CEO Update: With 1,000 onboarded locations, the GoCrypto Payment Scheme is conquering the World

I’ve always loved to work. Work gives me the wings to fly. In other words, I’ve always loved working on things that I believe in. These things define me and make me grow as a person and a founder. Now, for the first time in my life, I’m working on a story much bigger than I could imagine 2 years ago. It’s not just work, it’s not the only thing that I believe in, it’s pure passion. Passion that is slowly evolving into a psychological state that follows you at every step and moment of your life. If you give me a gap of a simple moment, I will start thinking about GoCrypto. If you give me 10 minutes, I will start calling people. If you give me an hour, I will already be at the office. I call this kind of behaviour paranoid. Some people say that, when you connect passion and paranoia, there are only two possible outcomes. The first one is fast growth, amazingly effective products and business development, a motivated team, with the fear of being overtaken by the competition moving things forward day by day, minute by minute. The second outcome is burnout.

I always used to think that I worked in a hard, efficient, focused way. Now, I came to redefine what hard work means; I’m reaching my/our new heights. If you ever ask yourself when this can happen, the answer is simple: when the demand on the market is higher than your supply, when you have a perfect market fit and hit the right timing, or simply when you want to (push it to the limits no matter what).

In the last 7 months, we had to change our mindset, our life priorities and our sleeping patterns to follow the path — our KPIs. The whole company transformed inside out. Every individual had to accept the fact that this can be it. This can be the story that we will tell about to our grandchildren, it can leave a mark or change the world we live in. We can see that light (a tiny one) at the end of the tunnel and are not leaving it out of our sight.

I think this is a normal process of every startup that makes things happen — no matter what business you’re in. But if you still ask yourself how hard we are pushing forward, please stop by or start working at Eligma.

OK, enough sentimental talk.

I would like to answer a few simple questions set to us in the last few months.

1. What is the tokenomics behind the GoC token?

Right now, we use tokenomics in connection with rewarding: the loyalty program with 2% cashback on every purchase made with the Elly wallet. GoC has also been integrated as a payment option for months. Our token can literally be used as a spendable currency — you can buy almost anything with it. But in the near future, when the scheme is big enough, we will start converting a percentage of the fees from different kinds of wallets and currencies into the GoC token. We will remove it from the market and lock it or even burn it.

2. Why is the price growing or dropping?

Well, simply because someone is buying or selling. It always works like that.

3. Why don’t we integrate Visa or Mastercard into the Elly wallet?

Pros:

• Acceptance: Your payment card is instantly accepted at any POS unit operated by a card processor/payment service provider/bank that has a contract with a card payment scheme.
• Credibility: Fiat payment schemes have strong brands, connected with credibility and trustworthiness.
• Branding: Physical payment cards can be branded to raise company awareness and visibility.

Cons:

• Payment licence: either a payment institution or e-money licence is required. The licence must be issued or passported to every country of the user’s residence.
• Issuing partner: Usually, a payment institution decides to issue payment cards through a bank that has signed a contract with a payment card scheme. Acquiring the issuing partner can be a time-consuming process.
• MSC fees for merchants: Joining a payment card scheme, a payment institution agrees with the fees that are charged to the merchant (Merchant Service Charge — MSC), leaving no room for the wallet issuer. MSC is determined by the acquiring party, based on interchange and payment scheme fees. If the wallet issuer applies additional fees onto the payment, crypto payments become uncompetitive.
• Fees for wallet users: The payment scheme subscription and physical card costs must be covered either by user subscription fees or hidden conversion fees — crypto-to-fiat hidden exchange rate markdown. Free service for users makes the business model unsustainable.
• Card scheme regulation: Due to AML and KYC regulation, card schemes usually demand from all partners to substantially check the users’ identities and prevent fraud, money-laundering and similar activities. In practice, this means that each wallet user who wants to acquire a fiat payment card must undergo the same identification process as at the issuing bank.
• Potential threat to crypto market: Payment cards enable payments with unlimited fiat amounts, which can present a significant threat to crypto market stability, especially when the cryptocurrency market depth (bids volume) is limited. Shocks caused by large volume purchases could destabilize the online exchange markets.
• Threats to crypto payment adoption: With additional subscription and exchange fees, ‘crypto’ payments will become uncompetitive (expensive) for the customers and the merchants. This might have a long-term impact on crypto payment adoption.

4. Why the GoCrypto Scheme?

Hard way is almost always the right way. If we want to be independent and really drive the crypto adoption as the fastest, simplest, cheapest and most advanced payment option, we have to be independent from the existing scheme providers and fee makers.

Every merchant we onboard, every existing POS provider we sign up for integration, every integration into a merchant’s cashier brings us one step closer to the goal that I’m talking about. This will be our goal for the upcoming years, and I hope we will be able to live this dream we have.

5. Is the vision that Eligma had in the beginning still alive?

It is, but we had to take a totally different approach to achieve it. I know it sounds silly, but everything is always connected to the funds, the time to market and the people. On the one hand, we are creating crypto adoption, but on the other, we are still looking at how to make things even more beneficial. This is why we created an app called Gorenjc. You can download it from Google Play or App Store. It’s the first version, but it has some amazing features like: scan receipts, automatic receipt/product recognition and sorting, product identification with warranty, review of monthly spending, integration of loyalty cards and working in the offline mode. We are pushing it forward as hard as we can… on the budgets we have.

There is a lot going on. Please read more in the update below.

We’re growing af

We are currently present with several GoCrypto locations in 5 countries.

GoCrypto’s home base, Slovenia, is the country with the highest number of physical locations accepting crypto in the world. We entered Croatia in May 2019 and continued our expansion to Switzerland, Hungary and Bulgaria. GoCrypto is also available for customers in the United Kingdom, Czechia, Slovakia, Romania and Portugal.

November 2019 marked the start of GoCrypto’s presence in South America — with the first official GoCrypto Scheme member on that continent. We were joined by Xpay, a partner provider of easy crypto payments successfully growing its presence in Columbia and Venezuela. 150 locations strong, they are also planning an expansion to other South American countries.

Now that we have gained legal approval in those countries and the proof of concept is confirmed, we will boost these markets with a systematic approach. Our SWAT mobile sales teams will open up to 13 new markets; in each, the goal is to onboard 20–50 stores to start accepting GoCrypto payments, launch the ambassador program and acquire as many PSPs as possible.

The GoCrypto scheme

Our focus is set on the GoCrypto Payment Scheme as a manifestation of our grand vision of a global and borderless crypto payment network. It will overcome business and technical interoperability obstacles and establish functional crypto payment chains, connecting all payment stakeholders.

Therefore, we have substantially upgraded our infrastructure, introducing payment protocols and procedures to be able to onboard new crypto wallets and cryptocurrencies with ease. The GoCrypto Payment Scheme is already swiftly filling the gap by connecting stakeholders in the world of crypto payments.

We have proved the concept with the integration of the Bitcoin.com Wallet and learned a lot in the process. Enabling instant crypto payments with non-custodial wallets has great value for all our future wallet integrations. With more than 10 million Bitcoin.com Wallets now being able to pay at GoCrypto locations, we have opened the gate to rapid mass adoption.

Meet the GoC token

In order to provide our token users with the best possible experience and even faster transactions, we have migrated the ELI token from Ethereum (ERC-20) to Bitcoin Cash (SLP protocol) and renamed it, fittingly, the GoCrypto token (GoC). The migration was announced and started on 25 November 2019 with an automated swap of ELI tokens to GoCrypto tokens in the Elly wallet and on the tokens.net exchange.

The migration (token swap) is still in progress and the process runs smoothly. ELI tokens can be swapped through our migration page: goc.eligma.com. Please be aware that the migration will only be possible till 31 May 2020.

We are extremely proud of GoC being one of the first SLP tokens to enter the renowned exchange.bitcoin.com, the biggest SLP token exchange that offers various trading pairs to active traders. GoC can now be traded with other mainstream cryptocurrencies like bitcoin cash (BCH) and ether (ETH). GoC was also listed on another reputable crypto exchange, tokens.net.

In celebration of the partnership with Eligma, the Bitcoin.com Exchange organized a trading competition in February 2020, giving away $25,000 worth of GoC in prizes. Congratulations to all the traders.

Developers, developers, developers

The GoCrypto Payment Scheme infrastructure was upgraded and improved to enable global expansion to a number of markets with different fiat currencies. The infrastructure is now 100% ready for:

• supporting new payment cryptocurrencies,
• integrating new custodial and non-custodial wallets,
• integrating new POS networks and enabling crypto payments in different types of cashier software.

Moreover, payments with the Bitcoin.com Wallet by scanning fixed QR codes were enabled. The billing and reporting modules were upgraded in order to support new fiat currencies and SLP tokens. The blockchain middleware was customized to support the token swap (migration) process (ELI to GoC).

We constantly improve our blockchain gateway, the heart of our blockchain-related infrastructure. We are always testing new blockchains, i.e. making due diligence and feasibility tests for supporting new cryptocurrencies. Our infrastructure is constantly monitored for fraud prevention, blockchain network anomalies and potential transaction delays.

The online Merchant Onboarding process was simplified to automate and speed up the merchant onboarding process. We managed to speed up and fully automate the process in which the merchants sign the contract with GoCrypto to start receiving crypto payments.

The GoCrypto Web POS, the most commonly used merchant interface to initiate crypto payments, was upgraded with 11 languages and fiat currencies for the planned fast-paced global expansion to new markets.

Elly.com and GoCrypto.com were optimized, with numerous new languages and the GoCrypto location listing map updated to better present where GoCrypto is available.

New products that we are working on:

Merchant Dashboard — soon to be released. This web tool will enable our merchants to have a clear overview of their payments and payouts, and to manage their contacts and assets.

Every merchant can become a crypto exchange with our hardware POS terminals — we are in the final stage of testing our own physical POS terminals that will enable merchants to buy and sell selected cryptocurrencies as well as to accept crypto payments.

Numbers, numbers, numbers. Lots of numbers.

We have managed to attract the attention of numerous media outlets that recognised our hard work and the GoCrypto potential.

We’ve been featured in more than 120 articles across the globe. Among many others, in News.bitcoin.com, BusinessTelegraph, FinTech Futures, Cointelegraph, Cointelegraph Spain, Cointelegraph Italy, Cointelegraph Brasil, Disruptor Daily, CB Insights, Yahoo News, CCN, Dnevnik, Siol.

Eligma’s vision and GoCrypto as its realization are increasingly generating attention across the industry. GoCrypto became a finalist at the Tech for a Better Globe award competition, we were featured by CB Insights as one of the most well-funded tech startups in Europe, and Silicon Canals selected Eligma as one of top 10 Slovenian tech startups to watch in 2020. We also made the list of 250 hottest crypto companies in the world. Crazy!

We have started working even closer with our fellow merchant partners. Together, we are featuring their work, their locations and their services in videos catered to showcase how GoCrypto is helping their business. In the last six months, we have published more than 15 videos. Make sure to check them out, to like and subscribe;)

We’ve been to a total of 10 events and conferences in Slovenia, Malta, Croatia, Switzerland, Germany and Uruguay. Making it almost 2 a month.

A licence to GoCrypto

We are in the process of obtaining a license for financial services from the central bank. This is a highly demanding project, but represents a big step forward in the crypto industry. It will increase the credibility of the entire crypto ecosystem. Providing GoCrypto (and previously Elipay) services internationally, the team got significant experience in cryptocurrency payments, payment services, payment systems, and the financial landscape. This was instrumental in mapping out the financial services for which Eligma is applying for a license. We plan to receive the license in 2020.

We have grown and upgraded the anti-money laundering department beyond the required level. Our aim is to improve the overall reputation of the crypto industry in the payment world. With new professionals onboarded and business partners acquired, we made another step towards setting new standards in the industry in order to achieve long-term use of cryptocurrencies for payments.

Always on the road

Since September, we have attended quite some events. We truly shined at Delta Summit, the official blockchain and digital innovation event in Malta, where we created strong GoCrypto awareness with 8 stands, taking over the whole event by refreshing and ‘branding’ most visitors with our yellow crypto coffee cups. I spoke on stage three times: as a presenter (High-inflation markets transforming into crypto countries), panel moderator (Systems of trade and stores of value. What is the future of value generation?) and a panelist (Nothing cryptic about crypto — Cryptocurrency and when will the banks be adopting it).

Our stand was also highly noticeable at the Lantern Fund Forum in Lugano, a central event on asset management and investment tools in Switzerland and Northern Italy. We attended the Merchant Payments Ecosystem conference in Germany, which is the biggest conference and expo in Europe for merchant payments professionals, and spoke at the Cryptocurrency Day Conference in Germany and many others. With our partner Xpay, we attended the 7. LABITCONF in Uruguay, the most important blockchain event in Latin America.

It takes two to make a fire

With the GoCrypto infrastructure ready for new integrations, Business Development is doing a great job acquiring new partnerships with:

• Payment Service Providers and Payment Processors that operate large POS unit networks that can integrate the GoCrypto payment method. These partnerships can significantly grow the merchant base; with each integration, we can acquire a large number of GoCrypto locations. We are actively communicating with some of the biggest players in the payment industry and we will of course share the news with our community when that happens.
• Custodial and non-custodial wallet developers; each integration can significantly grow the customer base. We are in active contact with the largest wallets in order to support payments with GoCrypto;
• Core blockchain/cryptocurrency projects whose currency we add to our infrastructure will help us reach new potential customers. We are constantly looking for technologies that could enable fast payments with new cryptocurrencies;
• POS cashier software providers that are adding the GoCrypto payment method and enabling merchants that use their software to start accepting crypto.

Cash, card or crypto

After entering the market last September, the GoCrypto payment infrastructure has reached a major milestone of 1,000 GoCrypto locations. Slovenia has become the country with the highest number of physical locations accepting crypto in the world. We couldn’t be more proud. Due to GoCrypto, it now boasts a ‘crypto’ grocery store, driving school, golf course, pharmacy, cell phone service provider, hotel, spa and so much more.

In the last few months, GoCrypto was joined by Burger King Slovenia (making it the first physical Burger King location in the world accepting crypto), 37 Žito bakery stores, the famous BrewDog bar in Budapest and a crypto ferry service provider in Switzerland, to mention just a few. You can now buy more than 140,000 different products with crypto. So, it is really easy to live on crypto now. Whether you are buying a car, getting some legal consulting or visiting a tourist landmark — just pay at GoCrypto.

After-sales and support

When it comes to retention of the merchants, after-sales services and support play a crucial role. It helps us build and maintain our relationship with merchants, thus rapidly growing the number of locations and raising the cryptocurrency awareness in the mainstream. This is why we are putting a lot of emphasis on establishing a very efficient after-sales and support department. We are enlarging the department as well as introducing several tools for maximising efficiency and productivity.

Elly, the first all-in-one crypto app

September 2019 saw the introduction of Elly, the first all-in-one crypto app. It was rebranded from the Elipay wallet and underwent major redesign, usability changes and security upgrades, along with the support for payments with the GoC token. Brand new features like crypto buy and sell were introduced, enabling users to exchange supported cryptocurrencies to Euro Token and back. The payment and transfer flows were upgraded to offer wallet users more clarity and flexibility.

Extended list of upgrades:

• Main menu was simplified; now, all the main features can be accessed with just 1–2 clicks;
• Market overview was redesigned to transparently show current values of cryptocurrencies and their trends;
• Wallets were redesigned to transparently show current wallet fiat evaluations; the exchange feature can be directly accessed from the wallet;
• Quick buy was introduced as a simplified process of crypto purchase;
• GoCrypto locations can now be listed according to the distance from the user’s current location, and can be easily filtered for categories;
• Loyalty program was simplified to make a payment experience even more convenient;
• User identification process (KYC) was stripped of data fields that can be obtained from the identification document;
• In-app notifications were redesigned to offer users better guidance through the features.

Elly 5.0 is on the way with new languages and an upgraded referral program as the wallet is getting ready for expansion to Latin America and other regions. New cryptocurrencies will also be supported soon; some of them might also have interesting and innovative features.

Control your spending with the Gorenjc app

When Eligma was founded, AI formed an important part of our whitepaper. We envisaged a smart platform where AI would be able to help you shop by getting to know your spending habits. We had to refocus (and especially resize) our AI development due to our focus on the GoCrypto Scheme, but the extensive AI training performed ultimately enabled us to develop the Gorenjc app.

We all want to save money, but throw away receipts, lose warranty papers, carry tons of plastic loyalty cards (except the one we need) and shop on impulse. Guilty? Uh-huh.

At Eligma, we developed the Gorenjc app to help with all those issues. Our beta version was launched in Slovenia only and is available on Android and iOS, and version 1 will be released together with one of our partners.

What the Gorenjc smart & stingy technology can do for you:

• scanning, reading and smart processing all of your receipts,
• automatic product recognition and categorization,
• automatic warranty recognition,
• handing you the right loyalty card when you need it,
• monthly expenditure overview,
• it also works without an Internet connection.

What to expect from us in the future

• Every merchant that accepts crypto will also be able to become an exchange where you can buy or sell crypto at the counter.
• We are talking with the biggest players on the market that cover millions of physical merchants to integrate GoCrypto into their POS or cashier systems. We are talking about millions of merchants.
• The Merchant Dashboard, which is used as an overview of the activities on the merchant side, is receiving an option called ‘business partners’. This means that every merchant can add its business partners and send them money directly at much lower fee on cross-border transactions, and the transfer happens instantly.
• By the end of this year, we will open 13 new markets, with at least 20–50 GoCrypto locations each.
• We are obtaining a license for financial services, which will give us higher credibility and more flexibility on the other market spread.
• New wallets and cryptocurrencies will be integrated into the GoCrypto Scheme along with the 36 settlement currencies we already cover.

We’re the rebels! The nice ones. We’re GoCrypto.

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.

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.