The Way Forward for Perlin
A renewed vision & fresh opportunities
Making Tough Choices for the Long-Term Good
We take our responsibilities to our token holders and larger community extremely seriously. The Perlin team has been working exhaustively to add real utility for our token holders and the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Despite some extraordinary early progress and world-class development work by the team, it became clear that the technical challenges we faced for Wavelet were not going to be surmounted by the end of Q1 2020 deadline. As a result, we had no choice but to indefinitely postpone public release.
The World Has Changed
When Perlin started its journey back in 2017–18, no base layer platform was undisputedly dominant. It was a contestable market with a broken field of multiple players all competing for mass adoption in a rapidly growing blockchain sector. Two and a half years later, the macro conditions have gone from bad to worse, with fierce competition between platforms resulting in a fragmentation of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Furthermore, there has been stagnation of new user adoption caused by the cannibalization of communities and infighting between ecosystems. So instead of growing the larger ecosystem, competition is driving greater fragmentation and eroding confidence in both the standardisation of underlying technologies and business use-cases. In this context, we believe committing further substantial resources into developing yet another competing blockchain platform would be counter-productive. Events over the last week have further confirmed this as markets plunge and all base-layer projects struggle to maintain market share and value.
Our Future Vision for Growing Crypto & DeFi Ecosystems
Beyond the long-term health of Perlin, our goal has always been to try and grow the broader blockchain ecosystem. Our engagement with Ethereum and other projects strongly reflects this. Despite recent events, we remain bullish on new solutions and use-cases that can help enlarge the ecosystem instead of further dividing it.
Trade Digitisation for Mainstream Adoption
In the trade sector, our enterprise products like ICC TradeFlow are specifically designed to onboard mainstream companies that would otherwise have no connection to blockchain. We’ve enjoyed significant success and major global media attention for those efforts and are confident of strong continued progress. The building of trade infrastructure, including complementary legal frameworks to support trade digitisation around the world, will continue to drive industry adoption. The postponement will have no impact on our trade products.
New Carbon Market Opportunities for Perlin
Closely related to trade, we are now proud to announce that we are getting involved in the world’s rapidly growing carbon commodity markets. As an asset class, trading on carbon markets have grown five-fold in the previous 2 years to a record high of USD $215 billion in 2019. In the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) market alone, the average price of carbon credits rose from USD $10 to $28 a tonne of CO2e offset last year. Further substantial growth is expected as whole industries move toward greater sustainability and make ambitious emissions reduction goals. Based on this, carbon trading will continue to grow significantly in both volume and value in the short term. In just China, for example, the opening of carbon trading markets in 2020 are predicted to be double the volume of the EU ETS, which is currently the world’s largest carbon market.
Access to an Uncorrelated and Rapidly-Growing Asset Class
As the first project to tokenise carbon assets at scale, Perlin will facilitate unprecedented exposure for crypto natives to carbon as a new and uncorrelated asset class. By directly connecting existing decentralised ecosystems and DeFi to carbon markets previously difficult to access, we will be working to expand the entire cryptocurrency universe. So instead of competing with existing platforms and projects, we will be working hard to build new bridges for a fresh wave of growth and new capital for the crypto sector. Most importantly, we will be focused on bringing enormous utility to our existing community by allowing them to participate in carbon commodities trading markets currently experiencing explosive ongoing growth. Bringing just a small fraction of the value of carbon markets into the decentralised ecosystem will be a great leap forward for crypto collectively.
Next Steps
You can check out our updated website: https://www.perlin.net/
We will be making announcements over the coming weeks and months to show the real utility we are creating with carbon. Things you can expect to see include:
- An updated Perlin carbon industry whitepaper
- Progress on our active negotiations with new and established carbon exchanges
- Major new industry partnerships for real world commercial outcomes
- News on Perlin’s involvement with high-value carbon generation projects globally
Thanks for your continuing support and looking forward to the journey with you.
Team Perlin
Kenta and Dorjee will be doing an AMA on Tuesday 24 March @ 6pm SGT (GMT+8) on our Telegram channel https://t.me/perlinnetworkchat. We want to give you all a chance to ask questions and hear about next steps for Perlin.
Please submit any questions you have to: https://forms.gle/sN5PPziihrMAdwS69
