AMA with Zac wrap-up: Q4 progress report and 2020 outlook
Dear Pundians,
Thank you for participating in the AMA session with Pundi X founder and CEO Zac Cheah. Wish everyone to start the year 2020 with vigor and conviction and so will Pundi X.
For those of you who may have missed it, the live recording of the AMA session held on Jan. 3 at 11:00 am GMT+8, tackling 2019 Q4 progress and 2020 outlook can be viewed here:
You may also find a summary of the video session as follows:
XWallet and its DApp
Less than a year ago we launched XWallet, we wanted to build an app that is not just a wallet but an ecosystem of services inside the wallet. Those services are sometimes called DApps.
Every quarter we have seen growth, considerable growth, and this quarter we have again hit a new growth point. Our quarter-to-quarter growth has increased by 80% in mere three months, reaching over 700K registered users. Our total transaction in XWallet had a 25% quarter-to-quarter increase.
What are people using with XWallet, apart from being a wallet? We want it to mean different thing to different people. Those that love playing games can make Dust & Draw and Lucky Spinner their favorite applications. Those that enjoy sharing and gifting will love CryptoGift. XWallet is a wallet but more than a wallet. It is something for everyone.
All services that are able to generate revenue for Pundi X will be part of the token removal mechanism whereby we remove 0.35% of the fees in NPXS that we charge on them. Also, the call for DeFi or financial apps are especially high and we plan to actively look into that.
Another feature request is the ability to store tokens in a decentralized way- to truly have ownership of the tokens in XWallet via private key/seed ownership. We have Binance, Samsung Wallet DApp, and MyEtherWallet DApp to do that. You will be seeing more decentralized wallet services on XWallet. It’s all about choices.
So, what are the DApps and services which we have on-boarded? New projects that have on-boarded onto XWallet ecosystem are RupiahToken, DigitalBits, and Enjin. Now there are a total of 19 digital currency supported on Pundi X payment platform, including stable coins, DAI, IDRT, and USDT.
We are entering the last month of Carnival. Super fun and many people have participated diligently, especially using Crypto Gift feature. There are two dedicated telegram groups created for sending and receiving Pundi X Crypto Gift only. Our groups were so active that combot stats has to take us out of their polling system as we consistently stayed №1 and №2 on the global group ranking.
From Carnival, we’ve also learned that the services becomes the essential element to grow the usage of XWallet. Here I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for making Carnival a success!
One pro-tip. If you are a merchant and you want to accept crypto payment, you can also select the merchant options and print out the XWallet QR Code to perform basic crypto payment via QR.
XPOS
From XWallet and DApps, let’s shift gear to hardware. The XPOS.
Universal payment — whereby we have the support of universal payment and acceptance. Some of you might have realized that the feature soft-launched in some XPOS, we are still testing it, and hopefully, we can officially say that the support is live, users of third party wallet apps will be able to use XPOS devices. We are opening the doors of XPOS to tens of millions of wallet apps users.
In the last AMA, we talked about the B2B and B2C verticals. B2C verticals are efforts to put XPOS in retail outlets, cafes, convenience stores, even mom and paps shops. B2B is our effort to push it in a more strategic scale, we are working with distributors globally. Their list will be announced next week on our official sites. For example, a Spanish user can get hold of XPOS from Bitcobie which is our distributor in Spain, distributors operate in the local markets and have the network and knowledge.
We will also be having our reseller program ready which we believe will open up and highlight a global sales channel of resellers and spearhead smaller orders. If you are a crypto and Pundi X believer that want to explore reseller, distributor opportunity, we want you. Go to our telegram, give a shout out and our community team will forward you to the right person.
Also in the last AMA, we talked about the successful integration of Verifone, one of the world’s top POS companies. In Q4 2019, we have integrated another top POS leader, in fact, number one in the market, Ingenico. It took us lots of meetings to discuss XPOS solutions and enabled them in their POS. As of today, we are continuing more discussion to bring it to the next level.
A great exciting point is on-Chain — XPOS will move to on-chain in 2020. This means that the transaction will be readable on the chain with the explorer tools, and of course still fully secure.
Previously in the last quarter, we announced our Venezuelan office, run by our capable Venezuelan team members. We have also localized websites of our key markets and soft-launched the https://www.pundix-venezuela.com/, where our Venezuelan users can purchase crypto and XPASS from. Websites are tailored towards the local markets, compliant and user-friendly. Hopefully, we will see more local websites popping up.
Moreover, in this quarter we are adding another office — Cyprus office. Pundi X Cyprus is a small and dedicated office that will work on many exciting things, following up on our meeting with the President of Parliament and other important ministers.
We now have a full-time Business Dev and Communications team in over 10 countries, these guys are hustling hard to deploy.
Next, following the tradition of sharing the popular crypto used in XPOS. We will also be publishing this fun and important XWallet usage insight. Here’s a bit information to share with you:
Top XWallet downloads, who are they? Top XPOS stable Coin usage? Who are they? Check out our report.
Token removal
Of course, the tokenomics. In the second week of January on Saturday, we will be removing a total of 6 billion NPXS/NPXSXEM from conversion and utility, which is around 855K USD in value. In the last 6 quarters, 18 months we have taken around 42 million USD worth of tokens out of circulation aka burn. Why is this number lower than last quarter? Last quarter we removed a huge chunk of tokens from conversion.
As you know 0.35% of the transactions are removed from XPOS transaction. In the last quarter, we have passed on the 0.35% profit to merchants instead of removing it to encourage XPOS usage, we will continue to do that but this will come to an end sometime in 2020.
We remove the amount of token through the transaction proceed that generates for our revenue, which are doing by putting more XPOS everywhere and more transaction on XWallet. Apart from XPOS transaction and withdrawal fee being part of the token removal mechanics, we also have DApps and XWallet transactions as token removal incentives. Anyone who wants to encourage, every usage in XPOS and XWallet will contribute to the token removal.
Many people have also asked us to remove more tokens. Our team above everyone else would like to see that, but we cannot remove by plucking arbitrary numbers. The tokenomics is based on building a real business project, and we aim to deliver it. And every quarter, we remove tokens.
Function X
BOB is the showcase of what is possible with Function X. We have done pre-order on XWallet and Campfire Japan, 2020 will start with on a global crowdfunding platform- We have chosen Indiegogo because of their great support to BOB pre-order campaign.
As we speak now the team is heading to Las Vegas to pick up a CES Innovations Award for BOB. An absolute honor to be named alongside the best such as Asus, HP, etc. This is the second time that BOB has been placed alongside with top consumer electronics brands. The first time was in Germany’s IFA, one of the largest consumer electronics show.
A lot of people asked when testnet will be officially launched? Testnet will be launched in the first half of 2020. One thing which we will improve in 2020 is the sharing of Function X roadmap update, our product and technical team has been buried into a hole building, building, and building.
Let me give you an example of the testnet use cases. It’s about putting your identity on-chain and now tested in the XWallet.
You will be able to sign your transactions using XWallet or any supported app (It’s similar to the concept of how MEWConnect of MyEtherWallet signs the website but their key actually stays in the app). Once sign, you can issue the signed message into the blockchain, so the other guy who has his private key can decrypt the message. The message can be sending crypto, text messages, images or anything. You name it.
And all these will be visible globally and transparently in the blockchain via our block explorer. So when can everyone see this? I ask for your patience. We will have it soon. We can’t confirm the dates right now, but we will be sharing it as soon as it is ready.
2019 was all about building, and 2020 is about building and sharing.
We are also extremely proud to have Dr. Yos Ginting and Yoshiyuki Yamamoto onboard to add to the great team led by David Ben Kay our president of Function X foundation.
Here is a wrap of our quarterly progress report. The market is tough but the ones with real use cases will stay. We will keep building and delivering. May the bull outrun the bear!
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