Q3 2021 Progress Report

Published in

Pundi X

11 min readOct 11, 2021

Note: below is the summary transcript of the quarterly report of the AMA conducted on October 7th. There might be minor discrepancies and you can watch the original video of the AMA here https://youtu.be/5RiuHmE7lBo

Dear Pundians,

Thank you for your time to participate in the Q3 2021 progress report. The session focuses on the launch of the Pundi X Chain.

Joining us today are Zac Cheah, CEO and Co-Founder, Danny Lim, Co-Founder and CFO, David Ben Kay, President of Function X, Marcus LeBlanc and Jeremy Herbst, two of our Community Wizards, and Peko Wan, Chief Ecosystem Officer.

The agenda of the Q3 report includes:

Pundi X Chain launch
XPOS development and adoption
Community events
Q4 outlook

Pundi X Chain Launch

The Pundi X Chain is a high throughput, low transaction fee and low latency chain. The special thing about Pundi X Chain is that it has a real life use case from the very beginning, which is the integration of the point-of-sales payment system to Pundi X Chain. This includes not only Pundi X’s POS devices, but also the devices using the Pundi X payment system.

In other words, any transaction being processed using the Pundi X payment system will be shown on the Pundi X Chain.

We will also migrate $PUNDIX on ERC-20 to Pundi X Chain when we launch the Pundi X Chain. Token holders will be given the opportunity to secure and govern the network. In return, every time a block is mined, there will be reward tokens generated and distributed to the delegators and validators.

Pundi X Chain will not only be connected to FX Core, but also Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum, and many other chains in the future.

Pundi X Chain is expected to be launched on the 13th of October, 2021. This will be a multi-stage launch.

The updated f(x)Wallet, FX Explorer , and NPXSXEM bridge updates will coincide with the launch of Pundi X Chain. In the latest f(x)Wallet 1.8 version, users will already see Pundi X Chain, BSC, Tron and Polygon in the network configuration.

Once Pundi X Chain goes live with the initial company-hosted validators, users will be able to transfer $PUNDIX from Ethereum to Pundi X Chain and start minting the PR token now officially named the PURSE token.

Two weeks after the launch on 13th October, there will be a series of activities. It is worth mentioning that BSC cross-chain functionality will be activated based on the result of the governance voting on f(x)Core. The submission of proposals, especially for tapping into the Ecosystem Genesis Fund, will also be open to the public.

Governance Voting

Governance Voting is at the heart of the future of the blockchain. Regulators are always looking to see if blockchains are “sufficiently decentralized” and having a stable and efficient governance voting system is a critical criterion in that determination. We encourage people to go on to the Function X Forum to get involved, get your proposals ready, and post them for voting on the system.

Pundi X Chain Validators

As we are celebrating Pundi X’s 4th Anniversary and the launch of the Pundi X Chain, we’d like to use this opportunity to thank our community members for their support. One of the events that has already concluded was naming the validators. 4 out of the initial 25 company-owned validators of Pundi X Chain will be named after the community members that were voted on by the community.

As for the names of other validators, they will be named after objects in the universe which received the most votes in the poll. Thank you to the community that got involved and we welcome you to delegate to your favorite validators when the chain launches.

Hello PURSE, the reward token

As noted above, the block rewards for governing the Pundi X Chain are in the form of reward tokens. The community has chosen “PURSE” as the name of the reward token.

The basic function of $PURSE is similar to loyalty points. Holders can use them to redeem NFTs, get discount vouchers, XPOS and other collectables in the future.

The block reward calculation and generation mechanism is inherited from Function X. With the reward system, one delegates token “A” and is rewarded with token “B”. In order to stay competitive with the current block reward rates in the market, which is around 5–15% APY, we have set the initial inflation rate up to 3,000%, hence bringing the APY to around 6–7%.

With the high initial inflation rate, is there anything we can do to prevent or mitigate the fluctuation? The answer is yes. The “Burn, Distribution, Liquidity” (BDL) system is made to mitigate speculation. For every transfer to a non-whitelisted address, 10% of the transfer will be burned, 5% will go into a redistribution pool to be distributed to all existing $PURSE holders, and 5% will go to the liquidity pool.

The next question is, how do $NPXSXEM or $PUNDIX holders receive $PURSE tokens? Currently, $NPXSXEM is running on the BEP2 chain, so in order to receive $PURSE, $NPXSXEM holders will need to migrate the tokens to a new smart contract and convert $NPXSXEM to $PURSE at a 1:1 ratio. However, to prevent market fluctuation, we have implemented a lock-up period as shown in the illustration below.

$PUNDIX holders who have been holding the tokens from June 21, 2021 to Oct 13, 2021 will get 8.93061 $PURSE for each $PUNDIX. Holders will need to go to the dedicated website, enter your token addresses, pay the gas fees and claim the tokens yourself. If there’s no claim, there will be no tokens.

Q: Will there be a bug bounty for white hat hackers to find bugs to make the network more secure? Almost every big organization is doing it, including Binance, Crypto.com and many others through Hackerone.com even though they are already so established.

A: Hackerone.com is a reputable organization with many white hat hackers there to help find security issues. We can incentivize Hackerone and the bounty with our EGF. It is definitely something that we will be investigating in the near future.

Q: El Salvador updates.

A: We are constantly in touch with the El Salvadoran government seeking instructions on how to ship the devices to El Salvador. They have also shared documents on how the central bank regulates the crypto services in the country. We already have a potential distributor and the first batch of the XPOS devices have been shipped to the distributor for testing. After the testing is done, the potential distributor will get the documents ready for applying for registration.

Q: Any news about XPOS desk developments?

A: In 2017, we talked about the XPOS desk. Now, our focus is fully on the XPOS that we have and the way we expand the hardware upgrade is by partnering with other companies, such as Ingenico, VeriFone, and PAX.

Q: Any updates on the technical aspect of FX blockchain for the gas fees?

A: Gas fees will always be in the native token that users are transferring on any blockchain. For example, if you transfer on PUNDI X Chain, it will be $PUNDIX that you’re using to pay for the gas fee.

However, there will be a certain percentage reduction in gas fees for internal transfers within the chain under the circumstances where the server fees remain the same when the token price rises. As for the gas fees for transactions coming in and out of the blockchain, we have been subsidizing these and we will increase the rate back to its original rate.

Q: How does one switch from being a delegator to being a self-hosted Validator?

A: We will have a lot of sessions on building a self-hosted validator coming out at the end of this month. Make sure to follow the Validator thread on the Function X Forum.

Q: Visa and Mastercard have enabled crypto credit cards. How do you see XPOS competing with that? Can we compete with ‘Lightning’ ?

A: Our biggest challenge is the adoption of crypto. As Visa and Mastercard enable crypto payments, there will be an increase in crypto knowledge which is good for us. Our partnership with other POS companies, PAX, Ingenico and VeriFone, allow users to use their Visa or Mastercards on the different devices integrated with the XPOS payment system. Instead of competition, we see it more like the growth of crypto knowledge and adoption to day-to-day use of crypto.

Our XPOS device also supports PayPal services.

As far as Lightning goes, since we have bridges on the FX blockchain, we may be able to bridge Lightning or any other blockchain to everyone’s benefit in the future.

Visa and Mastercard are proprietary internal chains whereas we are open to bridge other blockchains. Co-existence of these two types of payment systems may be the key to make the environment more robust and advanced.

Q: When buyback?

A: We are not allowed to announce the possibility of a buyback prior to the actual action. This is to avoid being seen as market manipulation by the regulators.

XPOS Development

Decentralized XPOS

The decentralized XPOS is being built on the Function X Network and it is in the lab testing environment right now. It will be a game changer because then XPOS will be able to tap into any kind of chain.

XPOS integration

We have successfully integrated our XPOS payment system with DX8000, which is the latest model from Ingenico. This allows more choices for our merchants and distributors to choose from.

Developments in Turkey and El Salvador

We are happy to share that under the hard work of our Turkish distributor OVO, the second XPOS crypto Exchange is now open in Turkey. There will be more stores established in Turkey by the end of the year.

There will be 170 XPOS devices donated to El Salvador, and the first batch has arrived in El Salvador for testing. Now that our local potential distributor is testing the devices, we will work on the regulatory compliance process.

Merchant onboarding support

We have produced over 100 videos to help our merchants with XPOS settings. With the help of our community, we are able to provide multiple languages of our tutorial videos.

Check out our playlist and you’re welcome to let us know what languages you’d like to see on the tutorial videos. https://www.youtube.com/c/PundiXLabs/playlists

Events and Community

PUNDIX4GOOD Celebration

The celebration of the 4th Anniversary of Pundi X goes on. Following the FantastiX4 — naming the validators, we have just completed another event, which is transaction mining. The rewards have been sent to the crypto sales accounts of the participants in this activity

Ongoing activities are the Meme social media campaign and Video campaign. We welcome everyone to either make a cool meme or take a short video, tag #PUNDIX4Good to join the fun and spread the word. More details of the activities can be found here: https://medium.com/pundix/more-pundix4good-celebration-activities-revealed-6367974dde8d

Community initiated marketing activities

A big shout out to the community for being enthusiastic in initiating all kinds of marketing activities. @karincatraders from Turkey has made amazing videos that featured Pundi X and Function X, interviewed $PUNDIX holders and shared very useful information about crypto. @DesignMinato has created a metaverse for Pundi X, in which you can find many characters from the Pundi X team. Last but not least, @theadoption_io which is something Jeremy is working on with Billy Dusse, is definitely worth checking out.

We’d also like to thank the community for introducing us to Ryan Matta who conducted an interview to learn more about Pundi X and Function X.

Check out the full interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKItWpXpjjE

Participate in TREE MILLIONS charity project

We have joined the Tree Millions charity project organized by Binance. Giving back to the community in different ways is very important for us. This is one of the initiatives that we want to do to contribute alongside our blockchain industry peers, and work with the Binance Charity to plant actual trees in the country that our community selected, which is Brazil. We encourage everyone to take a look at this project as it is important that we use less energy to minimize global warming. In addition to that, by planting trees, you will also get a NFT certificate.

Check out the project here: https://www.binance.charity/tree-planting

More Q&A

Q: When will $PURSE launch?

A: The smart contract for $PURSE will be created on the day the PUNDI X Chain launches, but the actual launch for $PURSE will be after the BSC cross-chain voting is approved. The result of the voting will be out at the end of October.

After $PURSE is launched, the migration page and the claiming page will come out simultaneously.

Q: You’ve chosen a decentralized marketing strategy! It’s a great idea to get the community involved in marketing. But how do you plan to motivate the participants? Do you have a plan?

A: The answer is the Ecosystem Genesis Fund. With 75 million $FX, the community can get involved and earn.

The Decentralized Marketing proposal which will enter the governance voting mechanism covers two aspects, creating content for the official channels and third-party-created content for Pundi X or Function X. Together with the creativity of the community, we can create more content for the brands and the community can be rewarded at the same time. Another part is to allocate to third-party content creators, like YouTubers, writers and media interviewers.

Details of the Decentralized Marketing proposal: https://forum.functionx.io/t/egf-proposal-request-for-comments-f-x-dm-function-x-decentralized-marketing/1236/34

Details of Ecosystem Genesis Fund: https://medium.com/functionx/function-x-august-hash-out-f7a024aa7c6c

Q: Is it possible in the near future to monitor in real time how many XPOS devices are operating and see all stats about the PUNDI X Chain (transactions, pundix fees, number of addresses and the amount of fees cumulated for the next burn (amount reset after burn)?

A: Absolutely. That has always been our plan to create real decentralization and transparency. Next week when PUNDI X Chain launches, it will be almost the last step to bring XPOS into the decentralized realm. Not there yet, but we’re getting there.