Trips Tokens Are Now On Uniswap
Back in 2108 I was on the stage in Como, at the amazing Vacation Rentals World Summit.
We had launched Trips a few months before and initially we were not supposed to be on that stage: Beetoken was.
They were a Silicon Valley startup made of ex-Uber, Facebook and Airbnb veterans had just raised 15 M U$ via an ICO.
They canceled the engagement, and we took their place.
So, there I was, in that magnificent theater talking about the blockchain.
There was probably only one person who really knew what the hell I was talking about: Richard himself.
Now, how do you explain the blockchain to people who have barely heard of Bitcoin? In 10 minutes?
You don’t.
All you can do is to give them a vague idea that something big is coming and that there are enormous opportunities.
You try to make it as simple as possible.
And how do you explain tokenization?
Most of these people probably believed Bitcoin was a scam.
Ethereum? That was not even on their radar.
By the way, this is a message I got in Linked today, when discussing some other blockchain project:
So, you are NOT going to sell the idea that your own issued token will ever have any value to such a crowd.
We didn’t do, and didn’t plan to do, an ICO.
We preferred to mimic Bitcoin’s issuance in which you do things which take energy and get a reward in Bitcoin.
Instead of mining, we asked people to work.
“Help us, and you get the Trips tokens”, that was the proposition.
Trips for Work.
Real Work For Fake Money
When the slide about tokenization came up on the screen, I said “I’m asking you to give me real work for fake money”.
In a world where everyone is “faking till it makes it” and everybody is trying to sell you something, that was evidently refreshing.
It was blatantly honest, and they loved it.
After the presentation some people came up to me and offered help, others invited me to other conferences and presentations and I knew they got the gist of what we were doing.
The Crypto Winter
The crypto winter continued to ravage and it became increasingly difficult to talk about tokens.
Being listed on an exchange was out of the question, because all the interest we created around the project was towards “no-coiners” (people who don’t possess cryptocurrencies).
They wouldn’t buy any, even if we were in Coinbase, Binance, at their local grocery store or recommended by their priest during mass.
We were not worried though.
Crypto is a quickly evolving universe, and we knew the solution would come.
A Fast Evolving Ecosystem
You see, it’s an open ecosystem and if there’s a problem biting enough people, someone will solve it, because they don’t need to ask for permission to do it.
They just do it.
The fact that crypto markets were limited to centralized exchanges was definitely a pain point for the space.
Having to rely on a corporation to exchange tokens is simply something at odds with the overall vision.
Dexes (decentralized exchanges) had existed since a long time, but they were painfully difficult to use.
I had lost my Bee Tokens in Idex myself, so I didn’t feel comfortable inviting people to trade there.
Then, last year we invited Clément Leasage from Kleros at the Hicon conference in Milan, and during a dinner he showed us Uniswap.
He was very excited about it, and initially I missed what the fuss was about.
A couple of months ago I remembered about that evening, I researched a bit and found it.
It was the beginning of June 2020 and Uniswap had about $3 M in daily Volume.
Not much, but interesting.
As you can see it grew very fast and today it’s around $280 M in daily volume.
So, what’s so interesting about Uniswap? It’s EASY:
The other great thing is that it is permissionless, as everything in crypto should be.
That means that we didn’t have to talk to the gatekeepers and ask them to list our token.
We just had to list it.
Ten minutes later we were on the exchange.
Later on, some Trips Community members joined the pool: they added ETH and Trips so that people can buy or sell Trips.
An unknown user, maybe a Bot, bought immediately some Trips and resold them a bit later.
This happened twice.
Since that day the pool has grown, and we have seen some action.
This before we even announced it.
What Can You Do?
If you earned some Trips by helping us, you can now sell them.
If you want to bet on the project, you can buy some.
Finally, you can participate in the pool and earn commissions on trades.
Come to see us in Discord if you need help.
