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SUMMARY: In a nutshell, the good news is that there is an indication of interest from Bittrex Global and Coinbase to list bitcoinR. Talks are ongoing and no agreement has been made. There is a backlog of asset listings at both exchanges, even if an agreement were made immediately (which it will not be), we are told that the time to list would be 90 days+.
bitcoinR (XBR) is only ~160 days old. When Bitcoin (BTC) was four months old, it wasn't listed anywhere and didn't have a market price. It took 547 days from release for Bitcoin to have ANY value, and then it was only worth $0.000008 - $0.08 per share. You can fact check this here:
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/121815/bitcoins-price-history.asp Unfortunately, a number of challenges at present far outweigh the good news. Put bluntly, the listing process has been a massive hassle and the bitcoinR community at large has not yet been helpful by way of growing the community or offering any financial help. For now, we will continue the listing conversations but will need to find a means to pay for the listing, if the interaction with the mining community does not improve, or we cannot find means to pay for the exchange listing we may have no choice but to transition away from the bitcoinR project.
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DETAIL:1. The Bittrex Global listing fee is ~$265k USD, plus we must commit to $10-20k USD per month in "market making" fees to a 3rd party like Jump Trading to ensure liquidity for the first 6 months.
2. THIS IS THE BIGGEST ISSUE WE ARE CURRENTLY FACED WITH: Bittrex Global indicated that they will require bitcoinR to indemnify them for 100% customer losses in case XBR suffers a 51% attack. They require a personal guarantee from the project founders. We haven't seen the contract language yet, but if it's anything along their verbal, it's untenable. It's unthinkable that ANY business person would take on an unquantifiable risk like that.
Any PoW cryptocurrency can be 51% attacked. Period. Even Bitcoin could be 51% attacked if one had enough patience and funding. XBR is more susceptible to this kind of attack due to the accelerated cryptonomics when compared to BTC as well. This is a very scary liability indeed and if it happened as it would incur said liability all at once.
Thus, we may need to find yet another alternative to Bittrex Global for listing pending the analysis of the language in the listing agreement.
3. Coinbase has agreed to continued discussions regarding listing and has requested that we consider custodying our treasury XBR units with them for a fee. This might work surprisingly well and also has the advantage from a transparency perspective; we'd be happy to do this in order to strengthen our relationship with Coinbase.
4. It was explained that the nature of Coinbase is such that they will not be "first to list" a new project, though in some cases, they are happy to follow another AML/KYC compliant exchange if the other exchange lists XBR first. So the way it is now, it looks like Bittrex Global is still the front runner for initial listing if we can figure out the 51% indemnification clause.
5. There is evidently a new hurdle for companies that wish to list with major US exchanges. It is an LLC that functions as an adjudicator of what is or isn't defined as a "security" in the US. It's called "The Crypto Rating Council" (CRC). A project is scored on a scale of 1-5 in order to participate for Bittrex US (in the US vs Global) and Coinbase doesn't require a rating but it helps improve listing priority. We cannot know this because we have no contact with the CRC, we have to trust Coinbase that this is true. More information here:
The cost for the review is unknown, as is their method of prioritizing a project review. They have made clear on their website that we as a developer team cannot put our project forth to review as the "members of the Council" select their own review targets and set their own priorities. We consider the scenario that our rating might be closer to a 1 than a 5 since there was never a token sale or ICO and we are a PoW coin, but this is just a hypothesis.
More detail regarding the CRC here: https://www.cryptoratingcouncil.com/faq 6. The constant onslaught of XBR miners asking inane questions repeatedly like:
"What exchange?" "What is the listing price?" "When will it be listed?" "Is this a scam?" is both irritating and disheartening.
One would think miners would ask
"How can we help XBR list on an exchange?" "How can we help determine a listing price for XBR?" "How can we contribute to the costs to make listing XBR on an exchange quicker?" and
"What actions can we take to further legitimize the bitcoinR project?"
Alas, it seems our community is currently teeming with greed and impatience. If a community member cannot be proactively helpful, please refrain from taking precious time away from the development team for silly, selfish questions or Tweeting the founders / developers.
Again, Bitcoin did not have a market price for 547 days, and then it was <$0.10.7. The founders have funded every nickel of this project personally since 2018 when design started with the exception of a $30k loan to DG from two investors that is now in its repayment period via installments. This repayment was unexpected and ultimately diverts money from deployment into the bitcoinR network, in fact:
$30k could likely have paid for the bulk of the listing fees for XBR on at least one international exchange.8. We were in discussions with an entity who self-described as KuCoin. It wasn't KuCoin, but rather a team of hackers that were emailing us from a cleverly spoofed domain and using man in the middle (MITM) attacks attempting to steal almost $10k in listing fees. We reported the hackers to the real KuCoin team who said they'd happily consider our coin for listing, but did not indicate what the fee would be. This was a massive waste of time and resources
9. When an XBR or BitcoinTalk community member asks if bitcoinR is a "scam" because it has not yet been listed after
four months, it discourages the founding team from wanting to continue to invest time and money into bitcoinR on a monthly basis.
The fact that certain members of the international XBR mining community may need or desire money immediately does not constitute an emergency for the bitcoinR development team, nor does it make bitcoinR a scam. The founders have paid 100% of the expenses associated with bitcoinR and have not sought money from either the global mining community or the global investor community. How could there be a scam if no funding has changed hands or been solicited? There was no ICO. No IPO. No IEO.
We haven't taken a single dollar from a single person with the exception of the loan from the two aforementioned investors who are in the midst of repayment.If this type of scam-accusation-disguised-as-inquiry persists, the founders and development team will further tire and likely become interested in investing their time and money elsewhere.
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ACTION:For all of the above reasons, I suspect one of four paths will be taken with the bitcoinR project:
A. We will sell all or part of the bitcoinR project to a yet-to-be-identified entity that has access to greater monetary resources and can better deal with DETAIL items 1-5 above. This may take the better part of a year or more.OR
B. Accept mining community donations to list XBR with an international exchange and custody the XBR OMO treasury units with a qualified custodian (such as Coinbase). The founders will dissolve the operating company in favor of a non-profit entity controlled by the mining community for the governance of the project in a similar manner to Bitcoin.
Depending upon the interest from the mining community, Option B could happen quickly or not at all.OR
C. We will continue to poll international exchanges to find one that has a good mix of transparency and listing fee value, and the founders will make one last contribution out of pocket to list XBR. This action is not guaranteed, and the founders / developers are under no obligation to do so. Again, community participation to pay the listing fees (Option B) is far preferred and shows good faith from the community.OR
D. Eventually, if there is no interest in acquisition of bitcoinR or donations to further support the listing and operations of bitcoinR, or bitcoinR cannot obtain an economically feasible listing agreement, the project will likely cease to be supported by the existing team and seed nodes will be shut down. Even with these actions taken, bitcoinR may inadvertently live on as a distributed ledger and could find governance and eventual success through a responsible, active community of caring, long-term thinkers, such is the nature of blockchain.Regardless of the path chosen, the success or failure of bitcoinR is and will be determined by the community. -------------
CLOSING:It is now clear to us the wisdom Satoshi displayed in choosing to remain anonymous and by further choosing to disappear from sight as figurehead of Bitcoin: The nature of blockchain is such that it does not need a central governing entity or figurehead. Crypto is, in-fact, better governed by a community of stakeholders who both collectively and individually have something to either gain or lose through strong control of ownership.
The job of a founding team is thankless and cash flow negative in the early days, though for now we will continue our efforts so long as the community evolves into being respectful and helpful.
NS
PS- Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be crypto founders.
