Announcing Arax a Message from CEO Sankalp Shangari
Dear Community,
We have received an awesome response to our recently launched Universal Crypto Wallet called Arax. It has been months in the making, and the end product has come out fantastic. We are super excited to hear more from the community itself.
Why Arax?
We believe that is the first question that comes to everyone’s mind.
To understand why we are doing Arax, we need to look back at 2018. It was a real roller-coaster year for everyone involved in crypto. With lots of hits and misses, what we learned from 2018 crypto market is now helping us reshape our focus for future.
The Lows of 2018
1. Too many products at the same time — With our willingness to change the world for better, we dwelled into a lot of financial and Blockchain products simultaneously. The market wasn’t ready for all these developments at once.
2. Audience & Adoption — The crypto winters led to a cold sentiment for a large percentage of the audience towards a crypto-based product. We are continuing to impart right education for global crypto adoption and the process will only grow larger with time.
3.Regulations — With the continuous hustle in market against cryptos, regulations for licenses changed over time, making it rather a troublesome task to get license across geographies.
4. Partnerships — We could not leverage our abundant partnerships as much as we would have liked to.
LALA began with the vision to create a world where everyone would have access to basic financial services. However, 2018 crypto market had a different plan with continuous ups and downs, changing the scenario completely. We built numerous products in anticipation of market pick up and adoption, but we could not release or were out on back burner with ever-changing market. These ups and downs made us go for last minute changes, resulting in burning more funds. Adding more to pre-existing features resulted in delays and costs, leaving organizational environment chaotic. However we realised we need to change our approach in September last year and starting working and brainstorming on a new plan.
The Highs of 2019
1.We continue to work dedicatedly towards the success of LALA in spite of turbulent and ever-changing market conditions.
2. Since market is still evolving and there is little clarity — be it on adoption or regulation or technology itself, we want to focus on three prime things this year:
- User adoption — Focus on getting as many users on board LALA & Arax. It has been a daunting task in 2018 with dwindling markets, but we believe that with this renewed focus, we will do better.
- Partnerships — We want to focus on partners and their services to integrate them into our wallet. Let the users speak what services they like. Please shout out to myself or any team member if you think a partner can be helpful to us for mass adoption.
- Audience focus — Crypto friendly countries to begin with, where user adoption is quick, and the community is more or less educated about crypto.
3. Hiring — Unlike many other projects, we are still hiring to place extremely talented individuals across our offices — Singapore, India, Dubai, Malaysia and SF (opening in summer)
4. Multiple LALA Token utilities — Our focus shall be again to build out those utilities with partners and gain more user adoption. We intend to focus on LALA Token as a prime medium for transactions within the wallet. There will be multiple features, products and announcements for same in coming weeks and months.
Coming back to Why Arax
With time, we are growing our expertise in Blockchain and the team is delivering products throughout. Seeing the market turmoil of 2018, and experience talking to other players, we believe:
1. Apps vs Dapps vs User Adoption: Success of service companies like exchanges, or protocols like ETH has been largely due to user adaptability as the need of the hour (fiat to crypto or crypto to crypto exchanges) or human behaviour (Crypto Kitties, ICO, DAI etc). At the end of the day, the key to success is user base.
2. Crypto Wallet as a Product: We thought long & hard and could’ve focused on either building yet another protocol or an infra play for mass populace. We tried to build local infrastructures in many markets in 2018, but people and regulators are not ready in these markets yet — especially for a full-blown financial ecosystem. So, the focus is wallet business.
3. LALA Fiat Wallet: LALA wallet of 2017/18 was a Fiat-based wallet with some crypto features. We engaged this route due to regulations and adaptability. Unfortunately, markets didn’t evolve that quickly and price depreciation of crypto did not help. With particular attention to Fiat, we started losing our focus on Blockchain. Hence Arax — a Universal Crypto Wallet, while LALA continues the Fiat route.
4.Technology Company First: We want to focus on Blockchain tech and our prodigy is our crypto wallet. Our USP is going to be to integrate as many important partners (prioritized as per demand).
5.LALA Token Adoption: With every partner, and every service in Arax Wallet, we shall focus on LALA as key adoption component, through transactions, referrals, rewards, loyalty points, etc.
6.Distinct Advantages: Now there are a lot of Crypto Wallets and we are aware. However, we have some distinct advantages in Arax available on launch and more coming soon
- Multi-Currency Support — Over 12 Coins available at launch, which took us months to
integrate, including Ripple, Stellar, TrueUSD, Litecoin etc, are not there in most of the wallets available
- GPS enabled transactions — Nearby Arax users can pay to each other using crypto instantly
- Crypto to Crypto exchange enabled
- Free transactions*
- Recharge your prepaid phone and utilities via crypto in 150 countries
- News and Analysis
- Focus on partners, over 15 partners that could be integrated for different services in the future
- Trading Signals
- Kiosk Payments
- Gift Cards
- Fiat to Crypto
- Retail offline as well as online usage
- Loyalty Rewards — LALA Loyal Points
- Several other features to be regularly announced
As quoted by Sir Albert Einstein “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.”, we are not going to stop exploring the possibilities, questioning the outcomes and delivering sustainable results.
For bringing positive changes to the masses has always remained our vision. We will strive and stride to achieve the same. All we require is continuous support and trust of our community, while we build solutions that add value to the industry and address the challenges of the community. The year 2018 has taught us a lot and year 2019 marks the implementation of our experience.
Thank you!
Best,
Sankalp Shangari
CEO & Founder LALA World
