April 2020 — IOV Update

Dear IOV supporters,

First of all, we hope you are well and safe in these times of epidemic, as well as your families and loved ones. These are difficult times for everyone.

A few weeks ago, Covid-19 took the world by surprise and sadly some people on our team were affected by it. Today, we are happy to announce that all our team members are now fully recovered.

Our first initiative in this epidemic is to help in any way we can. We have set up an address for crypto donation for the French hospitals. If you own crypto, and want to support them in this challenging time, you can send to these addresses and the proceeds will be immediately converted into EUR and sent to the Fondation APHP: https://iov.one/resolve/fondation-aphp*iov

We believe that starname has a great potential to help raise money in cryptocurrency and you will hear more from us on that front. We can set up similar starnames for NGOs and foundations that you care about to help them raise awareness and funds in crypto. Please contact us directly if you would like to know more about this.

In this context, we are focusing on driving IOV through this crisis and we took some decisive steps:

Change in Management Structure: Antoine Herzog appointed CEO and Karim Ganem, Chairman of the Board.

We are pleased to announce that Antoine Herzog has been appointed as IOV’s Chief Executive Officer. Karim Ganem is now serving as Chairman of the Board of IOV and is focusing on partnerships for starname adoption and special projects for IOV.

Antoine Herzog is one of the co-founders and has been providing the vision of IOV from the beginning. He has already achieved clear decisions and actions on the company’s next steps, in a time that requires fast iteration ability.

Antoine Herzog: “I am honored and excited to lead IOV. The vision hasn’t changed since the beginning. Our goal is to create the first network of crypto-users and contribute to blockchain’s mass adoption. The IOV Name Service provides the best technology in the market. As we all know, names are unique and are a commodity as well. We designed the IOV Name Service from this perspective. As we are in a competitive market, we want to emphasize one aspect: starname is not just human-readable, it is much more than that, it is your access to a network of crypto-users. We have been working hard for 6 months on something that is going to demonstrate what the network of crypto-users means and we will unveil it in the coming months.”.

Karim Ganem: “The company is now at a tipping point where highly technical decisions and good execution will allow us to make our vision real. We are happy to entrust the management of operations to Antoine while I am focusing on missions that will be useful for the sustainability and the future of IOV. We have always been aligned with the purpose and the vision of IOV.”

Marketing team strengthened, Non-essential costs cut

We are happy to welcome Olivier and Barbora in our Marketing team. Olivier brings over 30 years of entrepreneurship and marketing experience to IOV and is in charge of increasing the adoption of starnames at iov.one and executing the marketing plan as we are getting closer to the listing of the IOV token.

In this period of great uncertainty linked to the coronavirus crisis, we decided to reduce all our non-essential operational costs to make sure we can achieve our vision this year. The overall team has been reduced to the core minimum during this period of world crisis to keep operating the technology and marketing.

Listing of the IOV token

Regarding the listing date, a successful listing of the IOV token is a high priority for us, along with the adoption of the IOV name service. The sale of starnames will be driven by wallet integrations. We are finalizing our first batch of Wallet Integrations including Cosmostation and we want to show the world the full vision before going into exchanges.

We are focused on metrics and we want to do two things before listing:

• To have at least one wallet integrate our technology successfully and see starnames actually used every day for sending and receiving crypto-payments
• To reach 10k starnames registered

We will then organize a press launch with our wallet partners in order to show the quality of our wallet integrations and demonstrate our vision for mass-adoption.

Network upgrade

We successfully upgraded the mainnet of the IOV Name Service yesterday. We would like to thank the Tendermint team for including the 0.31 version release into their security update and all our validators who upgraded successfully to the new version 😍.

Looking forward to bringing blockchain to everyone, with all of you 🙌

Sincerely,

The IOV Team