PORT Harbor — July ‘21
ANCHOR POINT
Set Sail,
It’s been an incredible month for us here at PackagePortal. The fireworks actually began for us a few days after the 4th of July, as Gabe and I had a great call with the Secretary of State’s Office in Wyoming to discuss PackagePortal’s use-case & $PORT’s utility.
The next day, the whole team started a week long retreat together with our families in Boston and Martha’s Vineyard. We were able to plan, bond, roadmap, and rest together, after a roller coaster of a year. But we’re only half way through the calendar so there’s still much to ship!
We have so much planned for later this year, it’s hard to wrap my mind around how wild things will be. Traditionally, within the logistics and e-comm world, the holiday shopping months are known as “peak season”. This is the ideal time for targeted marketing and PR, so we have boatloads of fun planned, beginning in Q4.
Meanwhile, our KYC release is ready for iOS; we’re just awaiting a partner update for the Android version’s face recognition. Depending on their timeline, we may release the iOS that is ready. We’ll keep you updated there. But even more exciting, is that later this year the full v2.0 will be released with a complete rework of the confirmation flow, and support for merchants and more metadata. Juicy!
The work behind the scenes is ceaseless. Like waves of the sea, we continue to push and push and push against the shorelines, always delivering fresh liquidity to the dry sandy beaches.
THE APP
The Engineering team has implemented our KYC coding, but the app store releases remain pending as we await our KYC service provider’s update to their platform. In the meantime, we are continuing to test the function, while working on other features in parallel.
Our main focus right now is merchant integration and shipment support, which is mostly backend work. But we are also still pushing stability updates and improved versions almost weekly.
Building easy on-ramps to our tech is imperative for these old legacy institutions to adopt blockchain. So the engineers are working hard to get things in place to make the integration process as turn-key and repeatable as possible. So that any enterprise can easily partner with us, both now and into the future.
THE BUSINESS
Our founders continue to have calls with high-ranking individuals from various sectors of the logistics and e-commerce spaces. We are currently developing case studies for two companies; a newly founded beverage company shipping with Amazon, and a central player in the logistics sector of the UAE. The first will be a loyalty program management offering for the beverage consumers, and the latter is focused on the tokenization & traceability of goods.
Both of these case studies focus on different areas of our value propositions. And we remain in discussions with many others, in regards to current services as well as the other verticals we are positioned for.
Another cool bit of business news is that we’ve added a fourth member to our Advisory Board; Nathan Kelleher. The Australian native brings a wealth of experience in both logistics and e-commerce, with strong ties to the Southeast Asian Pacific region. Currently, Nathan is based in the EU, working with TrueAltitude and serving a number of retail clients who could all benefit from PackagePortal solutions.
THE TOKENS
PORT now has over a half million transactions on the Zilliqa blockchain. That’s ranked second in the entire network, bowing the knee to gZIL which will soon breach 1M. At the time of writing, PORT maintains over 27k token holders, which is 6.4x more than XSGD (4200), and 5.4x more than ZWAP (5000), and last week, the Token Rating system on Viewblock was updated to bring PORT from a 62/100 to 90/100. We’re working to get that 100/100 score soon!
Summer Shipments — Distribution #1 will ship out next week on August 1. Liquidity Providers on ZilSwap continue to accrue rewards automatically while in the pool. There’s 200k PORT that will be rewarded to LPs proportionate to their share of the pool during June and July. Then the following reward — Distribution #2 (100k) will occur on September 1, for those who LP’d during July and August. This pattern will continue until Distribution #4 happening on November 1.
Finally, while the delay of the ETH bridge sidelined ERC compatibility for $PORT, we stand ready to migrate tokens to the Ethereum Network as soon as the bridge goes live on the mainnet. We’re grateful to have the ZilSwap & Switcheo teams work so hard to create a beautiful UX/UI, and we’re thankful to have the Zilliqa team securing its unseen nuts and bolts. We’re very excited about what it means to have interoperability for the PORT token on multiple networks and exchanges.
We still intend to start with UniSwap and SushiSwap; but we are undecided in regards to PancakeSwap, given its propensity to rugs and flash loans on $BSC. Research is ongoing in regards to interoperability with other networks.
A FINAL WORD
During our time together in Martha’s Vineyard, we were able to reflect as a team and deepen our bond. Cooking together was therapeutic. Jet-skiing in the Atlantic was exhilarating. And closing our time together on a sunset sail out of the Vineyard Haven Harbor was surreal. All of the photos in this edition were taken during our trip. As a team, we couldn’t be more syncopated or unified in our compass heading, and we’re all individually executing in our duties to be the fastest and strongest barge in these open seas.
We know that our service needs to be both “enterprise ready”, AND user friendly, and we’ve made loads of progress in both areas; most of which is not yet able to be shared publicly. But what is true & on public record, is that online merchants and retailers will need to buy PORT as an entry fee, and hold it as a sort of perpetual license for access to scan data. This is a clever way to freeze tokens that are in circulation, without devaluing our integrity with illegal burns or questionable supply change mechanisms.
Also, in order to best facilitate major enterprises, we’re excited to be partnering with a new financial entity being formed to enable institutional investors and organizations to obtain PORT without needing to fumble with wallets, exchanges, or private key management. More on that later this year.
All around, it’s been a very productive month or so since the previous Newsletter. I couldn’t be more pleased with the team’s progress. Every time I see a demo of new features, I want to immediately show the world what’s coming. But patience will be rewarded. It takes only a short burst of manpower to winch the sails, but once we catch the tailwinds, it’s effortlessly smooth sailing from there. And the views from the helm couldn’t be prettier.
