Strategic Business Plan for 2019
We will drive you through the ways in which LTO Network creates value (technology), what value we create (product) and how we capture and maintain this value (token economy). Read further for our strategic plans for 2019 and our SWOT analysis!
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Following up on our token holder transparency report, which you can find in the article below, we will now cover the ways in which we approach the product, what the product is, and how we will maintain the product.
Warning: you will need about 5 cups of tea. Or maybe something stronger. 🍸
Table of contents
- Summary — conceptual understanding of the project
- What is LTO Network’s tech and what can you do with it?
- Is anybody already implementing it?
- How does the token come into place?
If you are not new to LTO Network, you may scroll to part 2 straight away.
2. Strategic Plan of LTO Network for 2019
- Mission statement of LTO Network
- Why other projects die — and how we intend not to
- Product focus for 2019
- SWOT analysis
- Marketing, exchange and community approach
Summary — conceptual understanding of LTO
What is LTO Network’s tech and what can you do with it?
You have probably heard of our hybrid architecture. If not, you can read all about it in 100, 300, and 500 words in the following article.
In short, the private layer is for data sharing and process automation (each process residing on its own miniature ad-hoc permissionless private chain). The public layer acts as a global security settlement layer — an immutable digital notary. This hybrid approach makes LTO Network GDPR and data privacy compliant, as well as scalable and ready for adoption.
Sounds pretty versatile, right? The toolkit has endless use cases. Essentially any deterministic inter-party process or legal agreement can be automated as a Live Contract: supply chain processes, third-party data handling etc.
But even more cases are “hidden” in LTO Network’s anchoring layer. There is an urgent need for companies and document management systems providers to create trustless and secure audit trails, to make sure data is not manipulated.
Ok, I understand the use cases — anybody already implementing it?
^ Here is an article from back in 2018. Keep in mind that this article is slightly outdated, as our mainnet is already up.
We have several big clients in the real estate market (such as MSeven, OSRE, Merin, Stena & CMS Law), as well as in the insurance market (DEKRA). These companies use anchoring for trusted timestamps and audit trails. Also watch out for our supply chain solution for waste transportation throughout Germany, The Netherlands, and Belgium. This solution is comprised of decentralized workflows, notary services, anchoring, and more.
How does the token come into place?
We often hear the following objection: “It is not realistic to expect a corporation or a government to go to some exchange and buy your tokens to be able to use your product.”
However, there has to a be way for clients of different blockchain expertise (think B2B or any user-focused project) to be able to interact with your solution without this friction, YET have the token be an integral part of your product. We solved this by merging the token holder community with users:
Companies that are not 100% familiar with blockchain or token markets do not need to concern themselves with acquiring tokens. Those with LTO tokens can lease out their tokens to XYZ for example — or XYZ can have tokens staked by their integrator. Of course, if clients want to buy tokens, they are free to do so. In any case, LTO tokens are used at all times — whether companies purchase or lease them.
Thus, any friction in acquiring tokens, as well as in incentivizing real network usage, is solved. Article from Altcoin Magazine.
Let’s sum it up.
- How LTO Network creates value (technology) — hybrid blockchain approach where you can both determine custom logic and use anchoring for security against data manipulation.
- What value LTO creates (product) — there is a two-layer adoption strategy as well: anchoring as a stand-alone feature, and decentralized workflows which can be used for any inter-party process or business procedure.
- How LTO captures value (token economy) — staking performed by clients, integrators, and community token holders. More adoption results in higher token reservation time (bonded by nodes), while there is no network inflation. For all the details, please read our tokenomics paper.
Ok, now that we have everything covered conceptually, let’s get into the details.
Strategic Plan of LTO Network for 2019
Mission statement and goals of LTO Network
LTO Network enables collaboration between multiple organizations and departments via decentralized workflows, in which parties can keep using their own (legacy) systems to participate in a process.
Cool mission, but how are we making it happen?
Why other projects die — and how we intend to change that
Projects that did not focus on long-term sustainability and their product have failed in less than a year.
The biggest waste of all is building a product that customers refused to use — Eric Ries, The Lean Startup
Often, when a foundation stops working on a project, no one is left to use the token. Bitcoin and Ethereum have large decentralized communities, which solves this issue. But other projects cannot compete with that. After all, not all decentralized projects have huge communities that maintain the platform. Other teams require something more sustainable to keep building. This is why we have implemented the open source business model used by Docker.
We released mainnet and provide toolkits to build decentralized workflows. Any IT company, integrator or startup can use the toolkit to build their own solution. Also, we constructed the token economy in such a way that integrators can make fiat money using the Network.
Overall, this removes the centralized point of failure when an integrator abandons the project. As such, it is one of the goals of the team to bring as many integrators as possible to the LTO Network blockchain and integrate their solutions. The usage of all these integrators combined also benefits the LTO Network blockchain in general.
Product focus for 2019 ‘Anchoring’
Our CEO Rick Schmitz explained the 2019 product strategy this way:
Start with something simple which can be shipped today and which businesses understand. When we succeeded with that, show them what else we have under the hood. A classic land & expand strategy.
As described in our visionary paper, blockchain products should gradually be integrated into businesses and their applications. In order for this to happen, integrators have to start with something simple that does not impact the way business applications function today. The impact of anchoring documents or data transactions to create an immutable audit trail on existing applications is negligible. But these are the first steps towards using blockchain in a broader sense (eg our decentralized workflow engine).
Thats why we create a 2-level adoption strategy: land first, then expand.
By implementing LTO Network public nodes (layer 1), which basically serves as a decentralized digital notary, integrators and their clients can get used to having nodes running in their IT infrastructures. When the time is right to take it up a notch, integrators/clients have the option to upgrade to decentralized workflows (layer 2).
In both cases, tokens are essential to the solution.
Competition analysis
As for competitors, Factom is the big one. Tierion and Blockusign are also doing something with anchoring, but all of them have other problems. In short, these projects often have:
- A wrong network setup for this kind of job (anchoring): a permissioned blockchain cannot be counted as an immutable notary.
- No option to upgrade to something which creates significant business value. As a stand alone product anchoring is great, however it is not game changing technology that can save billions of dollars.
- Usage of proprietary systems, which makes it impossible to get a blockchain project into production phase. Businesses have tons of existing (legacy) systems they rely on. The willingness to switch to a new (albeit much better) decentralized solution is practically zero, which makes it incredibly hard to acquire new users on your super cool decentralized platform.
What LTO Network does differently, is:
- We have a permissionless network, making our public layer more secure and actually immutable (decentralization!) — anyone can join and become a validator; no one knows who those validators are.
- Land & expand. We have more in store than just anchoring! If you have the public node already running, you are just a few clicks away from running a decentralized workflow to unlock those potential millions in cost savings.
- LTO Network integrates seamlessly into existing (legacy) systems. This adoption approach is more scalable and has a potential to acquire a much bigger end user base.
Short-term Q1 goals
- Prio 1: Make it super easy to anchor. Integrate transaction receipt for integrators and clients. Create extensive API documentation and wiki.
- Prio 2: Development of dashboard to show stats of the network, bridge statistics, transactions and stakes of nodes.
- Prio 3: New website
- Prio 4: New explorer (mobile view) + wallet
Of course, this goes hand in hand with constant work by our sales team, but that is not something one can put on the roadmap. As of Q2, we will start working on Summary Blocks, LPOI implementation and further development in general, as well as on speeding up business adoption.
Sorry, no blockchain drinking parties.
We are not paying 50K for an event booth at a blockchain conference. Those are useless and attract neither customers nor token holders. It’s just burning through community money. Instead, we will focus on quality events with integrators, B2B clients and those who can actually utilize LTO Network. So you can meet us at those events!
We will be aiming for more liquidity providers.
When you have a token, a product cannot do everything on its own — we get it. Therefore, we will focus on the best liquidity providers. Also, we will make sure to strike a balance between client adoption and network value. We will be constantly exploring new possibilities to enlarge the token holder community. Keep in mind being on 10 exchanges of low quality is not a solution — we aim to be among the best. Having a strong community helps!
We are being transparent with the community!
This has two aspects: keeping the existing community active, as well as acquiring new community members. First and foremost, we will be focusing on acquiring actual network users (via media publications in large magazines, announcements in external B2B sources etc.). This will be the user base of the solution. Next to that, we will be keeping the community up-to-date on everything we do, and make sure other communities hear about LTO Network too. This has been going well so far!
Last but not least, we intend to be even more proactive with updates, our community engagement programme and crowd sourcing some tasks. We’ll also be working on the adoption of dApps that would need LTO Network’s tech.
Here is to a great start of 2019, a successful mainnet launch and a growing and enthusiastic community! Let’s make this a year full of updates and new integrators. We’re excited to watch LTO Network unfold to its full potential!
For more cool stuff, go to t.me/LTOnetwork and click on /tools.
