Current Media: Update #20 — $CRNC Token Economics & The Road To $100M/YR In Earning
Hey Everyone! 👋
Today, we dive into further detail on our token model and why we so strongly believe it promotes a healthy long-term ecosystem that’s significantly beneficial to both $CRNC holders, as well as everyday consumers.
As an update, approximately 80% of our backers have confirmed the information, including their wallet addresses, as part of their $CRNC portal accounts. We intend to provide more details surrounding distribution as soon as all backers have had a chance to go through the $CRNC portal.
TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read) Our Update Includes:
- The Road to $100M/YR in Earning — Setting the stage with what it takes to get to $100M per year in earning, along with everything it impacts including $CRNC.
- Rewards Mechanisms— An overview of our target demographic and each component that makes up our rewards system, along with how each one contributes towards the bottom line and user earning.
- User-Driven Revenue and Rewards At Scale — We isolate one of our rewards features to show how it could generate between $3.00-$4.50 per user and what it looks like with 10k, 100k, and 2m daily active users.
- User-Driven $CRNC Token Demand At Scale — With $CRNC being paired with every redemption, we show you how the products could potentially generate millions in buy-demand for the $CRNC Token using a single reward mechanism as an example.
- Once A User Redeems Their Points, Where Does The $CRNC Come From? All tokens from within our redemption model, come directly from the market as opposed to being newly minted by Current. As such, we intend to announce a formal burn plan as it may not be necessary to introduce more $CRNC tokens in the market for a sustainable and efficient ecosystem.
- What Can A User Do With Their $CRNC Tokens — A more in-depth look into a potential staking feature. Users could earn points up to 50% faster. V1 of this feature may involve users earning CRNT Dollars (Bonus Buck In Product) that expire over 30 days. These CRNT Dollars allow the user to achieve the accelerated earning state aforementioned above; each time a redemption occurs a user earns at least one CRNT Dollar. Simultaneously, each time a CRNT dollar is issued, Current could $CRNC off the market. This allows us to implement the feature faster and achieve the same bottom line, as well as a supply-reducing token mechanism for $CRNC holders. This V1 is necessary, primarily due to regulatory conditions that will need to be met per region for us to transfer $CRNC to new users around the world.
- Planned $CRNC Token Burn — As part of the $CRNC token generation, we created 1 billion tokens. However, we have recently concluded that having this many tokens is not necessary to maintain a healthy ecosystem, no matter the size it grew. As such, we plan to “burn” a large portion of $CRNC until we get an optimal token supply to support our ecosystem fully. Also, in the process, significantly reducing the total supply of $CRNC. We intend to announce further details in an upcoming post.
- What Can Advertisers Do With $CRNC Tokens —At token unlock, ad impressions on the platform can be purchased directly with $CRNC. They’re incentivized to do so and receive up to a 50% discount. If paid for in fiat, Current intends to dedicate a large percentage of that revenue to purchase $CRNC tokens off of the market.
- What Is Holding Us Back From Scaling Right Now? — Priorities for Q3 include improved anti-fraud measures, additional ad partners, product stability, and automated redemption.
- What Can Happen When We Turn On Marketing? —We’ve done it before, and we can do it again. Expect more PR in both the crypto and consumer segments, more chart-topping acquisition tactics, and a surge in daily active users.
Let’s get to it, shall we?
The Road to $100M/YR in Earning Rewards
Sounds crazy, and a little bit sensational doesn’t it? However, based on the consistency of our early numbers, we don’t think it’s as crazy as it sounds and may come to fruition a lot sooner than you may think.
For a full understanding, we’ll first provide a brief overview of how a user earns rewards on Current, these reward mechanisms must sustainably drive revenue to the platform which is then split with the user. Afterward, we’ll single out one of the rewards mechanisms as an example to show you how it drives revenue at scale. Finally, to bring everything together we’ll show you the correlating effect on how this may impact $CRNC at scale via our “staking” and deflationary system.
Rewards mechanisms that provide revenue for the platform and the earnings user:
Firstly, Who Is Our Target User?
To best understand why and how our model works, you must first understand who our target user is. It’s essential to keep in mind, just because you may not fit into the product’s demographic doesn’t mean there isn’t a big market for it. For example, we imagine very few of our investors are regular users of services like Pinterest as opposed to Twitter, but it doesn’t change the fact that the Pinterest IPO is valued at $10–12B.
Similarly, unlike most media platforms, we focus on budget-conscious users. Today, there are approximately 4 billion adults in the world who own smartphones.
It’s estimated about 10% of them pay for a single media subscription service. Spotify, Apple Music, and a host of other premium services exist, all fighting to have users give them $10 a month for on-demand music streaming. That is 100% ok with us because that is not our target user.
We much rather go after the vast majority of underserved users who are not willing or can not afford to pay for music & media, all 3+billion of them. Our unique model allows us to potentially derive even more than $10 a month in earning from these users, and there are 900% more people who fit in this demographic than the “premium consumer.” Today, these users are either using free ad-supported services where they don’t get offline music, they don’t get paid, and sometimes they can’t even listen to music in the background (If they are using Youtube for music on mobile for example) — all features Current provides to users.
Bottom-line it’s our belief our offering is stronger than what is available on the market for this user-demographic. Current is not merely a “radio app,” and, is instead a rewards engine with a music component. This business model may transcend into several other verticles and daily habits. However, we chose music to start, because its something most of the world does; a daily habit, and for our model to work, users need to interact with it often.
With that being said, let’s dive into how this rewards engine works.
General Listening & Usage
Through general use of the app, users can earn as we have small strategically-placed ad banners throughout the app. These ads allow us to monetize nearly any action a user takes within the app and therefore being able to reward them for actions like listening to music.
Lockscreen Player (Android)
This is an Android-only feature that allows advertising on a user’s home screen even when the phone is still locked. This is one of our most unique and valuable features as an average user lights their phone up anywhere between 30–70 times every day. This feature also allows users to have easy access to the music functionality of our app even while their phone is locked. So, playing, pausing, and balance functionality is always accessible. Lockscreen is optional to leave on.
Rewarded Video
Current users also can elect to, and be rewarded for viewing longer-format video advertisements similar to those that are placed in front of searched YouTube videos. However, unlike YouTube where the consumption of these video advertisements are a prerequisite to watching a searched video, the Current user must opt-in to view these videos and is rewarded for their time and attention by a grant of Points while the Current Network is compensated for delivering a view to the advertiser.
Surveys & Opinion Sharing
Another rewarded action involves the completion of surveys by users. Market researchers use apps like ours to source highly-targeted survey participants. By completing surveys and questionnaires, Current users are rewarded with additional Points for their time and data while the Current Network is compensated for delivering such market research through the Current App. Through demographic research conducted by Current over the course of 2018, Current learned that a broad swath of the Current user-base looks to the Current App primarily as a rewards-earning opportunity, a large percentage of our users are generally familiar with the opportunities associated with the completion of online surveys, and are intrigued by the extra rewards generated by surveys.
Offer wall — User can interact with partner apps, games, trials and more.
An offer wall is one way to provide an in-app reward to a user, generally for performing a task like downloading a new app or signing up for a service. Users are presented with a variety of offers & apps to download and are given Points in exchange for meeting the requirements of the offer. User interaction with offer walls provides revenue for the Current Network on account of the selections made by the user as well as the data delivered to these ad partners through the Current App.
Redemption Margin — Spread made from gift cards and physical products
Within Current, users earn Points for their actions. As they are Points, users can choose to redeem them for gift cards or physical products. Once $CRNC is distributed, unlocked, and freely trading each redemption may also include $CRNC (We dive into this further below.) When users redeem for Amazon and other brands, Current receives a percentage discount off the total value of the gift card, due to our partnerships.
Card Linked offers (Coming soon) — Earn rewards just by using your credit card
By Q1 2020, Current plans to implement partnerships with American Express, Visa, and Mastercard networks via Empyr, a leader in the “online-to-offline” commerce marketplace. Empyr works with e-commerce companies and app developers in connection with the creation of card-linked rewards platforms, which lets users earn cash-back rewards for purchases made with offline merchants. Current App users will have the opportunity to link their credit cards and bank accounts to the Current App and correspondingly collect numerous cash-back rewards and rebates through qualified purchases at participating retailers. Furthermore, Current App users will be able to earn Points for each qualifying purchase in consideration for participation in the Current/Empyr card-linked offer program. The addition of the card-linked offer feature will position the Current App to become a central clearinghouse for hundreds of cashback offers & rebates that consumers rarely take advantage of, which, in turn, will drive significant value to the users, and additional revenue to Current.
Our reward mechanisms are what enable Current to drive so much value back to the user — upwards of $600 per year for power users (more on this below). Over time, we see this number growing. We are bringing in several additional earning features over the next 12 months and our goal is eventually to take the data we collect on user behavior and build a decentralized database where our users can opt-in to earn additional revenue from their property.
Get Caleb Reynolds’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Now that you understand what supports user rewards, let’s isolate one of them and watch how it scales to a reasonable 2,000,000 Daily Active Users — DAU figure.
User-Driven Revenue and Rewards At Scale
Using existing data from the thousands of Daily Active Users already earning within our platform, the average user lights up their phone between 30–70 times every day. The monthly revenue generated per US user from this activity and others within our product allows us to produce up to $3.00–4.50 per month on average (Estimated).
- At 10,000 DAU, that’s between $30,000 USD to $45,000 USD per month.
- At 100,000 DAU that grows to $300,000 USD to $450,000 USD per month.
- At 2,000,000 DAU, it explodes to $6,000,000 to $9,000,000 USD per month.
That is how we reach a magic number of $108,000,000 per year. Our aim as a platform is to sustainably generate $5.00 per month for the average Current user. Thus, we project with around 1,500,000 DAU from premium countries we should be able to be in the vicinity of $100M/YR. (It is important to remember that there are a vast number of variables that can affect these projections, so understand that the above estimates are projections based on existing platform figures.)
User-Driven $CRNC Token Demand At Scale
Naturally, the next question is: How do revenue and earnings drive adoption and demand to the $CRNC token? In order to understand the answer, there are two main features of our product that need to be understood.
First, it is our goal to drive public adoption of the token to all users of our platform, $CRNC could eventually be earned alongside every redemption of a gift card, physical product, or cash.
Overtime (with regulatory approvals), The flow could ensure every eligible user that earns Points on Current and redeems their Points for goods of any kind (gift cards, electronics, cash, etc) also acquires $CRNC within that same redemption directly from the market of already distributed tokens. Once a user acquires the $CRNC via a redemption they begin to earn Points faster within Current. A user must continue to acquire a certain amount of $CRNC monthly via point redemptions to keep this accelerated earning mechanism in place.
The first version of this feature will likely involve users earning CRNT Dollars (called “bonus bucks” in the product) that expire over 30 days. These bonus bucks allow the user to achieve the accelerated earning state aforementioned above; each time a redemption occurs a user earns at least one CRNT Dollar. Simultaneously, each time a CRNT dollar is issued, Current will buy $CRNC off the market or do another beneficial economic action for $CRNC (such as dividends or royalties). This allows us to implement the feature faster and achieve the same bottom line while providing a supply-reducing token mechanism for $CRNC holders. This V1 is necessary, primarily due to regulatory conditions that will need to be met per region for us to eventually be able to transfer $CRNC to new users around the world.
Once A User Earns $CRNC Tokens, Where Do They Come From?
The vast majority of cryptocurrencies are inflationary, where crypto companies constantly issue new supply from their own reserves directly to users/miners that engage within the network. We believe that this model is suboptimal in the majority of cases and believe deflationary models tend to work much better.
As part of the $CRNC token generation, we created 1 billion tokens. However, we have recently concluded that having this many tokens is not necessary to maintain a healthy ecosystem, no matter the size it grew to. As such, it is our plan to “burn” a large portion of $CRNC from the initial 1B supply, until we get an optimal token supply to fully support our ecosystem. And in the process, greatly reducing the total supply of $CRNC. We intend to announce further details in an upcoming post.
Advertisers Could Use $CRNC Tokens Too.
When regulatory approvals are in place and $CRNC is compliantly trading, $CRNC we eventually be able to accept direct ad-requests from large-scale advertisers. This may further limit the token supply and act as another buy-back program for $CRNC.
What Is Holding Us Back From Scaling Right Now?
Priorities for Q3 2019
Improved Anti-Fraud: Any time you’re dealing with the transaction of money, someone is going to try and game the system, much like a game of whack-a-mole. Current has a tremendous amount of systems already in place, many of which are automated. However, anytime you are dealing with large user numbers, it’s imperative to act with caution and take precautions.
Additional Ad Partners: As of today, we have a variety of ad partners that support the diversity of ads within the Current platforms. As we grow, its necessary to continually expand this offering to help further improve the diversity and making sure we have enough ad supply to fulfill the number of impressions that we may require at scale.
Product Stability: With every new product release, no matter how thorough the team’s testing, it’s expected that some of our users encounter the occasional crash or bug. It’s our goal to keep this number as low as possible. Usually, our releases are between 92–98% crash free and while we always strive to be on the higher end of that, our goal is 98% or higher. It’s important to be on the high side of this range because any user that has a less than optimal experience, we run the risk of ruining the relationship with that user and losing them as a user. This affects the overall lifetime value of all other users.
Automated Redemption: The process associated with every user redemption has largely been manual since Current launched the feature. In this period, we’ll be shifting towards a more automated process due to the sheer volume of redemptions as we grow. We project 1–1.5% of DAU redeem daily, at 1M DAU that is 10,000–15,000 redemptions a day. Simply, not possible to effectively handle that manually.
2019 Product Highlights
App Feedback On Android — Between December 2018 and June 2019, our Android rating increased from 3.667 to 4.506. The increase in rating is a clear indication that users have been responding well to each iteration of the product.
Here’s what the reviewers are saying about Current:
Crash Rate Stability: As stated in the section above, our product releases have been between 92% and 98% crash free.
Time Spent In App: +269% since the introduction of earning.
What Happens When We Turn On Marketing?
Once we address the items holding us back, we plan to turn on our user acquisition channels. As you remember from last year, we did this very well and enabled Current to hit the top of the iOS charts in many countries across the world. Additionally, Current hit the search trending page on iOS multiple times in 2018. The strategies used previously will be similar in nature to the strategies we use moving forward. As we turn things on, it’s expected to see drastic growth, month to month, in our Daily Active Users — DAU, Revenues, and Redemptions. Back to the top of the charts! Let’s go!
Summary
Whoa, that was a lot! We know. You may need a break, so feel free to get up, stretch, or grab a drink if need be. We’ll wait.
We understand this is a lot to digest, however, we found it extremely important to pull the curtain back further and really dive into the nuances of the token model ahead of $CRNC Token distribution. We hope we were able to shed some light on why we believe that this model promotes a healthy long-term ecosystem with built-in user-driven demand. We’ll be monitoring community questions closely to ensure that we clear up any outstanding questions before our next big update and AMA.
Next week, we’ll be working through the remaining backers to ensure everyone confirms their portal accounts. We’ll provide further updates surrounding distribution as soon as all backers have had a chance to go through the $CRNC portal. More to come 💪
Let’s GO!
How to Get Involved
- Chat with us on Twitter!
- Add Questions here for an upcoming AMA
- Have someone in mind that you think is a perfect fit for one of our open positions? Send them a link to our job board. As a reminder, we pay a referral fee for any employee we hire!
If you ever need to reach our community managers or leadership team, please feel free to write to info@current.us, and we assure you that we will respond in a timely fashion. Please keep an eye on our Telegram Announcement channel or Medium for all future updates. If you’d like to ask a question specifically for one of our upcoming AMAs, reach out to us on Twitter or add a question in our Google Form that we’ll use from here on out for all future AMA’s.
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 publicly update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.
