Where we are, where we are going. A mid year review

By Shahaf Bar-Geffen, COTI CEO

Published in

COTI

5 min readJul 30, 2023

The last 6 months have been tough for everyone, there’s no doubt about it.

It has been tough on COTI too, especially with the SEC case against Binance in which COTI was mentioned. We have taken it upon ourselves to be quite silent on various commercial matters until more clarity comes. This, of course, puts us in a tough spot where we weren’t able to update our community about our plans and what we’re up to.

Looking through our socials, it is clear that sentiment is low and people are confused about the future.

I’m here today to reassure you that we’re on the right track. We continue to build towards the fulfillment of our vision and know that if we can endure this period, we’ll be able to reap the fruits of our hard work.

Like nature’s annual seasonality, there’s a right time for planting seeds and a right time to reap the fruits. There’s no point in rushing a seed and picking a crop before harvest. Patience and the understanding of seasons and cycles is required, no matter how bitter the winter might be. All you can do is plant the right seeds, water your field and hope for some sunny days.

Going back to COTI, we plan to harvest some fruits this year, with the first commercial launch of a Private Payment Network that will introduce payment tokens based on the new CMD standard. The size of our client and its eagerness to succeed makes us very optimistic.

People have asked me why it takes so long and I’d like them to consider two things:

The first, is that big enterprises have a slow process of vetting and making the appropriate organizational changes. There are countless layers of approvals and due process that cannot be bypassed. However, once you cross it, like we did, it becomes a moat for our competition.

The second thing to consider is that a Private Payment Network in itself is a very complex product. It’s a piece of infrastructure so large, my developers often comment that you can build a full startup around it. Consider all the moving parts: it includes a Crypto Gateway (the type of product that companies like BitPay were created around), a bridge from various network (Celer, Multichain, Chainport — have all build companies around it), stablecoin mechanisms (think about the amount of work Djed took) and a full CRM and cashier integrations (think Paypal). Not only that, but it has to be a fully secured system capable of handling millions of dollars of transactions with a 99.9% uptime. So, not a small task by any means. I hope that answers the question of development time.

That said, the plan is to fully launch this year. Even before the full launch, we’ll allow our community to have a sneak peek of the product before its commercially launched. Won’t be long now!

In terms of new product development, we’ve used this season and period of relative quiet to being heads down and planting some very promising seeds: we’re building COTI V2.

Building a L1 is not a small feat as we all know. However, we are doing it again!

We are rebuilding COTI’s infrastructure based on all of our learnings, knowing what works and what doesn’t. For instance, if we want developers to independently build on COTI, we need to be EVM compatible, to have smart contracts and use the privacy that Zero Knowledge Proofs allows. This wasn’t the case in 2018 when we launched the Trustchain, but it is now. With compatible technology and the right developer tools, we can finally allow developers to grow the COTI network and develop everything on top of it, from Wallets to DeFi to Payment gateways and more. Throughout the years we have received countless requests from developers and we’re finally doing it.

We all know that there are already quite a few L1s out there, so what’s unique about COTI V2?

We’re introducing a new building block, called a Policy App or pApp for short. A Policy App is a set of rules that can be used on ANY blockchain and allows a person or a dApp to decide how they wish to handle transactions. For instance, a dApp can decide to implement a Financial Regulation Policy to filter out transactions that have failed Anti Money Laundering (AML) policies. A person can set a policy to only interact with a DeFi pool that has been deemed as safe or to just block spam transactions. There are countless examples, but the idea and its merit are clear. I can’t imagine Web3 adoption without the same concepts that we have in our world for transaction control and filtering.

A pApp is created on COTI V2 and can then relay and interact with any blockchain. For example, a successful DEX on Ethereum can subscribe to the same financial and security policies as a Cardano wallet, both of which were created on COTI V2. This means that developers on any chain can work with COTI V2 and grow its usage. COTI V2 gives us the ability to tap into the TVL and the transaction volume that happens on other chains and use it to fuel our own growth. This is, obviously, tremendously exciting for us and should be to everyone that is part of the COTI community.

We also know that in order for COTI to scale globally and reach its full potential, it needs to be permissionless. Up until now, we have walled COTI, for regulatory reasons among other things. However, policies and new ways of launching COTI V2 will allow us to explore ways to make COTI V2 permissionless and globally accessible. More to come on that.

In order to build COTI V2 and to make it accessible to developers, we needed to clear our schedule and focus. It means that our normal high pace of releasing features to existing products needs to slow down so we can focus on COTI V2. Development is already underway and we’ll go live next year. Obviously, more and more information will be released in the coming months.

What should YOU do in the meantime?

I’d like to start off by saying that I will never tell you what to do! What I can say is that the right question is sometimes “Who should I be?” instead of “What I should do?”.

Who should you be in the coming months, as COTI launches the first Private Payment Network? You should be patient and look to a longer horizon. You have waited so long already, and we’re almost there.

Who should you be while we build COTI V2? Be curious. We believe that more real world rules will apply to crypto for it to realize its potential and we believe that we’re building the right product for it. If you believe so too, you are in the right place.

I understand the recent sentiment and I encourage you to remember that it is always the darkest before the break of dawn. The entire team of COTI and myself will continue to relentlessly learn, adapt, improve — until we all win together!

Stay strong, stay COTI!