PARSIQ, Web3, and the Evolution of Our Platform

Setting the Stage for Our Future

PARSIQ and IQ Labs have made incredible strides during the past year.

On both sides, we have made significant progress. Not only in the development of our products, but we have also on-boarded dozens of new customers, broadened our name recognition, dramatically increased the size of our communities, and built a strong pipeline of interest across all of our available solutions. This pipeline is growing deeper than ever, as word of what we do and what we offer continues to spread throughout the blockchain community. As a result, our teams have been working in overdrive: onboarding new customers, developing novel tech solutions, securing deals and partnerships, and continuing to push our name and brands forward.

There has never been a more exciting time to be working on PARSIQ’s and IQ Labs’ products and technology!

Market Focus in 2021

From our product data and survey results, we know that ~70% of PARSIQ’s users use the platform to help them trade cryptocurrencies privately, mostly using our free plan. The other ~30% have a developer or business use case, which provides the base of PARSIQ’s revenue. In most cases, our corporate clients require our product team to maintain customer development to cover their needs from A to Z.

With this data in mind, we had a crucial decision to make: Do we invest in building products that cater to personal users, expanding our free services and trying to incentivize users to move to paid subscriptions? Or, do we focus on our foundational tech and SDKs so as to expand our B2D / B2B audience?

We decided to opt for the latter. Of course, we recognize our existing platform-users and appreciate their continued use of the current platform. And while those types of uses remain open and available, our plan is not to center our business on them; our pursuits and product developments will not be specifically geared toward self-serve products.

We are confident in this decision because, as we see it, there is much more traction to be made working alongside large, enterprise clients that require full suites of custom care from us. A side effect of taking this track is that we open our services to a much wider audience of users — including individuals! In fact (as you will learn in due time), we believe that it will open doors for us to create some exciting consumer-facing applications that have not been possible up until now.

Upon deciding to maintain a focus on corporate clients and developer audiences, our business development and marketing teams conducted an initial messaging revamp. This can be seen, for example, in the updated PARSIQ website’s structure and design. In the coming weeks, our plan to further cement this focus will become much clearer to the public in a number of ways.

Tallinn team meet-up 2022

As many of our community members know, we held a week-long, in-person session for our employees in Tallinn, Estonia at the beginning of the year. Our team has experienced rapid growth during the last twelve months. So, this meet-up was an important opportunity for many of us to meet face-to-face for the first time; but, equally important was the fact that it allowed us all to come together and set the stage for 2022.

It was an obvious success! We accomplished a lot during this week. For example, we aligned our KPIs, coordinated our goals, and secured key measurements. But we also took the opportunity to discuss the future of our industry (as well as our central place within it). Day after day, our conversations were productive. I was particularly struck by the way insights came from all directions: Development, Sales, Community, Marketing, and Operations — not to mention the external input we always happily welcome from our advisors, investors, and community members.

Beyond getting to know each other better, our goal was to hone in on the direction of the industry. I think we did a very good job at this. We focused our understanding of the steps we need to take in order to create the solutions necessary for our healthy growth and further expansion. Importantly, though, we have kept the needs of our customers (both current and future) close to our heart. Ultimately, we came up with ideas and plans for how our existing products will continue to advance Web3 to large-scale adoption.

A key task we accomplished during our meet-up in Tallinn was to finalize the vision of our roadmap. Because each project has a life of its own, we decided to split the goals of PARSIQ and IQ Protocol into two distinct roadmaps. When it comes to our roadmaps, our aim is to be careful, strategic, and decisive. Our work on the PARSIQ roadmap continually led us into discussions about how to best realize the full potential of the platform.

And this is what we are actually discussing at this moment: as we laid it out, we realized, more and more, that the PARSIQ platform is calling out for the next stage of its evolution. Such an evolution, we recognize, requires nothing short of a reimagining of what the platform can be — a notable expansion upon the firm foundation we have already built.

What we have learned

Since its inception, PARSIQ has been a data-focused company, one with a broad range of tools and capabilities to help customers in an impressive variety of ways. Indeed, the idea behind the PARSIQ platform has been to facilitate the widest variety of use cases that are present on the blockchain. And the tech we have built works great.

At the same time, however, we cannot deny how much the market has changed since our first roadmap was created. During the last two years, the terrain — the desires, needs, problems, and solutions — have expanded and changed so quickly.

So, as it currently stands, we have a set of tools that allow clients to build on top of blockchain data streams. A strength of PARSIQ is found in the way users can build their own solutions and use cases. Getting the wide-scale adoption we are gearing for, however, is no easy task on this model. For one thing, a platform lacks a sufficiently clear focus if its goal is to provide tool sets for others to build more-focused products upon. For another — and given our years of experience working with other projects — it is clear that many developers prefer to access data from within the convenience of their own codebase and their prefered programming language.

We believe these points make sense. We also believe that, over time, we will better serve our customers by removing any and all obstacles that stand between them and the data that is vitally important for them — data that we provide them. This will not only benefit our existing and future client base, but it will also provide us the means to establish ourselves as the reliable, one-stop shop for sourcing blockchain data.

While our initial model has served us well, allowing us to cast our net far and wide in terms of our offerings, we recognize that to best advance our vision, it is necessary to sharpen our focus by offering more powerful, and more specific, technologies. To provide a more focused offering, we must expand our product. We will do so by using our existing tech stack and rely on the expertise we’ve acquired through listening to our customers, investors, advisors, partners, and through the input of our community members.

Where we are headed: What’s next?

Blockchain data should be easily accessible. To us, this is a central tenet. Unfortunately, the “transparency and openness” of blockchain data rarely means “ease of access” to that data. Our goal has always been to change that fact. In refining our understanding of the broader terrain, we have also refined our vision of PARSIQ’s market-fit and mission: helping clients connect their Web3 protocols and dApps to off-chain user experiences.

In other words, we remain steadfast in our core, original vision of allowing clients to trigger their project’s business-logic given the events of on-chain activity. But we now approach this vision with a bit of a twist, that is, with more powerful and more specified, customized tech. We look forward to providing the precise details of this tech with you in the future. Again, we want to be careful, strategic, and decisive in our plans. That means that we’ll be taking the required time to finalize the rollout of our exciting new focus. Once released, it will be clear to everyone what can be expected from PARSIQ for 2022 and beyond.

But that does not mean we will leave you with no details in this announcement…

Project expansion: Key points for consideration

+ Focus on large blockchain protocols (DeFi & NFT related) and Web3-oriented companies.

• Many of the projects who currently come to us are seeking solutions to their problems and have found that our platform — in its current form — readily covers about 60–70% of their needs. For the remainder of the solutions, they require custom-built solutions. We love customizing our technology to fit the real needs of projects, but it has not been possible for us to do this for every project all the time. Moving forward, we maintain our offering of customized solutions, but will be much more tactical and comprehensive with the customizations we offer.

+ Support for our current client-base through a customer success team, rather than by offering our platform on a self-serve basis.

• Our goal now is to build toolsets — not for universal, blockchain applications — but for particular projects with particular needs, but ultimately making for easier custom integrations in the long run.

+ Sharing this toolset with the developer community — meaning, eg., APIs — as providing easily accessible and transparent sources of data are our top priority (in contrast to UI).

• Our expanded vision includes aspects of decentralization in our product and the ability for developers to contribute to the technology, as well as things like developer and project grants, ecosystem funds, etc.

+ Concentration on Data and its accessibility for different user groups.

• Our focus is on providing a one-stop shop for all kinds of data, no matter one’s needs. Not only will the APIs provide the raw data with filtration mechanisms, but it will also be accessible very quickly.
• For example, we have gotten our historical data to the point where 1 million blocks can be processed in about one minute. That is very fast compared to what is currently on the market.

+ Onboarding IQ Protocol and other DeFi protocols at the forefront for mutual benefit.

• Our new vision includes a flagship product — oriented towards Web3 Protocols and dApps — that will help solve all their data needs. It will, of course, be built upon the existing PARSIQ tech stack.
• IQ Protocol and other protocols will become full-fledged users of this Web3 oriented flagship product.

+ Updating the go-to-market strategies to give the community and token holders clearer means of participating with, and contributing to, the project at large.

• The expansion of our platform will include a B2C/retail-facing element, which will help foster more community adoption and awareness.
• We aim to create network effects via a consumer-facing mobile app connected to the flagship product.
• And — very happily! — there will be more utility for the PRQ token and even more involvement for token holders (read: DAO) in project decisions.

The future is bright

On the IQ Protocol side, we are more confident than ever that we are headed in the right direction with IQ’s offerings. With the rising popularity of NFTs, growing adoption of cryptocurrencies, and the beginnings of mainstream understanding of what both fungible and non-fungible tokens can do in the Web3 world, we believe that digital asset renting and blockchain subscriptions will be a natural evolution of the industry — one which IQ is well positioned to support. With interest in our solutions growing daily, we continue to be excited by everything IQ has to offer, and we can’t wait to share with you the future updates.

While our PARSIQ roadmap is being reimagined as we work toward our enhanced product portfolio, I am happy to share that we’ll be releasing our IQ Protocol roadmap this week. The roadmaps are the result of hard work from both teams, and we hope you are as excited as we are with the enhancements we are making, and the direction which we are headed towards.

This letter is the first of many CEO Letters which I plan to start publishing. We have a fantastic community of supporters, and this is just another way to connect with our community and share our plans for the future. Through this, and all of the other social channels we have, we want to be sure that you’re the first to know about the exciting updates we have in store for all of you.

Many thanks,

Tom Tirman