RefToken — A Year in Decentralised Affiliate Marketing

As we move in to 2019, we’d first like to say how much we appreciate the continued support from our community members during 2018. The start of the new year is a perfect opportunity to recap on some of the major events during 2018 and most importantly, where RefToken is heading next!

As you may already know we just about reached our minimum target raise last year. While we were pleased to have reached the minimum cap to develop our project, it wasn’t the raise we were initially hoping for — but what we did raise was a lot of experience.

After witnessing the rapid growth of the ICO market during early 2018 and having just finished our own ICO, the RefToken team decided to launch our very own ICO agency and proprietary ICO launch platform. By developing our platform and enlisting clients, we could more easily integrate our RefToken affiliate solution into our client’s projects; effectively turning our existing ICO clients into potential RefToken clients for their ongoing ICO Marketing campaigns.

We successfully launched ICOMalta, signing over 30 clients during our first year. Our ICO platform was developed swiftly and since then, we have been working on integration of RefToken affiliate tracking within our live ICO platform.

It became clear that in order to have end-to-end protection and trustless affiliate tracking, we would need to pass all of our sales through their own custom smart contracts. This would have been an enormous undertaking with the predicted volume of sales we are planning to process — so our developers got to work and found a solution.

As you know, we had already built a successful ICO platform, which in practice isn’t significantly different than a Payment Gateway for token sales. Therefore, as of 2019, our ICO platform will be merged into a token payment gateway that supports affiliate tracking through our RefToken technology. This will make processing sales easier, more cost effective and faster.

The token payment gateway will be connected to the RefToken affiliate platform, where affiliates and merchants can find each other, negotiate deals and claim rewards for successfully concluded deals — very similar to our prototype at ‘demo.reftoken.com’.

We believe that these changes will not only make our RefToken affiliate tracking more robust and trustworthy, but likewise enhance user experience and vastly increase our onboarding of new clients with it’s integration with our payment gateway technology.

So for a recap on our yearly progress during 2018, here is a look at the major milestones we have achieved since the start of the year:

• August 2017- Our white paper is released, as well as our RefToken prototype at ‘demo.reftoken.com’.
• September 2017 — Our team is expanded by hiring a full time blockchain developer.
• October 2017 — Our RefToken ICO starts.
• December 2017 — RefToken ICO ends.
• Jan 2018 — Exchange listing on OKEx, expansion of the team with 1 Swedish full-stack developer.
• February 2018 — Starting our ICO platform ‘ICOMalta’, we sign 3 clients to run their ICOs on our platform. REF listing on IDEX.
• March 2018 — Major development effort on our ICO platform, integration of AML/KYC.
• April 2018 — New ICO Platform ready for production with affiliate-tracking built in, Hired 2 fullstack developers from Sweden.
• May 2018 — ICO Launched on our new platform and multiple clients signed.
• June 2018 — Improved reporting on our platform implemented in the form of exporting CSVs.
• July 2018 — Wire transfers now supported on the platform. We expanded our team with a community manager.
• August 2018 — UI/UX-improvements to the platform, RefToken is listed on Orderbook.io
• November 2018 — BTC payments are now accepted on our platform. ICOMalta wins “Startup of the year” at the Malta Blockchain Summit.
• December 2019 — ICOMalta 2.1.5 gets released, with many existing bugs fixed.

In a year which proved universally difficult for the entire blockchain market, we showed our commitment to development, remaining agile and exploring new business avenues. Now, in 2019, these business avenues have converged and our RefToken affiliate tracking platform is ready to be implemented alongside our other ICO Platform technology.

Our team have worked hard through 2018, and 2019 will be no different — we’re happy to share with our community the following upcoming Milestones:

• January 2019 — RefToken will reach the PUBLIC BETA stage. Our Token Sale Platform will be released with a revised architecture, integrated out of the box with our RefToken affiliate tracking software.
• February 2019 — Our dividend platform will be ready to launch and integrated into our sale platform.
• March 2019 — UX/UI improvements. Ongoing token sale support (i.e. for dApps) at market price.
• April 2019 — Our RefToken affiliate platform BETA will end, together with the launch of ongoing token sales and increased platform user activity.

Once again, a big thank you to all of our RefToken community members for following our updates during 2018. We have exciting times on the horizon and we hope you will join us again through 2019.

Happy New Year,

- RefToken