Coin Community Update — February

Coin
7 min readMar 4, 2022

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Hi Coinvestors!

We hope that everyone is staying safe and healthy despite the events happening across the industry and the entire world! After some careful consideration and planning alongside our community, we wanted to provide an update on the company, network, and strategy. Let’s first start by providing some context and updates over the past month.

Monthly Recap

Coin has always been the largest provider of liquidity for the $COIN token. The funds used to create the liquidity pools came from funds raised during our offering with TrustSwap in 2020. Coin injected $2M in liquidity on Uniswap and was the largest provider of locked liquidity on Unicrypt in 2021. When we rebalanced the liquidity in December 2021, Coin injected $3M of total liquidity to the pool which, again, remained one of the largest pools across the industry.

In late January, the liquidity pool that Coin seeded on Uniswap was liquidated. Between January 20th — 21st as the market deteriorated and fell in excess of 30%, the $3M in TVL in our Uniswap V3 liquidity pool was completely depleted by sell-side pressure from $COIN token holders.

During this period, we also updated fixes and features in Coin Wallet and Coin Swap. This included a variety of updates, fixes, and functionality by which you can read in our release notes here:

Our team has been, and will continue, working to address the liquidity of the token as well as continuing with the next iteration of Coin Wallet and Coin Swap, and overall direction for the network. Today, we’d like to share it with you.

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Liquidity

Addressing liquidity will be broken down into two parts: Token / Company and the Network. We will be leveraging our network across our team and the community to explore options to raise funds and create value for the token, company, and network. Liquidity for the token and company is a multi-tier strategy that will be addressed along various avenues:

  • Token / Company
  1. Investment: Explore outside financial investment from VC’s
  2. Fundraising: Explore additional methods for raising funds as needed
  3. Acquisition: Explore interested third-parties that are interested in Coin’s talent, IP, or both

These activities will also include discussions with parties that were previously interested in these areas.

  • Network

Network liquidity is one of the critical success factors and areas of focus for all exchanges. With no liquidity, it’s very difficult to attract users to the network to execute tasks. Since the inception of the company, Coin has always been the sole source and liquidity provider for both the $COIN token and the overall network. This becomes a huge financial burden with a high cost for any company to seed, including Coin. To mitigate this risk, we will be focused on partnerships and integration with institutions, companies, and service partners to provide liquidity to the network. In this case, LPs would capture fee revenue for each trade executed in the pool to which they have contributed.

Partnerships

There’s a quote that states “if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” We inherently understand that it will be critical to leverage partnerships and collaborations to expand Coin and will be accelerating our ability to do this. Our immediate goal is to collaborate with layer one blockchain companies (Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, etc.) and their respective tokens. This includes, but is not limited to, token support in the network, blockchain network integration for deeper DeFi services such as liquidity pools, and more. Our target partners are those with large communities with whom we can cross-promote our services and technology throughout the industry.

These collaborations establish our credibility with reputable companies and create free PR and marketing that is amplified across the partner’s community and the entire industry. Longer-term, we will also seek to create integration opportunities directly into partner technology to either achieve the same goals or generate revenue for the company. This benefits Coin in a few ways:

  1. New network adoption and user acquisition
  2. Onboarding new members and users to the community

We are in contact with a number of these companies already and have already begun their integration into the platform / network in preparation for future releases.

Marketing

Given the current market conditions (both at a macro economic perspective of inflation, rising interest rates, and with the weakening crypto market) and corporate issues, we are going to be more risk-adverse and cautious in how we manage marketing until we gain stability and traction with product performance and adoption. It’s imperative that marketing efforts are timed appropriately to achieve the maximum results. To that end, we will be taking on other cost-effective activities and creative efforts to help bring exposure to our products while minimizing expenses as much as possible.

  1. Cross-marketing partnerships: We will heavily promote all collaborations with the companies and communities we partner with as mentioned above.
  2. Public visibility and influence: We’ve learned through the process of engaging with crypto influencers, it is lengthy, expensive, and that few are respected in the industry. We will be driving this “influence” directly ourselves in an attempt to gain awareness and exposure for Coin. Damon will personally take an active role in public visibility including roadshows, speaking engagements, and influencer marketing to help evangelize the brand.
  3. Community-driven suggestions: We ask and want to help support community-driven recommendations on marketing. These efforts can be grass-roots or significant. Either way we are here to support any activities that we deem will return value back to the token and overall community.

Operations

As stated in the marketing section above, we will remain more risk-averse and cautious in overall operations as well. Our activities will include:

  1. Reduce operating expense: Typically, the highest cost to any company is payroll. This is certainly true for Coin as well. Over the past year, we have grown our team to over 15 full-time employees around the globe. This number does not include contractors and companies we may leverage from time-to-time based on intermittent needs such as consulting, security audits, etc. Transparently, our monthly burn rate is high. Even more so as Coin is currently a company that does not generate revenue. Therefore, we will be reducing our workforce and other operating expenses to ensure sufficient runway.
  2. Focused spending: Due to the liquidity of the token and the current market conditions, we are very aware that any additional liquidity injected from our reserve will immediately be liquidated. Additionally, any funds spent on marketing will not be a long-tail effort nor yield the expected ROI. To that end, we will be cautious in using any funds to provide additional liquidity or marketing. Rather, reserve funds will be used in favor of engineering and building technology to attempt further growth for Coin. To accomplish the goals stated in the sections above (attract investment dollars, acquisition interest, partnerships, etc.) it will require intellectual property. For example, VC’s do not invest in technology companies solely because of their marketing alone. Reserve funds would be better spent ensuring that we create valuable technology and IP that is innovative and works as expected.

What’s Next

Moving forward, we are continuing with additional releases of Coin Wallet V3 and Coin Swap V2. As previously mentioned, these versions will include more features and functionality that includes things such as increased token support, liquidity provider integration, LP routing, blockchain network integration, and more. Operationally, we will work with the community on a closer basis. Every week, we will provide an update on progress, host a meeting with our community liaison group, and host a Telegram chat directly with our leadership team. We are also creating working groups directly with the community in Discord to address specific problems and solicit help from the community in various areas such as marketing, community management, design, and more. We will also be engaging with our community much earlier in the development and QA process to ensure our execution meets broader expectations so that we do not progress down a path that is unfavorable.

The operational items are being put into motion while things continue to progress on the side of engineering. We are going to have to collaborate and come up with creative ideas, take risks, try unconventional methods, and more. Our developers are here to support your proposals that the community believes will yield us the results we need.

Our goal is and has always been to return value to our community, token holders, and overall industry. It’s always been our intent to return this value by both providing disruptive technology and increasing the value of the $COIN token. We stand firm on a foundation and subset of technologies that has been developed that has received very good reviews (as seen here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/coin-wallet/fecfflganphcinpahcklgahckeohalog) and will continue to build upon this foundation to create an impact and provide value to the industry.

We hope that everyone remains safe and knows that we are committed to working hard, resolving our current challenges, and finding a solid path forward. It won’t be easy. It never has been… but we won’t give up. Meanwhile, we welcome all suggestions from the community and look forward to working more closely to collaborate on solutions together.

Below is a short-term roadmap that we would like to provide and execute as we move forward into April in preparation for the release updates for Coin Wallet and Coin Swap.

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Roadmap

Week of February 28th

  • Community Liaison Team Meeting
  • Coin Weekly AMA (Fridays)
  • Coin Weekly Update

Week of March 7th

  • Coin Wallet UI Teaser
  • Community Liaison Team Meeting
  • Coin Weekly AMA (Fridays)
  • Coin Weekly Update
  • Coin Community Polls (Branding, Liquidity, Ideas)

Week of March 14th

  • Community Liaison Team Meeting
  • Coin Weekly AMA (Fridays)
  • Coin Weekly Update
  • Coin Community Polls (Marketing, Ideas)

Week of March 21st

  • Coin Wallet Community Beta
  • Coin Swap UI Teaser
  • Community Liaison Team Meeting
  • Coin Weekly AMA (Fridays)
  • Coin Weekly Update
  • Coin Giveaway

Week of March 28th

  • Coin Wallet and Coin Swap Community Beta
  • Community Liaison Team Meeting
  • Coin Weekly AMA (Fridays)
  • Coin Weekly Update
  • Coin Giveaway
  • Coin Marketing and Community Collaboration

April

  • Coin Wallet V3 Release

Join our Telegram and community conversations or say hi to us at any of the channels below:

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