COTI through our journey. Despite all the challenges the entire world faced in 2020, we’ve had our best year so far, in terms of both development and growth.
For those who have joined COTI over the last year, you can read our previous 2019 COTI year in review here. As a company, COTI is now entering its fifth year, something of note in the crypto space.
During 2020 we’ve continued to deliver continual updates to our network, new product features, sign new partnerships and also launch an entirely new product, crypto’s first combined volatility index, and trading platform. We’ve been thrilled to see the fruits of the seeds planted in 2019 come to fruition in 2020 and are more excited than ever for everything to come in 2021! We would like to start this year’s review by thanking our community and our supporters for supporting COTI through our journey. Despite all the challenges the entire world faced in 2020, we’ve had our best year so far, in terms of both development and growth.
2020 has been an exciting year for the COTI network. After launching our TestNet and MainNet in 2019, we’ve been able to build upon this foundation to strengthen our network and continue to build out core aspects of our technology that has allowed for increased usage and utility of both the network itself and our COTI coin that powers it.
One of our most important achievements this year has been the completion and launch of our MultiDAG. The MutiDAG extends the capacity of our Trustchain to allow for multi-currency and additional token issuance on the COTI network. The MultiDAG lays the foundation to allow partners, from developers to enterprises and central banks, to issue tokens on top of the Trustchain. We have already been approached by potential partners and plan to participate in central banks tenders to issue Central Banks Digital Currencies in 2021. For more details and a demonstration of the MultiDAG, you can click here.
We also launched our COTI Pay v1.0 wallet, featuring a sleek responsive design for web browsers, COTI Bridge integration, updated staking support, and COTI-X integration. The COTI Pay v1.0 wallet is also now available as a mobile application on Android, via the Google Play Store and our iOS version of the wallet will soon be available on the Apple App Store (currently in the approval process). For those who haven’t accessed or downloaded the COTI Pay v1.0 wallet, you can click here to see what the wallet looks like.
To support liquidity across the COTI network, we launched COTI-X. COTI-X functions as an internally licensed exchange, a fiat on-ramp for the COTI ecosystem and is supported by several liquidity pools, including Uniswap. The COTI/ETH Uniswap pool is already being used by COTI-X to facilitate credit card purchases of COTI via the COTI Pay v1.0 wallet and on Binance and BitMax. COTI-X is also being used as a fiat on-ramp by some of our whitelabel wallet customers, covered in more detail below.
We recently released the COTI Global Trust System (GTS). The initial GTS system supports the Bitcoin network and will be expanded out to support Ethererum and Cardano in 2021. The GTS uses our unique Trustnode and Trustscore infrastructure to monitor user behaviour, calculate trust scores and as such, introduce more trust and adoption to other blockchain networks, past COTI. The GTS is available via a web interface and will also soon be available via an API and via Chainlink’s oracle and smart contract framework.
Our Trustchain 2.0 update has seen significant development and we’ve been hard at work at the challenges of implementing a pBFT consensus model to upgrade our network to DAG 2.0. This update will include major optimizations to the DAG structure and ClusterStamp that will significantly increase throughput and capacity on the Trustchain.
As we’re currently in the process of integrating our MainNet 1.0 into a major exchange to support more liquidity for our native COTI coin, in order to solve issues faced with the COTI Bridge availability and transfer limitations, this update has been pushed back to Q2 2021. Once this exchange integration is complete, we’ll be rolling out TestNet 2.0 and developing an SDK that will allow integration of MainNet 2.0 with KuCoin and other exchanges supporting the COTI native coin.
After the development of our underlying network architecture in 2019, one of our main points of focus in 2020 was building out our whitelabel merchant solutions to expand our payment network and use of the COTI network and utility of the COTI coin. We released several whitelabel wallet solutions in 2020 that use fiat, BTC, and stable coins that allow gaming merchants to accept crypto as a form of payment, firstly, Blockchain Dollars, used by Market Junction N.V, a gaming industry giant. Secondly, the Ultra eWallet, used by Dafabet, a name synonymous with gaming worldwide, and finally Simply Wallet, a custodian wallet with a simple user interface and with built-in credit card processing.
In 2021 we will continue to not only build further whitelabel products to support the growing demand for crypto and fiat-based patent solutions via our merchant network but also our Trustchain and supporting infrastructure to support the increased capacity required of this ever-increasing processing demand.
Towards the year’s end, we have introduced not only the long-awaited COTI debit card but also a direct integration of fiat into the COTI Pay wallet, allowing our consumers and merchants alike to use the COTI Pay wallet as a digital bank account, inclusive of an IBAN and supportive of both crypto and fiat alike.
We’ll also be focused on developing more features and tools for consumers who seek the same level of support and functionality we give to merchants: a combined world of crypto and fiat offers, via additional features in our COTI Pay wallet.
As always, our technology and development can be followed through our public GitHub.
This year we have continued to build important partnerships in both the crypto space and the real world. Following on from 2019, in which we partnered with Cardano, developing the ‘pay with ada’ gateway, Chainlink, integrated our GTS mechanism into Chainlink’s framework, Recruit, a major global enterprise with a market cap of over $50 billion, and more, in 2020 we also partnered with Celsius Network, who will be our CeFi partner supporting the COTI Earn functionality in the COTI Pay wallet, allowing consumers and merchants to easily earn interest and access loans directly on the COTI platform. We also partnered with MoonPay, allowing access to the COTI coin via credit card payments in regions we were previously unable to support.
Most importantly, we expanded our partnership with Simplex, allowing COTI to join top currencies like BTC and ETH in the ability to be purchased directly with a card or bank transfer. Top exchanges and platforms like Binance, Kucoin, Changelly, and ChangeNOW have adopted the solution and their user base can now buy COTI directly with fiat.
The other significant partnership of note for 2020 was via our COTI subsidiary, Paywize, which enables us to target a host of merchants via direct credit card processing that would not have been possible via crypto alone. Paywize itself has grown tremendously in its first year of inception and has become a payment processor serving over 100 merchants globally.
We have been able to target and sign in a host of merchants, mainly in the gaming industry, including Market Junction, Dafabet, Kindred Group, 10bet, Unibet, Jet Bingo, MyFirstWallet.io, Veritex, SimplyWallet to name a few. You can see more of our gaming partners here and read more about Paywize’s achievements here.
2020 was a tremendous year for COTI in terms of commercial development, with our strategy to serve high risk and gaming merchants proving itself, signing top tier merchants as described above. Each of these partnerships has helped to grow the functionality and utility of the COTI network with a total of almost $100M USD in processing volume for 2020.
Our staking platform was launched exactly one year ago, on January 1st, 2020, with the first node added to the MainNet. Since then, the staking program has been upgraded to Staking 2.0, allowing more stakers to stake more COTI coins on more COTI nodes.
To date, COTI’s staking program is one of the highest APY staking programs in the crypto space with an average APY of 40%, a total of 80M COTI coins has been staked and removed from circulation, across 18 MainNet nodes and more than 750 participants. We count eleven Community nodes and five Advanced nodes, all run by trusted members, former TestNet node operators, or community leaders.
In addition to our Staking 2.0 program, we ran several exchange-based staking campaigns via KuCoin and Binance. These campaigns resulted in an additional 70M COTI staked by hundreds of COTI holders, removing more coins out of circulation.
In 2021, as a result of the success of our commercial development and the growth of our merchant network, we will be exploring ways to expand the capacity of our staking program significantly, without degrading the existing APY of our existing Staking 2.0 program.
2020 was the year in which we finally answered the age-old question, “when Binance?”. Thanks to our amazing community, despite losing the Binance community vote in late 2019, Binance decided to list COTI, free of charge, in early 2020. This listing has had a significant impact on the growth of our community, the volume of our COTI coin, and the overall reputation of COTI in the crypto space.
Of course, 2020 was also the year of the DEX and we listed the ERC20 version of our COTI coin on Uniswap in August. Since listing, our COTI/ETH Uniswap pool has grown significantly, to just under $2m USD, giving traders around the world the opportunity to purchase COTI in a decentralised manner.
Last but not least, and in the spirit of the year of decentralisation, we also released the beta version of our crypto volatility index, CVI, a market fear index for the crypto space. The CVI is both an index and a trading platform, allowing users to hedge themselves against market volatility or lack thereof.
Since the well-publicised release of the CVI index, we have shared several updates of real-world market forces that demonstrate the effectiveness of the index itself as a trading tool for crypto traders. This market analysis covered recent BTC movements, including the highest ever BTC price level, the OKEX scandal, the US elections, and several other market factors.
The CVI platform is governed by the $GOVI token, and our community was given the ability to participate in the fair launch and token distribution of the $GOVI token by claiming $GOVI tokens via the COTI Pay wallet, or via supplying liquidity to the COTI/ETH Uniswap pool. The claim process was a tremendous success, with over 250M COTI coins locked by COTI holders during the claims process and the COTI community will be the first $GOVI holders upon token distribution.
With the beta platform now released, the entire crypto community can not only use the index as a trading tool, but can also now directly trade market volatility on the platform itself. We have included our COTI coin as a means of collateral for the trading platform, continuing to expand the utility of the COTI coin while acknowledging the continued support of our community.
With 2020 behind us, we can now plan 2021. We want 2021 to be even bigger than 2020! Stay tuned for more information.
We wish you and your family good health and a wonderful 2021
Stay COTI!
For all of our updates and to join the conversation, be sure to check out our channels:
Website: https://coti.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/COTInetwork
Telegram: https://t.me/COTInetwork
Github: https://github.com/coti-io
Discord: https://discord.me/coti
Technical whitepaper: https://coti.io/files/COTI-technical-whitepaper.pdf
