Looking back at 2018
The past 12 months were full of excitement, joy and hard work. We thought that an overall look-back at the most important topics would be quite interesting, since it puts the road we have come along in a new perspective. Let’s dive in!
1. Marketplace
The development of the marketplace was surely our greatest focus in 2018. Thousands of hours of team work was invested into each milestone.
We have put together some of the noticeable improvements in the comparison below. To get a full idea of the improvements made on the marketplace (including the less visible ones), we recommend to go over our monthly recaps.
2. Blockchain
In 2018, we have taken a radical step regarding the underlying blockchain technology we want to use. Throughout our initial development of the marketplace and the DAPP, we identified important blocking stones and decided to build our own blockchain to overcome them.
This not only solves our technological hurdles, but opens up completely new opportunities and expands the scope of LockTrip by an additional, much broader layer.
In terms of blockchain development, we have achieved great progress already. Some of it is summarized below.
- Identifying key characteristics needed to come up with a truly business friendly blockchain
- Developing solutions for the economical weaknesses of current blockchains and drafting a proper architecture
- Building a minimum viable product to demonstrate the concept and mechanics of the LockTrip blockchain
- Educating our core community about some of the key characteristics of the blockchain
- Releasing the LockTrip wallet, the blockchain explorer and a staking calculator
- Developing the full version of the testnet, which is about to be released
3. LOC price
In 2018, LOC significantly over-performed compared to the general market. Most importantly, LOC never went below its ICO price and thus claims a very unique position in an environment where 99% of all projects took strong damage from the bear market.
The USD value of LOC has seen an appreciation of 58% from $0.60 in 2017 to $0.95 in 2018.
The success of LOC is even more evident when compared to Ethereum (or Bitcoin). Taking Ethereum as an example, the price of LOC kept increasing slowly but steadily throughout the first 9 months of the year, after which it saw a sharp jump.
As a result, LOC has experienced an impressive 703% growth compared to Ethereum (from 0.00086 to 0.00691).
4. Ranking
The website Coinmarketcap has an extensive database of coins and tokens hosted on multiple blockchains.
Every coin/token is ranked based on its market cap, which is an important indicator for us on how our project performs.
At the end of 2017, there were around 1,400 different projects listed. Among those, we claimed our initial position in the area of rank 500. This already placed us in the top %36 of all listed projects, which was quite a strong start.
Throughout the year, many new projects were added to the ranking. There are now close to 2,100 projects listed on the database, even though hundreds of failed ones were removed in the same period.
Despite the infusion of those new projects and the removal of failed ones, we managed to further climb in the ranking. As of the end of 2018, we were placed at rank 250 from a total of 2,100 projects. This places us in the top 12% of all listed projects.
5. Bookings
The amount of bookings were not really a focus point for us during the past year. This is simply because we were busy with the development of the marketplace and have declined to market a not yet finished product.
Regardless, we saw a strong growth of bookings mostly coming from our core community and new introductions to their friends and families. Below, you can see the amount of bookings placed on our marketplace for each quarter. A total of 196 bookings were made in 2018.
The next graph shows the booking volumes for each quarter. More than 68,000 Euros worth of bookings were processed during 2018.
Assuming an average of 20% in savings realized compared to conventional booking sites, this implies that we managed to save our customers a total of 17,000 Euros in travel expenses.
6. Internal
Some very important steps were taken in 2018 regarding our internal development. We have …
- … managed to build a fully internal team of developers
- … moved to our own office
- … acquired a very talented CTO
- … built an array of internal tools for various tasks which can be leveraged whenever required
- … gathered an enormous amount of experience and know-how
7. Liquidity
At the beginning of 2018, LOC was only available on HitBTC and Mercatox. Since, we got listed on Kucoin by winning their community vote competition and added a very powerful liquidity network called Bancor, which allows for direct LOC purchase from within our marketplace (using Ethereum or Ethereum based tokens).
We have also completed the Binance community vote at 2nd place.
During 2018, LOC additionally got listed on a number of smaller exchanges:
🔸 FatBTC
🔸 Idex
🔸 GateCoin
🔸 Lykke
🔸 Yobit
🔸 LATOKEN
🔸 WeiDex
A key strategic step in increasing our liquidity was the reduction of the trading steps on HitBTC. This allowed for a much smoother price movement and thus a more healthy trading environment.
8. LOC Economy
The architecture of the LOC economy is now much stronger when compared to our initial promise during the ICO. We have listed some of the most important enhancements made during 2018 below:
- Expanding our business development beyond hotels & homes to also include flights and other travel related services
- The proof of stake mechanism of our new blockchain creates a completely new form of demand through staking, which keeps the transactional economy within the LOC ecosystem rather than giving it away to project agnostic miners
- Burning mechanism at the protocol level of the LockTrip blockchain, which allows for a certain percentage of the transactional economy to be burnt (reducing the total supply)
- Burning mechanism for voting on variable settings of the LockTrip blockchain
- Projects building their token on top of the LockTrip blockchain will create additional demand individually (ICOs, LOC/token trading pairs, etc.)
- Unlimited additional opportunities that will be explored, strategically selected and supported in 2019 and beyond
We are very excited for 2019 and can’t wait to have an even bigger impact on both the blockchain and travel industry!
LockTrip is the first marketplace with 0% commission where you can save on average 20% on your hotel and rental bookings compared to anywhere else. Read how to buy LOC tokens here!
