qiibee’s 2019
Dear qiibeeans, can you believe it’s already the end of the year? Well, we can’t but we are tremendously proud of what we achieved this year and where we are standing now.
We’ve closed 7 new partnerships, got the QBX listed on two exchanges, realized various technological achievements, setup a new website, updated our logo and much more. All of these results are covered in over 500 social media posts, over 60 blogposts, 23 newsletters, and thousands of telegram interactions. But let’s have a closer look on what we achieved throughout the year.
qiibee’s 2019 achievements
January
Customer Journey of the Future with BSI
qiibee and mindnow partnered up with BSI Software. The strategic partnership between BSI, mindnow and qiibee gives us access to some of the most renowned companies in Switzerland and Germany. These companies include retail giant Lidl, German Federal Railway Deutsche Bahn, Swiss luxury confectionery and chocolate producer Sprüngli, and many more.
QBX (Now) Available on Coinsuper Exchange
In order to bring loyalty on the blockchain towards mainstream adoption, the QBX token has to be widely available. Therefore, we were excited to announce that the QBX token was available to buy on Coinsuper Exchange including the pairs QBX / BTC & QBX / ETH from January 2019 on.
Coinsuper is focused on providing clients a protected, consistent and proficient digital currency trading experience and they have been staying among the 20 best, worldwide players with over one million clients.
February
qiibee’s Logo Upgrade & Website Redesign
Beginning of 2019 — in February — to be precise, we re-launched our website qiibee.com. Getting there was quite an exciting time for all of us. We spent many days and nights, weekends and especially the Christmas holiday working on it, but seeing the outcome, it was really worth it. And in addition to the new website, we also honored the QBX by redesigning our logo.
From qb to qbX
While being in the preparation phase of getting the QBX token listed on its first exchange in January, we decided that our logo must match with the token name. Therefore we upgraded the logo from qb to qbX, as the officially traded token name is QBX. With the X added, the whole logo got more dynamic and the recognition value is much higher now. The improved dynamic and increased distinguishing feature, laid the foundation for the design of the new website.
March
From 5 to 44 Sausalitos Locations with qiibee
After the test-phase of Germany’s leading cocktail bar and restaurant chain with the qiibee ecosystem, they decided to rollout the possibility of earning crypto, from 5 locations to all the 44 locations they are presently running.
This is a huge vote of confidence and we are very proud that the pilot project was so successful. Even more, considering their expansion plans of growing to approximately 100 restaurants.
Other than that, Sausalitos will also expand outside of Germany. Salzburg and Innsbruck (Austria) will make its start but also the United States are on their list, said Christoph Heidt, Sausalitos CEO.
This is of course fantastic news for qiibee. The more branches Sausalitos has, and the more internationally they are located, the more people around the world will be able to earn crypto while having fun nights out with cocktails and burgers.
April
New partner on board: Fabware
Fabware is a Software Development Agency which offers custom software and mobile app solutions for various sectors. Fabware was founded in 2004 and has its headquarters in Zürich, Switzerland and an own development center in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Fabware is the leading provider for mobile applications for Swiss banks such as Vontobel, Raiffeisen and various Swiss cantonal banks. Other than that, they have customers such as Zurich (Insurance), Nestle, Swiss Re, Six and Geberit, just to name a few.
qiibee’s public permissioned blockchain is live
In April we had more awesome news to share with you as we re-launched our own blockchain. For that, qiibee performed the migration from its old PoW chain to the new PoA blockchain which was a full success. But why did we decide to change from the PoW blockchain to PoA blockchain? Because the latter is for our use-case much more efficient and less expensive. If you want to learn more about it, especially how to connect to the qiibee blockchain you can simply click here.
May
FederEnergia partners with qiibee to create their own blockchain-based loyalty program for thousands of Italian merchants
Team qiibee announced a further partnership along the way towards mainstream adoption of loyalty on the blockchain with FederEnergia, who is a non-profit federation in the electric and gas water sector since 1957 and is connected to Confcommercio which reaches almost 1m Italian merchants. Among these merchants are oil and gas companies such as Shell and ENI, airline company Alitalia, banks such as Unicredit and Deutsche Bank, mobile provider Vodafone, car brands such as Fiat and Jeep and many other big companies.
Blogpost-Series for Brands & Channel Partners
Did you know that loyal customers spend 30% more but high financial inefficiencies and customer acquisition costs as well as low interoperability of programs lead to low engagement and redemption from consumer sides. The outcome are unsatisfied customers and frustrated companies. So, what are the key factors for a successful loyalty program? To answer this question and to give brands and channel partners a guideline, we have published from May on a blogpost series on ‘How to setup your own loyalty system in 7 steps’.
Through the blogpost series we generated new leads and improved our google ranking to be found by even more potential customers.
June
Binance Chain <> qiibee
In June, we were absolutely excited to announce our integration with Binance Chain and our listing on Binance DEX, a new blockchain software system, developed by the well known and world-leading crypto exchange, Binance and the community.
Dexs (Decentralized exchanges) are characterized by allowing consumers to maintain full control over their funds because all critical features are performed on the blockchain. Thus, the exchanges are more transparent.
July
qiibee brings Swiss credit card issuer with more than 1m credit card customers on board
qiibee got a new customer on board; A Swiss credit card issuer with more than 1m credit card customers. Our partner MindNow leads the development of the credit card issuers loyalty system. Before rolling out their loyalty system on the blockchain, they opened up a subscription option where you can subscribe to be one of the pioneers in making use of the world’s first Crypto-Cashback-Card and get real value in cryptocurrency for your spendings and benefit of major other advantages.
Currently their tech team is working hard on the development of their loyalty program. But the bigger the brand, the more complex the loyalty system. And this means that they have some delay with the development of their loyalty system. Subsequently we are also patiently waiting for them to finish up the development and then integrate with our technology.
In any case, we’ll keep you posted as soon as we have an update.
Raising the curtain for our new Exchange & Transfer Feature
Many of you have been waiting in eager for the exchange and transfer feature in the qiibee wallet app, and since July 2019 it is finally available for both, iOs and Android. And with millions of QBX already being exchanged, we are amazed how much appreciation the exchange feature received.
QBX (now) available on Trust Wallet
For an easy way of buying QBX on Binance DEX and — back then — participating at the #BNBack Competition, we wanted to make this as accessible and easy as possible for all. We decided that users should be able to easily buy the QBX directly from the Trust Wallet. So we were more than happy to announce in Summer that the QBX token is available in the Trust Wallet App.
Coinify integration in the qiibee app
With great excitement we could announce our newest partnership with global virtual currency player, Coinify, end of July. After the exchange and transfer feature was such a great success among our loyal qiibeeans, we were very excited to announce a further qiibee app success. Thanks to this, you can now easily buy ETH within the qiibee wallet app with your credit card or bank account and with the ETH you can then pay the transaction fee on the Ethereum Chain.
August
qiibee is an official IBM partner, thanks to ‘Startup with IBM’
With great excitement, we could proudly announce our acceptance by the ‘Startup with IBM’ program, beginning of August, making us an official IBM partner. The collaboration enables us to reach the huge network of IBM which makes further collaborations possible and improves the access to technical resources that help us to scale on an even greater level and further disrupt the loyalty industry. We get access to enterprise-grade technologies and expert advice, can benefit from communicating with other startups and specialists through meetups and special events, get access to more than 130 unparalleled services and can make use of IBM’s free Cloud credits worth 120.000 USD a year. This offers us to spread multiple qiibee blockchain nodes across the IBM network and enables new testing scenarios.
qiibee joins the Oregon Enterprise Blockchain Venture Studio
“R / GA’s award-winning strategists, technologists, designers, and consultants advise blockchain companies such as qiibee to develop and prepare their businesses for future milestones and with that, they will continue to foster innovation across enterprise blockchain.”
So we were absolutely thrilled to announce our acceptance by R/GA Ventures, Moda, Umpqua Bank, Portland State University, Oregon Health & Science University, Business Oregon, ConsenSys and blockchain research firm Smith + Crown during this summer and with that, the participation in the Oregon enterprise Blockchain Venture Studio (OEBVS) from August until October. The program offered us most valuable sessions on pitching, sales and partnerships and prosperous meetings with studio partners.
September
Partnering with Domec — one of Italy’s most fast growing FinTech leaders
With great excitement, we announced in September a further partnership, this time with Domec — one of Italy’s most fast growing FinTech leaders, active in the area of innovative payments and digital loyalty. Over the years, through Domec Tools®, the modular and flexible Cloud SaaS platform, Domec has supported Banks, Public Administrations, Financial Institutions, Telephone Operators and Retail Chains in Digital Transformation and Open Innovation.
qiibee’s first company get-together
After two years of expanding our team and focusing together on reaching our goals, we’ve finally managed to gather part of the team in Zug and enjoyed a week full of successful workshops as well as really fun times together including typical Swiss cuisine, the famous Chocolate fabric (Lindth & Sprüngli) and an awesome view over the Crypto Valley while having some after-work drinks. It was a great chance to be together, celebrate and have fun while prepare very exciting next few months and we can’t wait for the next get-together!
October
Successful OEBVS DEMO Day at Portland State University
As culmination of the three months at R/GA in Portland, our CEO, Gabriele Giancola really rocked the DEMO day in front of many experts from various sectors, also including R/GA’s partners: Business Oregon, Umpquabank, Moda_Health, ConsenSys, OHSUNews, Portland_State as well as smithandcrown. The presentation was a full success and right after the event, we had great conversations about potential collaborations with huge international brands. More soon… ;)
November
qiibee’s AMA with Decentralized Club
In case you missed out our AMA with Decentralized Club in November, we’ve summarized the best questions which our CEO, Gabriele answered during the Q&A session and created a blogpost out of it. Questions on company goals and the QBX token got answered and we think you should definitely have a look at it to learn more about what we are currently focusing on, which challenges we’re facing and where we want to go next.
November & December
Preparing 2020
If you’ve been wondering why team qiibee was rather on the silent side during the last couple of weeks, compared to the months before, then it’s because we were / are currently working on our roadmap 2020. In the last few weeks we reviewed what we achieved and learned in 2019 and are setting new goals and milestones which we’ll be focusing on in 2020. Part of this preparation is also reviewing existing structures and processes and adapting them to the new goals and milestones. Besides the restructuring of our roadmap we do of course also review the current processes of our business development and optimize them, so that we can keep up with the massive amount of requests we’re receiving by brands and channel partners.
Other than that, our tech team has been busy adding new features, improving the general functionality and testing as well as squashing bugs during the last couple of weeks! And they have added a pending status feature to transactions that haven’t been minted yet and are also making some huge improvements to the ease of integration with our upcoming SDKs which make using the blockchain even easier!
Moreover, during the last couple of days, our tech team ran some tests with brands on the qiibee chain, to see how many customers they could reward. And these first tests showed that we are able to reward 6.5 million customers per day across 12 brands. It is worth pointing out that this is not the limit of our system and we can achieve significantly higher numbers with more brands.
Currently we are also testing some other mechanisms to improve the throughput of the blockchain platform. This will enable us to onboard a much higher number of brands and improve the overall performance.
With these numbers in mind we can look to the future with confidence and can’t wait to onboard more brands.
Additionally, our tech team is busy with meetings with other tech teams from brands in the pipeline and we can’t wait to tell you more about it.
December
Christmas Campaign — 4000 SurveyTokens are waiting for you!
To sweeten the time left until Santa comes, we ran a holly jolly Christmas campaign where you could earn up to 4000 SurveyTokens which equals 4000 QBX! The survey is open until today (23rd of December) at midnight > Participate now!
Last but not least…
…we from team qiibee want to THANK YOU for joining us throughout the year and being such a loyal part of our community. We can’t wait for 2020 and to see what it has in store for us. We will of course keep you up to date with all our achievements, whether it be new partnerships, internal achievements, tech accomplishments, expansions, new listings and more.
In the meantime we wish you a wonderful Christmas season and a cheerful start into the new year — 2020!
We’ll be back with our first newsletter, on the 10th of January!
