Perspectives
Running a business in a sector that is ever-changing like crypto can be rather hectic. It is due to this reality that we have never claimed to know it all, on the contrary, we fully accept the fact that we can be wrong. In fact, proving to yourself that your assumptions are wrong is the closest you'll ever get to having it right. Occupying a turbulent and groundbreaking sector is no excuse for continued sub-par results.
There is an expiry date on every ineffective strategy decision. Adapt or die…
Monday was a rather hectic day. When entering the office, I was just in time to prevent Kasper and Sander from killing themselves. Where Kasper’s choice to go was sleeping pills and vodka, Sander went for a more ‘up in your face’ approach by jumping of the balcony of the sixth floor. I was only just able to prevent this from happening by calling their mothers to talk them down.
It was clear that several members of our community were not satisfied with the progress and approach of the team to achieve exchange listing. In this blog I would like to take the opportunity to put our decisions into perspective.
“Kites rise highest against the wind — not with it.”
Winston Churchill
MEA CULPA
First things first. In the end it was my fault and my fault only that progress on the exchange and community front turned out the way it did. Sander & Kasper had been working like dogs to achieve listing and you can be certain they explored every avenue imaginable. In their efforts we quickly concluded that most exchanges were not interested in the fact we were actually operational and had big clients and venues lined up to use our smart ticketing application.
Exchanges wanted to have a project with FOMO as to secure a guaranteed spike in new users when listing a project’s token. As I didn't want GET to become yet another hollow pipe-dream project, I decided to focus our resources on what we do best; disrupt the ticketing space. In hindsight this decision was short-sighted, while focusing on fundamentals is solid from a business point of view, it was evidently the wrong path to choose if we wanted to sustain and grow our community.
We now fully understand that even true believers in our vision want a token that is traded in volume. Listing and liquidity is not about providing flippers a way out, it is about trust and accountability. I take full responsibility in that regard. GET will not be listed on a centralized exchange in Q1 as was communicated earlier. At the time we made this promise we had a confirmation of a top-5 exchange to have our token listed at the beginning of March. Unfortunately this agreement was canceled by the exchange due to emerging regulatory matters on the side of the exchange (this was verified/true). The cancelation of this assumed listing forced us to fall back on our crypto marketing. Only problem was we didn't have any. My bad.
When all is said and done, in the end it comes down to me freeing up capacity to expand the community. In this light we have opened up a job opening for a dedicated community manager, but I fully understand that this is rather late.
Why
Since we’ve concluded the ICO, we had to get cracking with serving our clients and building the organisation. This is a real live business and there is very little room for screaming moon in Telegram all day. We never promised fast returns and we were never in the business of attracting flippers. If you interpreted it different; deal with it.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the concept of turning a profit on your contribution. What I do oppose is doing so in a manner that purely accomplished this by finding a greater fool to pay for your profit. We want to build a protocol that will stand the test of time, I have no sympathy for people investing purely based upon perceived hype potential. I’m here to make sure we become the no.1 blockchain ticketing protocol, not to put money in the pocket of short-sighted investors that just want to line their own pockets.
We have accomplished a great deal in 3 months and I’m extremely proud of my team. The dev-team is humming and growing, we’ve got more requests for new events than we can chew off and we’ve laid the ground work to scale up and make sure the GET Protocol creates real utility fueled demand for the GET.
In short; GET is and always has been a utility token. We have communicated this clearly from the get-go. As such its value will be determined by its utility in the protocol.
The plan moving forward
To make sure our community is better informed about the progress we’re making, we’re hiring an extra community manager. He/she will help us grow the community, so we have a broader base of better informed people.
Since Wednesday GET is also traded on RadarRelay, which is the best decentralized exchange I’ve seen emerge so far.
In addition we have an centralized exchange listing confirmed for Q2 of this year, we’ll share more details on this as soon as we are allowed to share this information.
Help us out!
The crypto roller coaster is bananas and is responsible for unrealistic expectations from people who are not used to investing. It takes time to build and grow a solid business. I understand the need for projects with less solid business fundamentals to spend a huge amount of effort in shilling the community. I sincerely believe this is a big problem in the crypto space and I’m not planning to become part of it.
Please use your energy for good and help us grow the community, spread the word about our project because if you’re in it to help achieve our mission, hang in there. We’ve got your back. I assure you that keeping the business fundamentals the first priority is the way to go.
