HelloGold Foundation Update #6–20th December 2017

Business

Last week the HelloGold team was humbled and honored to be one of six startups selected as a member of the exclusive TenXClub. The TenXClub is an initiative from Malaysia’s Ministry of Finance and it aims to recognize and support Malaysian start-ups with the highest potential.

The award was received at the Global Entrepreneurship Community Summit 2017 held in Kuala Lumpur, and was given out by none other than the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Dato’ Sri Najib Razak.

Robin introducing HelloGold to the PM

HelloGold was also represented by Kai Lin at the TechMatch ASEAN 2017 event jointly held by MDEC and US Market Access Center. The panel of judges were thoroughly impressed by Kai Lin’s 4 minute pitch, recognising HelloGold with the Best of TechMatch ASEAN 2017 award.

Kai Lin showing us how it’s done!

We are excited that the Telco partner referred to in the last update will be announced very shortly! To recap, it is one of the largest telcos in Malaysia and in Asia with about 300 million customers in 8 countries.

At the same time, HelloGold is seeing strong progress on customer acquisition. In the last update, we reported that it took 2 weeks to get from 5,000 to 6,000 users. The latest 1,000 customers took 10 days to acquire, and all this while the cost per registered customers has dropped 25%. Most importantly, we see the trend further accelerating over the last few days which should provide good momentum for HelloGold’s end of year campaigns.

Technical

The following are updates to workstreams currently worked on by tech.

1. KYC v2. Phase 1 of KYCv2 has been completed according to schedule. The Android version of the app has already been released while the iOS version has been submitted for approval by iTunes. Tech will start implementing Phase 2 of KYC v2 this week. The KYC process will continue to be refined based on feedback from the marketing team on the effectiveness of the redesign.
2. Customer in app tracking. Working closely with Marketing, Tech has added more analytics capabilities and tracked events. These will provide an even more accurate picture of marketing initiatives, enabling the team to design them more effectively.
3. Preparing core systems for regional expansion. To support expansion plans to other countries across the region, Tech has started the important task of rearchitecting the current core systems. This work should improve HelloGold’s agility to better support the localised requirements of each country while keeping the core systems stable and secure.
4. Enhancing in-house blockchain capability. Tech has been busy building blockchain credo with some intense in-house training by blockchain lead Dave Appleton. Dave’s style involves starting from the ground up, covering how to construct smart contracts, security practices, as well as often-overlooked items such as minute details of ABI encoding.

This training will spin off a number of community workshops positioning Ethereum to developer communities. Dave is already scheduled to speak at JSConf.asia and Gophercon.in early next year.

Dave and his trademark hat making an appearance in Singapore and India soon

Tokens

Updates on the token side:

1. GBT product. The Foundation has made its first sale of approximately 500 GBT! As previously mentioned, GBT will be sold initially OTC (Over-The-Counter) as the team iterates on optimising the buy and sell process. If you believe a big correction is around the corner as the market continues to break new All Time High records, pay attention to the GBT product we will be pushing out soon! You can find out more about GBT here or by dropping us an email at foundation@hellogold.org.
2. GBT reward distribution. The previous GBT distribution was made on Friday, 8th December 2017. The total allocated to HGT holders was 0.422 GBT, up 12% from the previous month.
3. Exchanges. We expect to announce a couple of new exchanges shortly. Watch this space!
4. Smart contracts. Last week we provided an update on the decision to re-define some features of the Gold Backed Token, to allow for the flexibility of tokens backed by other assets such as silver contributing to HelloGold Token rewards. We have finished coding this second version of the GBT contract and it has already passed one round of audits by ChainSecurity. We are currently confirming services with a second auditor to provide a second pair of eyes. Once the second audit is complete, we will update the GBT. Both HGT and GBT will be frozen (not transferable) for the duration that the update is done (expected to take no more than three hours). After that the old GBT contract will remain frozen. We will announce the new GBT contract and update Etherscan, MyEtherWallet, and others as soon as possible after that. We will inform supporters on all channels prior to and upon completing the update.

We will continue to provide updates every 2 weeks. Please do get in touch with us in between if you have any thoughts, suggestions or recommendations.

The HelloGold Foundation Team