Connecting the dots.

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade or reach for tequila.

Everything in life is good for something, and we simply haven’t discovered yet what COVID-19 is good for. It is no secret that we’ve been fighting hard over the last few months, especially because we couldn’t grow as fast we wanted due to the quarantines and lockdowns that were in place. Actually, all you can do at a time like this is to catch up with the development scope, focus on the product and business models, and encourage the people to stay focused. This was probably a tequila period. In early June, we started moving things forward also in the business and expansion aspects. Making this kind of progress in such a short amount of time is almost a mission impossible. Great job, team!

The upcoming months will be all about connecting the dots. All products need to be connected into one solution that is simple to use, solves a problem and has fast growth potential. Our focus segments:

1. Security

2. Licenses and legal

3. Business development

4. Product development

5. Expansions

I’ve never told you that, but those startups that succeed do so because they simply never give up. We are moving fast, maybe too fast in some segments, but this is the name of the game. Move fast, break things, keep focus on the target.

Enjoy the report and stay healthy.

GOCRYPTO — THE CENTRAL POINT OF CRYPTO SPACE

We are available in over 50 countries

Country by country, partner by partner, user by user. Our vision to create a global network that will transform the payment landscape with easy access to crypto payments to everyone interested is coming to fruition. GoCrypto is now the world’s largest and fastest growing crypto payment network, known as the GoCrypto Payment Scheme.

The GoCrypto Payment Scheme introduces a brand new practice in the world of crypto payments: it connects all stakeholders and technologies of the payment chain to enable everyone’s customers to pay with or accept cryptocurrencies. So, we do not focus on developing a particular wallet, one payment gateway or a single POS device, but connect all of them into one experience, one global network with unified payment protocols. We bring together crypto users, crypto wallets, crypto exchanges as well as cashier system providers, PSPs, payment gateways and merchants who would like to accept crypto. Enhancing everyone’s service range, visibility and appeal in the commercial mainstream.

Why jump onboard?

Cashier system providers, PSPs, payment gateways

Your merchants and service providers can accept instant cryptocurrency payments. Just like they accept credit cards or cash. Provide your clients with a cutting-edge payment option and stay ahead of the competition.

Crypto wallets

If you are a crypto wallet, support for GoCrypto payments to your wallet is simple to integrate. Whether your wallet is custodial or non-custodial, your users can make instant crypto payments at GoCrypto locations worldwide.

Cryptocurrencies

Make your currency known in the mainstream and further its utility by integrating it into crypto wallets like Elly in order for it to be spent at GoCrypto locations worldwide.

Crypto exchanges

Add a mainstream utility to your exchange app. Let us help you upgrade your app with a payment functionality enabling your users to pay at local and online GoCrypto stores with cryptocurrencies.

Furthermore, GoCrypto constantly collaborates with exchanges in another way: working with numerous exchanges has been vital for the stable functioning of the GoCrypto system from the start.

A record 1,000 GoCrypto locations in Slovenia

We are creating the next generation of payments by bringing crypto into mainstream shopping with contactless, mobile payments. In July 2020, we broke another record: GoCrypto marked 1000 locations in its home country. As the 1000. location in Slovenia, we were joined by WOOP! Karting, one of the most modern karting centres in Europe, and WOOP! Trampoline park, the largest of its kind in Slovenia.

Due to GoCrypto:

• Slovenia is the country with the highest number of physical locations accepting cryptocurrency; it is possible to spend the whole day using only the crypto wallet and leaving cash/cards at home,
• Slovenia boasts the first Bitcoin City™ in the world — a unique ecosystem evolving from the BTC City shopping and business centre, with over 21 million visitors a year,
• big brands in Slovenia now accept crypto: Burger King Slovenia, Tuš supermarket, the biggest Slovenian electronics seller Big Bang, Four Points by Sheraton, the Žito bakery , the Jurman pizzeria and restaurant, the Cacao cafe and patisserie,
• the number of products that can be bought through GoCrypto now exceeds 150,000.

Lots of firsts

Our efforts in the last six months were severely impeded by COVID-19 because many physical businesses had to close for months on end, and many of them are still closed. We therefore concentrated our efforts online, but still have a few offline highlights to share with you:

• first GoCrypto location in the UK (March 2020), first location in Romania (May 2020), first location in Portugal (July 2020), first location in Czechia (July 2020), first location in Antigua and Barbuda (August 2020), 20 locations in Bulgaria (May 2020), hundreds of locations in South America (with Xpay in Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela — March 2020).
• first trampoline park that accepts crypto (Slovenia), first VR adventure escape reality (Bulgaria).

ATM provider: in May 2020, GoCrypto was integrated by Venditur Ultimus, a provider with ATMs in Slovenia and the UK.

50,000 cashier units in total

GoCrypto is already integrated into 14 cashier software solution providers. The latest to join were mikroPOS (Slovenia, April 2020), SmartPOS (Croatia, July 2020) and eGestiune (Romania, July 2020). This makes GoCrypto available at 50,000 cashier units altogether.

PARTNERSHIPS AND INVESTMENTS

More licenses to GoCrypto

In June 2020, we made a remarkable development in mass adoption of cryptocurrency.

Sharing the same vision in terms of mainstream use of cryptocurrencies, we partnered with TEN31 Bank (WEG Bank AG), a fully regulated German bank, which will help us connect the dots between crypto and conventional banking. They committed themselves for Eligma to obtain a 9.9% share in the bank.

This partnership will accelerate our access to highly regulated markets such as Germany, and result in the development and growth of the crypto industry.

Crypto at the cashier point with a switch of a button

Eligma will make a strategic share acquisition that will enable us to offer merchants an all-in-one payments option.

Lab4Pay is a developer of a smart POS that integrates a number of payment methods. We are in the process of acquiring a 19.25% ownership share of Lab4Pay; Eligma and one of its investors will be jointly holding a 38.50% share.

This partnership aims to impact the commerce place where cash and cards are still strongly present as payment methods. In collaboration with Lab4Pay, merchants will be able to accept crypto instantly because it will already be integrated into their POS.

Eligma Labs

Specializing in blockchain solutions, Eligma Labs is the technology arm of Eligma. It has generated over 2 million EUR by licencing our technologies.

GoCrypto Eurasia

Eligma and the Liquid exchange are working together towards catering to the Asian markets and expanding GoCrypto to enable cryptocurrency payments in the Far East and other relevant markets. The partnership will enable the best rates and the lowest fees for the merchants to start accepting cryptocurrency payments seamlessly.

Bringing GoCrypto to Africa

Eligma’s partnering with Quidax, the leading African cryptocurrency exchange, in August 2020, will enable merchants to accept crypto payments and to receive settlements in their local currency. In Africa, the first local currency will be Nigerian Naira (NGN).

This is an important milestone for the GoCrypto Payment Scheme as GoCrypto enters its third continent. We are now present on ⅗ of the world map! This shows that crypto is becoming a highly relevant way of payment on a global scale.

Influencers in the payment industry

In June 2020, Eligma became a founding member of the Emerging Payments Association EU (EPA – EU), a non-profit entity uniting payments industry influencers. They cover all the aspects of the payments value chain –banks, issuers, PSPs, merchant acquirers, retailers, and of course payments schemes, now joined by Eligma’s GoCrypto through our membership.

DEVELOPMENT AND PRODUCTS: WHERE WE’RE AT

In the last half of the year, we were focused on:

• optimizing and upgrading all existing merchant tools and infrastructure to facilitate the geographic expansion of GoCrypto,
• developing additional merchant tools with the aim to provide a holistic crypto payment related solution.

Additional languages were added in correlation with the targeted countries. The onboarding process was shortened. More onboarding steps were automated, with merchants receiving detailed instructions via email, supported by step-by-step videos. This makes the integration very simple and a merchant can onboard themselves alone and more quickly.

The GoCrypto infrastructure and tools were updated to be available in over 50 countries worldwide with ensured settlement in their local currency. The prerequisites to enable payments from any custodial and non-custodial wallets were developed and the integration instructions prepared.

A dynamic KYC, referral and loyalty programs were developed enabling us to tailor them to country specifics. The GoC Gift token (GoCG) was launched, being reserved for rewards and airdrops; its usability is limited to payments only.

The Merchant Dashboard. Your crypto business overview.

Every easy solution for the buyer needs to be based on an equally flawless user experience for the merchant. Therefore, the GoCrypto Merchant Dashboard was born.

The GoCrypto Merchant Dashboard is a free tool that enables every GoCrypto merchant a fast and effective overview of all the business performed through GoCrypto. You can use it on your computer, tablet or phone. Here are some of its highlights:

• All time payment statistics, store statuses and activity log. Always be on track with real-time data.
• Details on all your received payouts and handy access to your payment history with detailed activity overviews.
• Export-ready accounting reports. Simple paperwork means simple business. Select the desired time period and export the data as a PDF or a CSV for accounting and other purposes.
• Control all your GoCrypto stores in one place.

This makes it a piece of cake to edit your store info (location, opening hours, contact data) and also add new stores if your business expands. Your store will be better presented and even more easily found by crypto wallet users.

Live support. If you have any questions, we are available to you with a click of a button.

Become an instant exchange with GoCrypto Hardware POS

When developing the concept of the hardware POS terminal, it was our main goal to make your buy and sell of crypto to your customers instant and as simple as possible, with no technical or crypto knowledge required.

Do you have a brick-and-mortar currency exchange, or are you looking for an additional revenue stream at your shop or service? The GoCrypto Hardware POS terminal is a perfect way to extend your business. It enables every merchant to become a crypto exchange — at zero installation or maintenance costs, and to accept crypto payments for their products or services.

Gorenjc, the expense-tracking app

Our AI developments in the understanding of user shopping habits resulted in Gorenjc, the expense-tracking app. It was launched in June 2020 in the Slovenian language, with over 2000 users and more than 5000 receipts scanned in the first week alone.

The Gorenjc mobile app is a free assistant that helps you:

• monitor your spending habits,
• store and analyse your receipts,
• keep your warranty papers in one handy place,
• carry your loyalty cards for you at all times.

What the Gorenjc smart & stingy technology can do:

• scanning, reading and smart processing all of your receipts,
• automatic product recognition and categorization,
• automatic warranty recognition,
• handing you the loyalty card you need.

On the basis of the receipts scanned into the app, the Gorenjc AI not only gets acquainted with one’s shopping habits and helps keep them on track, but also acquires product price information, which will play a central role in its further development and partnerships arising in this connection.

…AND WHERE WE ARE GOING

Shop with your fave wallet. The Pay at GoCrypto app

Wishing to actively promote the use of crypto in daily shopping, we have realized that we will always be one step behind the demand. GoCrypto currently supports Elly and the Bitcoin.com wallet, with 11 million users in total, but there are very many other crypto users out there that we do not cater to simply because we do not support their wallets.

We tackled this problem by developing an intermediate app. The user will download it to their phone and be able to pay at GoCrypto locations with many more supported currencies and wallets. Here’s how it works.

With the Pay at GoCrypto app, the customer will scan the purchase QR code at the GoCrypto location, which will provide the wallet addresses and amounts for all supported currencies. These will be easily shared and opened in any crypto wallet to conduct a payment. Instant payments will be supported with BCH, BTC, ETH, GOC, GOCG and BNB initially.

Furthermore, we will soon integrate the support for the following cryptocurrencies into our payment processor as well as into the Elly crypto wallet: XTZ, LTC and VIB.

Merchant Dashboard 2.0: Keep your assets in crypto

The most important highlight of the new version is that the merchant will be able to choose between receiving settlement in their local currency or crypto. The choice will not be fixed — one will be able to select a different currency at any point, with the selection entering into force with the following month. The cryptocurrencies initially available for selection will be: BCH, GoC, BTC and ETH while others will be added later on.

Another benefit: since cryptocurrencies can not be sent to one’s bank account like local currency, the merchant will be able to make withdrawals of the crypto payouts at any point.

A brand new website

Eligma’s expansion both in operation and products warranted a new website. It will initially be available in English, with other languages to follow. A new slick design will allow for an effective overview of all GoCrypto products and solutions.

Shorter loading times on the locations map and demos of some of our GoCrypto products will result in a highly user-friendly experience.

We have also updated the FAQ section as we have seen an influx of interest and questions from merchants on how crypto works and how to implement it at stores.

MIGRATION

The migration of our previous native ELI token from the Ethereum (ERC-20) to the Bitcoin Cash (SLP) platform finished on 31 May 2020. In this, ELI was renamed GoC. The migration lasted for 6 months. In the process, 85.83% of the tokens were successfully migrated.

The 28,806,275 GoC that were intended for migration but were left unmigrated, were burned on 28 August 2020. The burning took place in the form of a single “burn” method transaction that immobilized these tokens permanently. In this way, these GoC tokens were taken out of circulation.

RECOGNITIONS

Award nominations

Finalist at Emerging Payments Awards
On 5 August 2020, Eligma became a finalist at Emerging Payments Awards 2020 for the Best Use of Blockchain in Financial Services. The Emerging Payments Awards celebrate innovation, collaboration and emerging payments by recognizing companies that have made significant advances in how we pay today.

Finalist at PayTech Awards
On 13 August 2020, Eligma became a finalist at PayTech Awards 2020, organized by FinTech Futures, in the PayTech of the Future category. The mission of PayTech Awards is to highlight IT excellence in the finance and payment industries.

Memberships

In June 2020, Eligma became a founding member of the Emerging Payments Association EU, an entity uniting payments industry influencers in the EU.

Based in Luxembourg, the EPA — EU builds on the network of the Emerging Payments Association — its sister organization based in London and bringing together 150 members. They cover all the aspects of the payments value chain — banks, issuers, PSPs, merchant acquirers, retailers, and payments schemes.

Creating press buzz

We have been mentioned in more than 140 articles from all over the world (Bitcoin.com news, Fintechzoom, The US Breaking News, Dnevnik, Criptotendencias, Intellinews, Finance, Delo, Bitcoinnews.ch, African Crypto News, The Fintech Times, Bitcoinglobal, Bitcoin Insider, Bitcoin Global Canada…).

• Europe EU-Startups, the leading online publication with a startup focus, named GoCrypto among the 10 most promising Slovenian startups to watch in 2020.
• TechBuzzWeb placed us amid 9 innovative startups to watch in the upcoming year.
• Seedtable, which specializes in analysis of European tech, named us among the 121 European Startups to Watch — making us rub shoulders with Zoom, Soundcloud, Spotify as well as our neighbouring company Viberate.

ATTENDING EVENTS — ONLINE AND OFFLINE

Although the majority of events that we wanted to attend had been cancelled, we fired up our cams and attended online meetings and webinars. Once the dust settles, we are going back at it full throttle, coming to a city near you.

At the BCH London Meetup in March, we discussed initiatives for London and GoCrypto’s plans for retail adoption. (That same month, we also opened our first ever location in London.) In the same month, we attended the Vendocom Future of Payments Conference, organised by the most trusted independent forum for suppliers and users of payment systems in Europe. The virtual BCH Tokyo Meetup in April, however, took place with Eligma at the foreground: it hosted a Q&A with Dejan Roljic, focusing on merchant adoption.

KEEPING UP OUR STANDARDS

E-MONEY LICENCE

We have submitted the first draft application for the e-money license with the local regulator — the Bank of Slovenia. This highly demanding project took our experts a few months to generate the extensive 1000+ page documentation required. The license will be passported to other EU countries to ensure smooth international expansion. There are several entities with e-money licence in the EU; however, only two are in Slovenia so far. What is more, Eligma will be one of the very few crypto companies with such EU financial licence. This will enrich the entire crypto ecosystem and be another stepping stone in the mass adoption of crypto payments, which we are helping to create.

We are proud to be involved in the legislative and regulatory procedures with our extensive experience with anti-money laundering cryptocurrency payments. Through this, we actively participate in developing the crypto industry in Europe and globally.

ISO 27001 AND 9001

ISO/IEC 27001 is an international standard on how to manage information security. We identified information security as one of the company’s most important focuses. In order to check all critical points, to constantly review and upgrade our information security processes and systems, and to implement proper information security controls, we decided to pass the certification in compliance with the ISO/IEC 27001 — Information Security Management System standard. This systematic framework will enable us to manage information security related risks and to protect important information, e.g. in connection to payments or to personal data.

Moreover, we want to improve the quality of our services by passing the ISO 9001:2015 certification, a quality management system that will help ensure that Eligma meets user and other stakeholder needs within the statutory and regulatory requirements related to our products or services. The ISO 9001:2015 management system standard helps make sure that consumers get reliable goods and services of desired quality. The ISO 9000 family of standards deals with the fundamentals of quality management systems and the following quality management principles: customer focus, leadership, engagement of people, process approach, improvement, evidence-based decision making, and relationship management.

TOKENOMICS

Our tokenomics is going into the loyalty program direction, in which every merchant will be able to create a custom loyalty program hooked to its crypto, cash, digital payment, credit or debit transactions — with just a few clicks. Every time a user makes a transaction, the merchant can reward the user with a custom % cashback and process the user’s receipt in return. What we found through our portfolio of 1,500 merchants is that they all face the same problem: they do not have a live loyalty standard or token that has real-time value and is a trigger to reward and bring the client back to the merchant. Merchants will simply top up their GoC loyalty accounts and spread the loyalty points towards the users. As you know, users can use their GoC at any GoCrypto location. GoC will be used as the fundamental token that can be renamed into any loyalty point according to the merchant’s wishes. The Merchant Dashboard will soon get an extension that will be used as a tool that shows the retention rate and analytics of the purchased goods in various kinds of parameters.

Anyway, working on it as this solution is far from simple in the backend.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Not everything that we do is perfect, but we simply believe that moving fast and breaking things is how we roll. In the upcoming months, we are focusing on a really huge task, connected with the idea of “how to put all the products into one”. A holistic solution needs to be simple and move mountains. I will tell you more about it over time. Stay with us, visit us, wear a mask and never give up.

Your Eligma Team

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If you want to join us after reading this, here is how you can do that:

• All merchants who would like to start accepting crypto at their local or online stores can join us here.
• All POS cashier software providers that would like to integrate GoCrypto, please email us at partners@gocrypto.com.
• All potential distributors around the world, please email us at partners@gocrypto.com
• All crypto wallet providers that would like to hook onto our infrastructure, please email us at partners@gocrypto.com.
• All POS payments providers that would like to partner with us, please email us at partners@gocrypto.com.
• If you think you could bring value as an Eligma team member, please write to us at jobs@eligma.com. P.S.: We are specifically looking for new sales representatives at this time; fill out the form here if you are interested.

If you would like to ask me anything, please write to our official Eligma group on Telegram or contact me on my LinkedIn Dejan Roljic profile.