Hello Gembira and thank you for your question. The value proposition for institutions to purchase STACS for its utility is the need to stake STACS in order to participate in the network. Institutions will be able to run nodes and validate transactions. This in itself, by way of staking will lead to a lower velocity coupled with high demand due to the incentives gained by staking.

Also, please see this message from the GBX CEO, Kurt Looyens. "Dynamics of institutional sign up are clearly (and logically) different from our retail set up. The process takes longer and has a lot more depth. Having said that, we are making progress. All developments on the side of GSX and the STACS protocol are an obvious support. Can't say much concrete, but we are making things happen ... step by step."

If you haven't already, join us on Telegram: https://t.me/GBXCommunity 

Hey everyone, please find below the latest update from Vali, as shared with everyone in the RED community group on telegram. You can also join the group, at the following link: https://t.me/RestartEnergy


Hello, how is everyone?

I thought it's about time i come with an update . A lot is going on, on our side,
These last weeks have been pretty full for us.
With our payment provider we underwent trough a full financial / billing audit, that required us to do quite a lot of changes on the way that we take care of the payments/billing and other things like that, being fully compliant it's pretty exhaustive i might say, but we are and we know for sure that our users data is safe, the requirements made us do some changes in our terms and conditions, our policies and our flows.
At the same time  we  crushed a lot of bugs, we discovered several others, we did UI/UX cleanup on the apps, everything looks much better now from our point of view, the mobile app is undergoing a full refactor.

Another great news, is that we are going to change the actual exchange, but with the new updates from swazm, we're going to have automatic order matching (yep, fully decentralized, how cool is that?), a new ui, and the simple exchange will hook automatically in order  to do live  shapeshifting. (coming next  week with screens).

A lot of you are asking is may still happening, well yes, we already encountered delays, but  these things happen(it's not always us), sometimes you need to account for them, but we are still on schedule for next week, if we  encounter more delays that might come from requirements/legal reasons, at the very begining of June we're still launching, we're still undergoing changes and testing at the same time, please keep in mind that we are  expecting  thousands of users and we need to have everything working perfectly, imagine that each and everyone of the users need to go trough kyc, so it will get pretty crowded, fast and we need to be ready.

We want to congratulate our dev Vlad who has been with us  from the very begining for being a father to a healthy baby boy!.
We also want to thank to our beta testers, and also our community for being a part of this amazing project.

Bellow attaching this weeks sprint report !
----------
Node
Added auxiliary method to pass access token in requests for mobile file access.

Web
Usability
Filters on tradeview section were updated visually and are responsive on all devices
Consumer Wizard, Producer Wizard, Trader Wizard now have default values selected for Country, City and Supplier
Contact form was added on the bottom of the website on the landing page

UI/UX

Design improvements
Redesign Production Point page
Redesign Consumption Point
Redesigned Exchange page
Redesigned Welcome page for traders
Added labels in producer dashboard, consumer dashboard, offers, subscriptions, consumer for the ability to be translated.
   
Multi-language
Translation for labels in Support section
Terms and Conditions updates and language translations
Producer Terms and Conditions updates and languages translation
Consumer Terms and Conditions updates and languages translation
Trader Terms and Conditions updates and languages translation
Privacy Policy updates and languages translation
Cookie Policy updates and languages translation


New functionalities
Implemented the Buy MWAT page
Market label from the sidebar in Dashboard is no longer available, there are now 2 types of Exchange, simple which is available for Producers, Consumers and Prosumers, and traders have also access to the advanced exchange

Bug fixes
Fixed Production Point flow bugfixes
Fixed Consumer Wizard flow bugfixes
Fixed price validation when adding an offer
Fixed overlapping loaders
Fixed phone number country selection on Make a Payment
Fixed a bug where you would get redirected to login instead of enter pin screen if your token access expired
Fixed a bug which resulted in the selected language not being saved




Mobile


[refactor]: add eslint
[refactor]: fix eslint errors
[refactor]: Text, Picker components
[refactor]: Add consumption point and consumption point screens now use mobx

New functionalities
Created purchase page (MWAT / RON)
Implemented functionalities for the ‘More page’: Share, Community, Help, profile, Support.

Vali, [24.05.19 20:59]
UI/UX
Changed share options for pending trader

Design improvements
Changes to the picker to allow default values (eg. Country, City, Supplier pickers)
Small design changes to Pending trader page
Replaced the text font in the entire application with the one from the design
Removed redundant “Log in to Restart Energy portal to activate” functionality from the Add Consumption Point flow when the user is already a Restart Energy client



Bug fixes
Linked line chart dashboard data
Fixed wallet address crashes
Linked ‘Invalid tarder’ page
Fixed multiple bugs resulted from mobx migration
Fix transfer crash

In order to use the pull payment protocol, users will need PMA Tokens. The only means of transfer of value for the pull payment protocol will always be in PMA. Learn more on the website here https://pumapay.io/#/token and Whitepaper (Pages 9 and 25): https://pumapay.io/docs/pumapay_whitepaper.pdf

Dear Community,

#HOW is back, with CEO Kurt Looyens available in the Telegram community today to answer questions and talk all things GBX and crypto.

Join us for some croissants and a chat 😋

Dear Community,

The GBX Knowledge Pro Quiz: Quick fire round will commence today at 12pm UTC in the GBX Telegram Group. Just before this we will begin to tag the participants in the Telegram community channel, this will allow us to make sure that everyone is present.

At the beginning, we will start by muting the channel and community members will not be able to post anything during this time.

🥇1st place Quick Fire round

The 1st place contenders @amoc2018, @majesticcrypto1 @antoinestevers will be asked a question and 60 seconds after the question has been posted the channel will be un-muted. The first of the three participants to post the correct answer will be the winner of the round.

The channel will then be muted again!

🥈2nd place Quick Fire round:

The 2nd place contenders @Haz_D, @Tanyhed and @boncryp will be asked a question and 60 seconds after the question has been posted the channel will be un-muted. The first of the three participants to post the correct answer will be the winner of the round.

The channel will then be muted again!

🥉3rd place Quick Fire round:

The 3rd place contenders @Sozmax, @uyccccc and @Badroc will be asked a question and 60 seconds after the question has been posted the channel will be un-muted. The first of the three participants to post the correct answer will be the winner of the round.

Good luck to you all!! 🏆

Why would you say that? The first three integrations with early adopters are underway. They are in the final stages of onboarding and testing using the Business Console to set up their crypto billing models. In addition, IMLive has been accepting PMA tokens since the launch of V1.0 in May, 2018

PumaPay will invest in promoting the acceptability and usability of the PumaPay Protocol and the PMA tokens. They are dedicating efforts for increasing the demand for the token via usability, by bringing in more early adopters who will in return bring in their users which will grow the ecosystem where the PMA token is the only means of value transfer. However, the team do not have control over the price of the token and its price will only be determined by supply and demand forces in the markets.

Hey everyone, Vali just posted his Friday update, please read it bellow and see what's been happening since the last update:

Good evening everyone, I am sorry for the late update, but unfortunately we've been caught up with several things.
 I will try to give a high level update on the progress we've made so far because the notes will be published in a separate thread and the progress can be also viewed on our git.
 
First of all I want to stress out that going for a payment provider for a project that had an ico and deals with crypto is not an easy job, 90% percent of them just say no when they even hear the word blockchain, for the other ones you need to.prove how you do kyc/aml who's the company who are the owners what is the usage and what are the terms and conditions your policies and the process is very time consuming, but we managed to get over that, we are in our last steps into the partnership.

We're working round the clock and checking the producers/consumers that are going to be with us for the beginning.

We've already audited internally our contracts several times, and as we add more and more features to them they're going to be audited from an external.company as well.

Regarding the security, we've seen several opinions around here about how we should implement funds transfering and different kind of issues, we want to assure everyone that we take security very seriously, we ONLY use cold wallets and we sign on the fly only on a specific chain (swazm) so that the funds are always secured, and can't be withdrawn even if the system is compromised, more details will follow next week in an article.

Last but not least, MAY IS HAPPENING. But please try to understand that we are doers not talkers , so If an update does not come at 2 pm in a Tuesday that doesn't mean that we are lying, it means that we're just busy making thing happening.

Since December RED has developed his own decentralized exchange/ platform/ kyc module/ support module/ security hardware/ infrastructure/ smart meters. So even if it looks small I can assure you it's not, we are a team that has expertise in software/business/energy, you can scout us on LinkedIn, backgrounds from big companies like Microsoft/Ubisoft/Philips , our developers are constantly reading the development/main channels, and taking every opinion in consideration, most of them.left the office just a few hours ago.

Thank you everyone, we're going to keep you updated, the exact date for the launxh, depends on 3'rd parties and do not want to make promises that I can't.assume.

Have a great weekend everyone.

Thank you for the feedback, judaspriest!