Here our latest update written by Rob. A lot to cover and therefore quite extensive - well worth a read!
G’day Cent’urions!So February is a short month but it’s been a busy and productive one for the Incent team,and I wanted to take a moment to bring you all up to date.
StrategyI want to start by bringing you all right into the tent with respect to our Strategy, as I think it isinteresting in its own right and it will also help to frame the remainder of this update in context. So, here it is in a picture...
The first thing I want you to notice is the circle on the far right, which recognises that growth of Incent’s market capitalisation is our grand strategic objective. Put another way, we fully recognise that if the market capitalisation of Incent (the currency) is growing, we must be getting the supporting components of our business right. Put yet another way, yours and our aims remain completely aligned. So, with this said, working left of this objective, you will note that from our perspective, growing Incent’s market capitalisation requires us to focus on two subordinate activities, commercial and market operations, which are discrete but mutually supporting. Finally, both require and benefit from a strong organisational infrastructure. This presents us with specific Lines of Effort (LoE), all of which we have been advancing over the last month.
Commercial OperationsLet’s kick off with an update on the Commercial Ops LOE, which right now centres on development of the core commercial product and the crypto-specific technologies that support and augment it.
With respect to our core product, Hawky’s team are a good way through the Consumer Appbuild and Kyle is advancing our Operations Management App, which is the component which will be released and documented on a re-orientated website (due to launch in March), in order that developers can swiftly implement third party integrations. As I’ve mentioned before the core product will be rolled out to online merchants that operate the Magento platform in the first instance, and we’re about to commence work on this Plugin. This leaves the Crypto Integration component, which had required us to make a decision on which platform we will be settling through. You’ll be pleased to learn that this decision has now been made and we are forging ahead with the integration engine. More on this later...
In the meantime, we’ve kept our foot down with respect to commercial operations in the crypto-space. I’m hoping that exposure to our strategy underlines the logic of pursuing implementations in the crypto-space as well as mainstream commerce. In our view, any project that can be leveraged to support market demand for Incent makes huge sense - so long as it evolves core development in the process. This was our rationale for the ICOTechside-project, the next big implementation of which will be the MobileGo ICO, which announced earlier this month.
Your own opinions may differ but we believe that MobileGo has the potential to be a big raise - particularly since we have made it possible for them to pitch to both Waves and Ethereum communities on the promise of a cross-blockchain token. Delivering on this promise has required us to build some unique IP that we have named BlockSwap, which allows any listed token to be swapped instantly between blockchains, without compromising total supply.
The commercial implications of these developments is significant near term and enduring demand for Incent, which will be baked into both MobileGo’s ICO deposit technology and BlockSwap. More generally, we feel that both ICOTech and Blockswap have the potential to drive more and more interest and activity to Waves and Sasha (CEO Waves) agrees, which is likely to drive a further deepening of our strategic relationship as we move forward.
In the meantime, we have a prototype of BlockSwap live
here, where those of you with IncentCoffee tokens can test the technology.
Market OperationsThe first stage of this LoE required us to make Incent tradeable and those of you watching closely will know that we put our foot down on exchange integration over the last month, listing on Liqui, Cryptopia and Tidex so far with Livecoin (which has a bigger volume than Bittrex) to follow soon. So far we have been pleasantly surprised with trading volume on Cryptopia, and the way price is trending, particularly since we are yet to provide any liquidity of our own or stimulate demand through commercial operations. This will change next month as we roll out our Market Making operation.
And where this is concerned I want to let you know that we have decided to centre our operations on the Tidex exchange. This may seem odd in the light of trading volume to date but there are several reasons supporting this decision, including: the absence of trading fees, Tidex’s strategic proximity to Waves, the prospect of DEX integration and the ability to settle using Waves as a counterparty currency. We also recognise that our market making operations will draw volume onto a platform which is strategically important for Waves.
With respect to the detail, we are developing a trading bot that will lay a configurable lattice over the Incent market, deploying Incent and counterparty currencies to provide market depth and sufficient liquidity to assure settlement at knowable values. In concept, the IncentBot has the potential to generate a profit but the proof of this pudding will be in theeating. In any case, our intention is to roll this out as soon as we can, in order that we can understand and optimise it, in advance of the commercial launch of our core product in Q2. Assuming we can get IncentBot playing nicely, we’ll open-source the code so that y’all can see how it works and run it for yourselves in ours or other markets if you wish.
In all of this I want to make it absolutely clear that our Market Operations are not aimed at profiting from our position at the centre of the Incent ecosystem but rather, enabling that ecosystem to function in a deep and liquid market. If we get this right consumer demand for Incent, driven through merchant partner integrations, will drive price North.
OrganisationA flick back to our Strategy diagram will confirm our intention to underpin our product and operations with a robust organisation. On this front we spent February reestablishing as an Australian entity and sorting out our banking. As I have written before, we regard the establishment and maintenance of blue-ribband governance and compliance standards and credentials that doing so will secure - as essential to securing business at the top end of town. To this end we have retained the services of a Compliance professional to lead on this work and represent our interests with the Australian Digital Currency Commerce Association(ADCCA) and the legal entities we retain in support of this effort.
We are also in the midst of an internal security audit, the objective of which is to ensure that we fully understand and mitigate the vulnerabilities and attack vectors that we face.
Finally...I’d like to close by re-assuring you that in amongst all this heavy lifting, business development continues - ably led by our COO Richard Farrelly - with active conversations ongoing at all commercial tiers. And this is important because while we appreciate that we will likely need to have demonstrated commercial credibility at the bottom end of town before anyone at the top signs on the dotted line, engaging corporates and the agencies that support them can never start early enough and on this front, I can assure you that interest in what we are doing is only building.
Watch this space...
On! On!Rob Wilson
CEO
Incent Loyalty PTY Ltd
