Current Media Update #23 — Innovation Awards, Listing Updates, Growth, & Upcoming Features.
Hey Everyone! 👋
If you missed it on October 10th, Current formally announced, investors will be able to freely trade the media industry’s first blockchain-enabled digital security, $CRNC, on OpenFinance Network (OFN) and OFN’s upcoming international network of partner exchanges. The news was dropped at ChainDD’s 2019 CHAINSIGHTS Fintech and Blockchain Summit in New York City. Full details can be read here.
Since then, we’ve received many questions around the strategy. While we can’t discuss projected volumes, listing price, or listing date (just yet), we will provide some background into the new, complex, and ever-evolving security token market that has inspired our decisions.
Outside of token-related matters, the engineering and product teams, as always, have been heads down grinding on various new features and preparing for our growth targets in Q4. In parallel, the marketing team has been starting to run a variety of growth tests while preparing a variety of other campaigns that are aimed to acquire a large scale of new users and keep our existing users engaged and retained.
We also recently released an AMA that covers a wide variety of topics, from product strategy and Bonus Bucks to exchange listings and partnerships. While we touch on many of those points in this update, it is highly recommended taking a deeper dive, either by watching the video below or reading the transcript here.
Finally, on Monday, October 28th, Current Media received the People’s Choice award from Chicago Innovation! Only 25 out of 450 nominees received honors across a variety of categories. We’re honored and speechless that our users and community came out to support Current and extremely humbled to have won an award alongside some of the largest, most innovative companies in the country who each call Chicago home. As a recipient of this award, we’ve been invited to ring the opening bell on the floor of the NASDAQ and join a delegation to the United Nations.
Now, let’s dive in!
Exchange Listing
If you missed our previous announcement, we encourage you to take a read here. As announced, we’re still working towards an unlock in Q4. That said, we have had some questions that we recently addressed in our AMA that we wanted to touch on here.
The first question we often get is, “What do you mean by ‘Distribution Partners’?” The reference to ‘Distribution Partners’ describes the first of its kind network of exchanges that work together via a kind of referral system to process and complete buy and sell orders. Traditionally, when a digital asset gets listed on an exchange, each exchange is solely responsible for the trades that take place on its platform. However, in our case, due to the many regulations surrounding digital securities and the appropriate licenses required for platforms to trade them compliantly, listing $CRNC on just any exchange isn’t so simple. With our partner exchanges, we create a sort of referral network where the partner exchange will refer a trade to OFN, and then OFN will execute the trade on the partner exchange’s behalf. This allows us to get access to a large number of users on some of the more prominent exchanges while still staying compliant with all of the relevant regulations and rules.
The next big question that we are frequently getting is, of course, “when $CRNC will be listed on these exchanges?” There are a lot of moving parts to do an integration compliantly. Everything is going smoothly as we continue to work towards a unlock. However, we are still not able to provide more detail on a specific listing date or partner exchanges. With that being said, we are still on track for a late Q4 target and should have the particular details around Securitize registrations, token unlock, and token listings for you in a follow-up update.
Growth
The time is finally here! In the last few company updates, we touched on the various goals we had before we would start our user acquisition campaigns, including improving our anti-fraud mechanisms, automating customer support, increasing product stability, and adding more ad-partners. We are proud to say that these things have, for the most part, been dealt with, and we have begun various user acquisition campaigns!
Our new Director of Marketing, John O’Connell, who previously was a Director of Marketing for Career Builder and worked on growth for Google, has been fantastic these past few weeks planning out our growth strategy. We’re working towards ramping up our user acquisition from the ~10,000 new users per week we are getting now, to ~10,000 new users a day.
To make Current more accessible for people around the world, we are also working on app localization in Spanish, Portuguese, German, Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin. As we expand into more and more markets, you can be sure to expect more supported languages. Also, we have formalized a variety of exciting influencer partnerships that we will talk about a bit more in our next update.
Upcoming Features
Our development and product teams have been hard at work, adding new features to the Current App. One of the most exciting developments is the completion of Bonus Bucks. Bonus Bucks not only allow users to unlock increased earning potential in the app by being active and making redemptions but also ties together the success of the app with the $CRNC token with a portion of all revenue from Bonus Bucks going towards buying the $CRNC tokens off the market. This deflationary mechanism is unique in the crypto space and something that we are excited to go live with. If you want to learn more about how Bonus Bucks works, check out our recent article about our token economics here! Bonus Bucks should be live in the app in the next couple of weeks, and you can expect more details surrounding the buyback and burns schedule, the timing of buybacks, and much more in our next update!
Card-Linked Offers, which was introduced in a previous update, is another feature that we are very excited to be releasing shortly. Through our partnership with Empyr, our users can link their credit cards to their Current account, earn additional cashback whenever they use their card as well as earn Current Points at the same time. This should open massive earning opportunities for our U.S. users.
Another exciting feature that we recently mentioned in the last AMA is Current Bill Reducer. With the Bill Reducer, 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 negotiate a reduction of their bill. We then take a portion of any money that we save them. This is being done through a partnership with Mark Cuban backed Billshark that we are very excited to move forward!
Airdrop
The airdrop went over without a hitch! Thank you to everyone who participated! If you were involved in the airdrop, you will receive an update via email when Coinlist has completed your KYC. All airdrop and bounty tokens will be unlocked no earlier than 12 months from now as required by U.S. securities laws.
More updates to come!
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 out to our community managers, or leadership team, please feel free to write to info@current.us, and 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 update any forward-looking statements publicly, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.
