Current Media — AMA #6

Hey Everyone! 👋 Welcome back to the next edition of our AMA series, it’s October 2019, there’s been a ton going on and have a lot to cover today, so let’s dive in.

What are some companies you’ve partnered with which will actually increase the adoption of the $CRNC token as a whole?

The first thing to be aware of before I answer the question is that any time a user generates revenue through our app, a portion of that revenue goes directly to the $CRNC ecosystem. This means that any partnership that we make indirectly goes towards improving the $CRNC ecosystem. As far as partnerships that we have or are working on, one of the most exciting ones is for our card-linked offers feature. Card linked offers allow our customers to earn additional cashback everywhere they shop, and we take a portion of the total cashback that they earn. Another interesting feature + partnership that we have lined up is for our Bill Reducer feature. With this functionality, our users can sign up and send us their bills for things like electricity, internet, etc. and we will then call up their providers on their behalf and reduce their bill. We then take a portion of what we save them. In addition to these features, we have many partnerships with a variety of ad providers, and our Bonus Bucks system will hopefully be launching very shortly!

Outside of product partnerships, we also have our partnerships with Securitize and Openfinance. Both of these companies have been vetted and approved by the SEC for their specific use cases, and we are working on even more partnerships with distribution networks that would tie in with the Openfinance Network. We will go a bit more in-depth on this later in the AMA.

If Current continues at this rate, will you run out of funds? A lot of projects have already drained the majority of the funds they raised.

We have taken a very conservative approach to how we are spending money, unlike many VC and crypto-based start-ups which are heavy cash-burning operations, and often times kept all of their money in crypto. At our current burn rate, we should have enough money to last us 3 more years, however, our goal is to be revenue positive before the end of next year. The reason that we are focusing so much on our product is that it’s extremely important that we build a profitable ecosystem for both us and our users. Many companies end up having to subsidize user rewards with VC cash and that is not a viable strategy for any company. This is why we are looking so much into numbers like what our cost per acquisition is and our users' lifetime value. Figuring out how to back out all of these numbers is something that can take several years to do, but we have put in our time, and are very close to being able to start scaling heavily.

In addition to this, we plan on being a public reporting entity by the end of 2020, so our financial status will be something that we are required to report on a quarterly basis.

What is your product launch strategy and how is $CRNC going to benefit from mass app adoption? Is there any projection on the user growth and token growth model?

We covered a lot of this in a recent blog post. Just this past summer, however, we have given away over $100,000 in user rewards, and almost all of those users found the app organically. We recently hired a director of marketing who came from Google and Career Builder who will be heading up our user acquisition and marketing strategy moving forward. While we have very recently started to do some light marketing to get the engines warmed up, we are still working on a few things on the product side before we are ready to go all out with our marketing.

The iOS app needs improvement. What steps will you guys be taking to make it smoother

Our engineering team is always working on improving the app, so if you are regularly checking the app, you should see things getting better and better week over week. We recently hired a director of engineering who will be streamlining our engineering process in addition to another 5–6 engineers who we have brought on in the past few months. If you check out the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, you can see that our ratings have been consistently going up, so I encourage you to check in there every now and then.

Having a dedicated Current app on my AppleTV would be awesome as opposed to streaming from my phone. Any thoughts on developing a tvOS version of the app?

Our long term goal with Current is to build a monetization engine that any free app, game or whatever can use to monetize their app. Right now, however, we are focusing on proving out the underlying model for this monetization engine in our own apps. In addition to this, the majority of our user base tends to be more budget-conscious, and therefore less likely to own expensive products like Apple. In the future though, we love the idea of having functionality on AppleTV and other platforms!

When will the ‘Bonus Bucks’ feature be fully implemented and subsequently the $CRNC tokens purchased off exchanges?

Bonus Bucks should be live by the end of this year with its current released date slated for sometime in November. The (token) buybacks will be happening on either a monthly or quarterly basis, however, that schedule has not been determined yet. There is not definitive timeline on when the buy-backs will start, as there are a number of regulatory disclosures that we need to make surrounding the buybacks.

What’s Current’s opinion on Blockstack being listed on Binance?

Blockstack took a very similar route that we did in that they did a Reg D. and Reg S. side by side offering for their first raise, and recently got approved for a Reg A. Blockstack is more of an infrastructure-based project with their own blockchain that people can build services on. My opinion is that they believe that they have reached a point of significant enough decentralization that exchanges like Binance without ATS licenses can now legally offer it as an option. That being said, it isn’t being listed on Binance U.S., so United States citizens still won’t be able to trade it.

Due to all of the deflationary mechanisms that we have designed for the $CRNC ecosystem, our token will likely not be considered decentralized, however, so all of the exchanges that we list on must have the appropriate licenses for trading securities. Despite this, it is very interesting to see the space develop and see how the regulatory environment changes.

Is $CRNC a security token? If so, do investors receive dividends by holding $CRNC tokens?

We’ve gone through great lengths to ensure the compliance of $CRNC and to make it able to be traded in an unrestricted fashion in the future. In order to ensure our compliance, we did have to register $CRNC as a security. As far as dividends go, we do not currently have plans to issue them outside of our buyback and burn program with Bonus Bucks, however, it is something that we are looking into.

Regarding the great news to launch $CRNC through Openfinance and “Their upcoming international network of partner exchanges.” What exactly are those international partner exchanges that you speak of?

There are some things here we can talk about and something that we can’t and unfortunately, right now, we are unable to name any names. That being said, I can explain how our processes look with these partner exchanges. These exchanges can be anyone from traditional large crypto exchanges to even normal stock and security platforms. With these exchanges, we create a sort of referral network where the partner exchange will refer a trade to Open Finance and then Open Finance will execute the trade on the partner exchanges behalf. This allows us to get access to a large number of users on some of the bigger exchanges while still staying compliant with all of the relevant regulations and rules.

I didn’t directly participate in the token sale but am interested in trading the token. What will be the procedure to get my ETH address whitelisted?

We will be opening registrations through Securitize to the public in the coming weeks. This will allow you to trade and transfer the token once we unlock it. We will be sending out updates through email and social media when that process starts, so be sure to stay tuned.

What are you planning to do to keep the value of the coin when it hits the market. After months of waiting, don’t you think it will crash and screw early investors?

As a company, our sole goal is to create a great product that will serve as the backbone of the $CRNC ecosystem. As many have seen over the past year, there have been a lot of projects that were hyped up a lot, but then had their price crash after the hype died down. Our goal is to build the fundamentals behind the project that build organic demand for the token in order to maintain a healthy price action not based on hype, but based off of the real value that the Current ecosystem provides. Building these fundamentals takes a lot of time and hard work, however, which is why the wait has been so long to get the tokens. Fortunately, things are going very well for us so far, and we are very excited for the token unlock and the growth in the app that will soon follow.

Why is there no awareness campaign going on right now, prior unlock and listing?

A lot of the marketing that we have been doing and planning has been more around the product rather than the token. At the end of the day, as we said in the question above, the most important thing to build a healthy ecosystem for the token is making sure that the app provides real value to our consumers and is able to grow and retain users. Outside of product marketing, our efforts on the crypto side of things have mostly been educational in nature, trying to build awareness around deflationary token economics and other regulatory aspects of the space.

When will bounty, referral, and airdrop tokens be distributed to participants?

The distribution of referral, bounty, and airdrop tokens with begin 12 months after the unlock of the $CRNC tokens.

Why do we have to pay $6 for processing before we receive our airdrop/bounty/referral tokens?

This is purely for CoinList to conduct KYC/AML. Current does not receive anything from this fee. We actually had to pay a fairly large amount of legal fees to even do this in the first place. The money is going to the fact-checkers who are making sure that all participants are who they say they are and are compliant with all the regulations that we need to follow.

Keep an eye out for more news this week!

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[PLEASE READ] Important legal disclaimer: No money or other consideration is being solicited by this communique, and if sent in response, will not be accepted. Our discussion may contain forward-looking statements that are based on our beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to management. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by the following words: “may,” “will,” “could,” “would,” “should,” “expect,” “intend,” “plan,” “anticipate,” “is designed to,” “believe,” “estimate,” “predict,” “project,” “potential,” “continue,” “ongoing,” or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology, although not all forward-looking statements contain these words.

These statements involve risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and other factors that may cause actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from the information expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. Although we believe that we have a reasonable basis for each such forward-looking statement, we caution you that these statements are based on a combination of facts and factors currently known by us and our projections of the future, about which we cannot be certain. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements about: developing and designing the Current network, including the $CRNC token and its future utility; the anticipated development and growth of the Current Network; maintaining and expanding our base of users; our anticipated growth and growth strategies and our ability to effectively manage that growth and effect these strategies; our expectations regarding regulatory developments and their effect on the Current Network, including the ability of applications on our network to develop a user base and a successful business model; and potential future listings on an exchange or ATS. We cannot assure you that the forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate. Furthermore, if the forward-looking statements prove to be inaccurate, the inaccuracy may be material. In light of the significant uncertainties in these forward-looking statements, you should not regard these statements as a representation or warranty by us or any other person that we will achieve our objectives and plans in any specified time frame, or at all. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements publicly, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.