Smart contracts (origins in 80s, 90s vs. 2013 ETH and 2020s Cardano)
We had a pretty interesting product update. We laughed, we cried, we all learned a little bit. Two and a half hours lots of stuff and I hope this gives you guys a good window into all the things that are happening. There's an enormous amount of complexity in Cardano and Goguen is no different. In fact that one slide showing all the interlocking dependencies and the moving pieces for it and just the sheer volume of things that are going on is, is an indication of not only the quality of the team but also the commercial reality of being a smart contract platform. In 2020 when I co-founded Ethereum our reference material was paper. We looked at things that Nick Szabo and people from the 1990s and 1980s wrote about and whether you were a Ricardian contract fan or you had programmed in Eiffel or you understood things like FpML basically it was an open field which gave us kind of a freedom to just do whatever we wanted to do but it also didn't give us a commercial reality of who's going to buy it? Who's going to use it? What do you need to do? The expectations in 2020 are vastly different from the expectations in 2013 and the reality is that there are massive deficits with Ethereum as designed today which is why Tezos exists and Algorand exists and why ETH2 is being constructed . It's why there are so many different players from Polkadot and others on down who have deep and detailed opinions about the things we need to do. If the ICO revolution hadn't happened, there was no notion of an ERC20 token and we were in a just different world.
We didn't have DeFi, any of these things and now in 2020 if you are to be competitive and build great things and actually invite real use and utility at a scale of millions and billions of people or government or Fortune 500 you need to have real good answers about a lot of different threats and things. For example, Marlowe, what it does is it leverages 20 years of history from domain experts like Willi Brammertz and over 30 years of history in domain-specific language (DSL) design from professor Simon Thompson and his team and it puts them together. It says for the first time ever we're going to have semantical clarity between the entrepreneur, the developer, the writer and the financial services infrastructure whether that be the banker, the insurance agent, the exchange, whoever that might be. Up until the totality of human history till today we have never had that semantical clarity. All four of those actors speak different languages and what we're doing with Marlowe as a DSL is an example of how you can unify and create a common language and experience between all of them today.
Marlowe, DSL, Glow, Plutus, IELE
Right now, you guys can go to the Marlowe playground and you can start using it and start building things and start having that semantical clarity and work with us and over a period of six months or so that will continue to evolve. Templates will evolve, applications will be constructed and those applications will work their way into Cardano applications and eventually they'll become cross-platform and work on things like (Hyperledger) fabric and other such things as we see industry and commercial adoption but it requires a starting point and Marlowe has evolved over a four year period through the hard labors of so many people to actually give us a great starting point. You can visually look at contracts and talk about their design. You can write them in JavaScript, you can write them in the Marlowe programming language. There's a Haskell side to things and you can see the power of this approach because of its design. You can prove things are correct, you can use theory that has existed for over 40 years like SAT solvers and reachability to actually show that you're not going to have a parity bug and that's just one example of one DSL of which many more will come. The point of DSLs is to give clarity to people in the industry. For example if we get into the health business and we start talking about medical records that will become a DSL to broker their movement and that same clarity and semantical unification will occur between doctors and hospitals, patients, governments, regulators and business professionals and they will now have a common language. So, Marlowe is an entry point and it's an example of how to build a DSL and evolve a DSL and bring the right people to the table.
When we look to things like Glow, from MuKn, this is an example of a team that's highly motivated and intrinsically across blockchain. When we look to the future and we say what happens when Bitcoin gets smart contracts? What happens when ETH2 comes out? What happens when people want to build cross-blockchain applications? Wouldn't it be nice to have a unification language and that's what Glow is basically all about. By strategic investments in that ecosystem, what Glow does for us is it ensures that we won't be left behind that Cardano has that and all Cardano infrastructure can benefit from that and Glow in turn will benefit from its embedding in our ecosystem. More users, more technology and ultimately because Cardano's the best. If you deploy in that direction it's the best experience. When you look to Plutus, Plutus is the unification language, it's the conductor of the orchestra and it pulls all of these things together and there were a lot of design requirements with Plutus that were quite hard from a theory viewpoint. We really cared a lot about resource determinism. We wanted to make sure that it was always predictable or at least as predictable as it can be to know how much it costs to do things because at the end of the day this is not a science experiment. These are not toys back in 2013. We had the luxury with Ethereum of just seeing what happened and the market makes strategic investments and they have to know how much their operating cost is going to be for their business model. We designed Plutus so that it would be one of the best programming languages on a long arc agenda of being a very practical on and off chain language to unify all the Cardano ecosystem. There are many objects in the ecosystem to operate, manipulate, instruments of value like native assets, identity, smart contracts onto themselves, DAOs, off chain infrastructure and you need a conductor that's capable of living in between all of these things and you need certainty that the code you're writing is going to work.
This is why we based it on an ecosystem that has 35 years of history and we as a company have invested millions of dollars in that ecosystem to modernize it and bring it into the 21st century especially for things like Windows support and working with partners like Tweag WebAssembly support, working on projects like compilation to JavaScript so that we can share that's there and our commitment is going to continue beyond that we are a founding member of the Haskell foundation working with Simon Peyton Jones and we're going to ensure that Haskell has compilation to ARM and that all of the technology that's required to keep that language competitive and actually make the language even more competitive will happen. It's very nice that Plutus is deeply ingrained in that ecosystem and that makes it a perfect conductor language. In the coming months we're going to talk a lot more about our relationship decay in IELE. If you live in the imperative object-oriented world and you want to do things a bit differently than the way things are done in the Haskell functional world then it makes sense to have an option that has the same principles as us which is why we reached out to Grigore years ago and established a commercial relationship with him. It's been the privilege of my career finding a way to resurrect that relationship so in the coming months we're going to talk a lot about how IELE fits into the Cardano ecosystem and the value it's going to bring in addition to the value of Marlowe, Glow, and Plutus.
Native assets
One of the single most important things about all of this is the native asset standard. One of the things we did not anticipate when we created Ethereum is just how pervasive the user's ability to issue an asset would be. We figured this would be an important thing, it's why we put it on a T-shirt back in the Miami conference in January of 2014 and we realized that from the color coin's project in the master coin project and one of the most important things is that we have the ability to issue not just a utility token but non-functional assets, security tokens and a litany of other instruments that hold value. Some ephemeral, some permanent, some with flexible monetary policies, some with fixed monetary policies, some from a central issuer, some from a decentralized issuer, some managed by a foundation, some managed by the community, some managed by fixed code that's immutable and the point of the native asset standard in the ERC20 converter is to establish a co-evolution of the technology and the commercialization of the technology. What we've been doing with ERC20 converter is using that as a way to create a conversation with those who want to migrate or build on Cardano and thinking through how are we going to create practical standards with our native assets. We already have enormous advantages with this standard over Ethereum. In particular the fact that your assets you issue on Cardano are treated the way that ADA is treated whereas in Ethereum you're a second-class citizen or ETH is treated differently from smart contracts. This first class citizen approach means that your assets will have the same governance access layer, to portfolio access and infrastructure that ADA itself has. Easier listing experiences, easier time with hardware wallets, easier time with wallet software. In general better user experience, faster transactions, lower transaction costs and then eventually for higher value tokens even the possibility of paying transaction fees over the long term in the native asset itself as if you were your own cryptocurrency.
Goguen rollout
You just simply cannot do this with the design of Ethereum and Ethereum 2. It's a huge advantage we have in our ecosystem and it's one that will become more pervasive over time now Goguen has already started. As a launch agenda the very first update to enable some Goguen era functionality was the metadata standard which meant that you could go from just moving ADA around to actually a whole litany of applications in the identity space and in the metadata space some of which we're aggressively negotiating on in commercial deals which we'll announce at a later date. The rollout of Goguen in terms of the system as we mentioned in the presentation will be principally done for the first iteration over a series of three hard fork combinator (HFC) events. The first of which is beginning this year in November December time frame and that's going to lay a lot of the foundations that will enable us to get to the second hard fork combinator event which will occur in Q1 of next year and we'll announce that specific date likely at the next product update and then the third one will happen shortly thereafter. They have to be spaced this way because it's just simply too cumbersome on our developers and also our partners such as wallet infrastructure and exchanges to try to do too much too quickly and furthermore there's an enormous amount of work as you've noticed on that slide to roll out Goguen. You have to do two things at once, you have to deploy the infrastructure but then you also have to populate the infrastructure and what's nice about the way that we've done things as you now see with the Marlowe playground the population of that infrastructure is occurring now today and with the ERC20 converter and the mint test net that's coming.
That's going to occur in November which means that that gives people time to start building and playing on our ecosystem in a safe sandbox so that when they deploy it to the mainnet they do it right the first time and they don't make an existential failure as we have seen with the DeFi space because at the end of the day once you go live you have a huge adversarial surface and everybody in the world is going to try to break the things you've done. It's very important that you do it right which means that you need time as a commercial partner and an application deployer to do it correctly. Parts of Goguen are indeed shipping this year, some have already shipped and we'll have another HFC event at the end of next month or early in December and throughout the first quarter of next year and likely the second quarter will complete the other two HFC events which will roll out full support for native assets, extended UTxO, the Plutus infrastructure and the Marlowe infrastructure. In the meantime we're also working on strategies about how we can ensure best integration of Glow and IELE into the Cardano ecosystem and as you've noticed there are three parallel teams that are working very hard. The Shelley team continues to upgrade the Shelley experience. Just today we've received a lot of concerns over for example the state pool ranking in Daedalus. Let me be very clear about something. There's no problem with the ranking software, the problem is the k parameter. It needs to be increased and the fact that things are getting grayed out is an indication that the ranking parameter is actually working right for the first time. So, k needs to go up but there are consequences of that and we need to improve the software to reflect those consequences but it is my goal to get k to 1000 before ideally d hits 0 because we really do want to have over a 1000 well-functioning stake pools but by no means is that the end of the story.
Improvements + project Catalyst
We need partial delegation and delegation portfolios. We need means for stake pool operators to communicate effectively and efficiently with those who delegate to them. We need improvements in SMASH. We need an identity center, we need a litany of improvements to Daedalus itself. Right now, today, there are more than four companies working full-time at doing just these things in addition to the Goguen updates that are occurring right now. That research thread and that development thread will continue. We've already seen seven CIPs including CIPs related to the reward function. We take them very seriously, we review them and there's enormous amount of discussion about how to create a fair and balanced system and we appreciate this feedback. It's a process and we ask for patience and we also remind people that we launched Shelley just at the end of July and despite that the ecosystem has more than doubled in size and it's been growing at an incredible pace and it's only going to continue and we're only going to see our best days ahead of us. Good things are coming down the pipe and it's becoming a much more holistic ecosystem from in performance improvements, to usability improvements, to better overall software for everyone.
There's no greater example of that than what we've been able to accomplish in the last three months for the exchanges in general. We're really proud of what we've done with the Adrestia stack and we're really proud of working with great partners like Binance and Bittrex throughout the last few months and we've had some certain challenges there but as a result of overcoming those challenges we have left behind an incredible enterprise grade listening experience that continues to get faster, continues to get higher quality and is secure and reliable 24 hours a day, seven days a week and we'll continue investing heavily to ensure that that only gets better for all of those partners whether they be an external wallet or their infrastructure like an exchange operator. We've had a lot of wins also on the governance side with the Voltaire Catalyst project. We have seen huge wins in participation going from small focus groups to now over 3500 people every single day coming into cardano.ideascale.com competing for 2250000 worth of ADA with fund2. That's just the beginning and every six to eight weeks that's going to increase in scale, in terms of the money and people, the quality... When we ask what is our developer acquisition strategy that's a major part of it because people know that there's money to be made in building on Cardano and that you have the right incentives to go realize your dreams and add value so just as these frameworks like the Marlowe playground and the Plutus playground and other such things like Glow come online and IELE come online the ability to build will be matched by the ability to discuss what to build and fund? What to build through a community driven process that includes greater and greater inclusivity. For example the next fund will include a voting center built right into Daedalus in addition to the cell phone application that we've already launched to vote and we will continue refining that experience relentlessly that's one of our fastest moving teams and I will remind you we are doing this in parallel to the Shelley workstream and the Goguen workstream that we showed you guys today. Finally there's Basho, not the next hard fork combinator event but HFC#3 which we anticipate in Q1 2021.
Sidechains, Hydra
I would like to include a sidechain protocol that allows the movement of value between independent systems through some form of blocking mechanism. We are currently examining and designing a protocol that we think fits very nicely into the way that our system works with mild modifications to the ledger rules. If that and should this be successful then that helps with one of the pillars of Basho interoperability and then the other pillar is scalability. Rob is hard at work working with technical architects and scaling up a team to start de-risking the Hydra protocol and others are hard at work evolving the science behind the Hydra protocol. We have seen great progress on all fronts to de-risk Hydra's roll-out and what's so beautiful about Hydra is it is our belief that the majority if not all of Hydra can be implemented in Plutus. As Plutus rolls out we have a natural constituency to run this infrastructure. The stake pool operators and we have a natural way without an HFC event or special accommodation of rolling out Hydra.
It's not really needed at this level of scaling capacity. We have an enormous throughput already 10 times greater than Ethereum as it is today and room to make it a hundred times greater than what Ethereum is today without Hydra. However as we de-risk this infrastructure solidify the protocols and get out all the kinks. What's so beautiful about it is that we will be able to when the time comes the community can roll out multiple implementations of Hydra so that there is diversity and there will be a natural group of actors to run those channels as we have seen for example with the Bolt spec and the Lightning ecosystem on Bitcoin. The contrasting difference between Lightning and Bitcoin and Hydra and extended UTxO and Cardano is we designed Cardano for Hydra.
Bitcoin was not designed for Lightning and as a consequence it's always more difficult for them to try to make meaningful progress whereas us there's no friction in that relationship. It just fits very nicely through so the roadmap is coming together and Cardano 2020 has definitely started to evolve into quite a mature ecosystem and what's really exciting is we're going from an ecosystem of potential to one of reality and instead of asking what could we do we're showing people what has been done and people are actually doing things every day.
Our commercial team is inundated with requests for coordination and cooperation and deployment. I get numerous emails every single day, well intended to very serious about people wanting to build on the platform and we're really excited about that. We're going to keep this steady systematic relentless march as you saw with the enormity of the news today. It's business as usual and it'll be exactly the same in November only there'll be more and every month. The velocity increases, we burn down the remaining story points to get these things done and things are happening very quickly and we just keep releasing and releasing and releasing and it's a very different time than it was even six months ago.
Community rules
What's so reassuring is we continue to have the best community in all the cryptocurrency space. It's the final point but it's one that I'm most proud of. You see people get to decide where they want to live, what infrastructure they want to deploy, on who they want to work with and when you have a welcoming warm and friendly community that is constructive and productive and their job is to help you get to where you need to go you want to work with those people. When you have a destructive or toxic community that's exclusive hierarchical and not invented here in their mentality people don't want to work with that community. Money can't buy that. I don't care if you have a bank account with four billion dollars or you're a central bank. You can't buy character and you can't buy culture, you have to make it and you have to earn it and if we've accomplished anything over these last five years from the 90 papers now and the million plus lines of code and the incredible releases that have happened and continue to happen we accomplished the greatest thing of all: we built a community to rival that of bitcoin's. I believe with that community we can realize the dream in the coming years of Cardano becoming the financial operating system.
For those who don't have one and giving open prayer and free economic identity to those who need it I am astounded by just how easy it is to roll these things out. They're super hard and complex under the hood but they just feel right and fit right and all the pieces are starting to come together in just the right way and I'm astounded by the fact that when we roll them out community members are there to receive them and take them to the next level.
Thank you all for attending the product update at the end of the month. This was a real good one, just as good as the Shelley one and we are now in the Goguen era with the first HFC event coming in the end of November and we're going to keep pushing them out. Every single one of them will add more capabilities and I encourage everyone to check out the Marlowe playground start building with it. Today things are happening really fast when the mint comes online at the end of November. Start playing around with that, start talking about the multi-token standard. If you're interested in a project our commercial division divisions always' open and you're going to see more and more progress from all entities in this ecosystem and some potentially major announcements before you can think it. Thanks guys it was a good day and thanks to the entire team that made all this happen I'm real proud of all of you.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5wADba8kCw

Let's first talk about MESH technology:
It works in a decentralized manner relaying messages to other nodes without a central coordinating server or node. So for example a phone could send a message offline and it would get bounced between other phones to it's final destination.
Blockmesh has patented technology, a released app as well as they just announced Mr Shrem from the original Bitcoin foundation on the board. They have pretty hard working team. They said they will start marketing soon.
​
What is BlockMesh
BlockMesh’s vision is to create the world's first decentralized, cost-free communications network.
All data sent through our network will be absolutely cost-free. Our goal is to become the leaders in mesh technology by reinvesting in the technology and creating a platform where any developer can take advantage of our network with our simple open source API.
​
BlockMesh platform has three major products
Mesh Dev
MeshDev is a platform built for developers which will enable them to add the mesh networking infrastructure we’ve developed to their current apps/platforms. Thus enabling cost-free data transfeapp use for their users.
Mesh Ex
MeshEX are our custom Wi-Fi routers which users will be able to install in their homes or offices. They will be rewarded with Mesh Tokens for each MB of data that passes through their router. This not only extends the mesh network, but pays its owner to use it.
Mesh Ad
MeshAD is a revolutionary take on real-world advertising. Knowing what your audience is interested in, and what they engage with is of utmost importance. Our advertising platform will offer partners the most targeted geo-located and demographic insights ever acquired.
​
Their new chat app is LIVE
https://twitter.com/blockmesh_io/status/1261029954919313410
​
They have patents on their HARDWARE, they are integrating their hardware ALREADY called Mesh Extender Key Ring
BlockMesh will compete globally for the peer-to-peer offline communications and remittance market. We’re building a network to support the internet of things in a race for network coverage (predicted that will connect 50 billion IOT devices by 2020.)
The MESH Extender (Experimental Stage technology) will extend the mesh network reach of your mobile device. Our initial focus for the Mesh Extenders (MeshEx) will be on communication as it’ll allow us to grow an organic, supported network.
BlockMesh is focused on delivering free communication to the undeserved and will incentive's the network with BMH tokens. We believe this approach will fast track mass deployment of devices that will rival existing platforms competing for this market segment.
For more details:
https://blockmesh.io/Hardware.php
​
Binance is trying VERY hard to break into the African market (1.2 BILLION PEOPLE). They are trying to convert the “Unbanked” into crypto users. What better way than to offer a South African (hotspot for crypto) cryptocurrency? I think Boshmesh has better chance to hit african market.
​
Advisors:
Mike Weetman Former CFO of Yahoo and DreamWorks USA
Charlie Shrem - Crypto well known figure
Few more you can find in their website
​
I think this project defiantly have chance to moonshot. Just sitting at $50K marketcap.
This project has potential to reach 50-100 marketcap in bull run easily which is 1000-2000X from now
5M marketcap would puts us 100X in short term
500k marketcap would put us 10X now??
Website: https://blockmesh.io/Faq.php
Twitter: https://twitter.com/blockmesh_io
Hardware: https://blockmesh.io/Hardware.php

Hi Bitcoiners!
I’m back with the 30th monthly Bitcoin news recap.
For those unfamiliar, each day I pick out the most popularelevant/interesting stories in Bitcoin and save them. At the end of the month I release them in one batch, to give you a quick (but not necessarily the best) overview of what happened in bitcoin over the past month.
You can see recaps of the previous months on Bitcoinsnippets.com
A recap of Bitcoin in May 2019
Adoption

• A local convenience store accepting bitcoin (1 Jun)
  
• The ₿ symbol is now available on iOS, Android and Microsoft services (4 Jun)
  
• Wasabi Wallet does its first ever 100 person CoinJoin (6 Jun)
  
• Asking shops to accept bitcoins when buying online (10 Jun)
  
• South Korea gets its first bitcoin ATM (13 Jun)
  
• Bitcoin passes 1 million daily active addresses again, like in November 2017 (15 Jun)
  
• A bitcoin update from Venezuela (17 Jun)
  
• A gas station that accepts bitcoin (21 Jun)
  
• Someone receives a letter from their 88 year old father who started investing a few years earlier (25 Jun)
  
• Buying coffee through the Lightning Network at a Bitcoin conference (29 Jun)
  

Development

• Watchtowers are coming with the next big release for the Lightning Network (11 Jun)
  
• Someone who managed a bounty wallet dedicated to a scalability concept from 2012 is offering the 5.725 btc to a new scalability project (12 Jun)
  
• Lightning Labs’ non-custodial Lightning mobile app is now on mainnet (19 Jun)
  
• An overview of potential upcoming updates to Bitcoin’s consensus rules (21 Jun)
  
• Lightning Labs announces Loop In, a service that helps manage Lightning Channels (26 Jun)
  
• A list of technical improvements coming to the Lightning Network (28 Jun)
  

Security

• An overview of 9 easy ways to lose your cryptocurrency with a bonus 10th in the comments (5 Jun)
  
• A storage socket as an idea to store a physical bitcoin wallet (8 Jun)
  
• A discussion on what someone who lost access to their 9.5 bitcoins from years ago can do (11 Jun)
  
• A reminder to not store your bitcoins on any exchange (14 Jun)
  
• A warning against a support number scam for Ledger hardware wallets (14 Jun)
  
• Irish cryptocurrency exchange Bitsane exit scams its self-proclaimed 246k users (28 Jun)
  

Mining

• A reminder of a report on how 74$ of Bitcoin mining is powered by renewable energy (9 Jun)
  
• The block reward is halving again in under a year (12 Jun)
  
• A reminder that cloud mining ventures are scams (16 Jun)
  
• Bitcoin’s hashrate hits another all-time high (20 Jun)
  

Business

• Samourai Wallet receives $100k in funding (3 Jun)
  
• HodlHodl exchange enables users to buy and sell bitcoin directly from their Lightning Network wallets (5 Jun)
  
• Bitcoin Suisse ads on Zurch’s airport (11 Jun)
  
• Bitrefill raises $2M in funding to grow its team and advance its Lightning Network services (13 Jun)
  
• Bakkt will initiate user acceptance testing for its bitcoin futures in July (13 Jun)
  
• People are concerned about the ethics, censorship resistance, centralization and privacy of Facebook’s Libra project (14 Jun)
  
• Coinbase becomes one of the participants in Facebook’s Libra project (22 Jun)
  
• CashApp by Square enables bitcoin deposits (25 Jun)
  

Research

• goTenna releases a whitepaper for mobile mesh network bitcoin payments (11 Jun)
  
• Ruben Somsen explains his research on Statechains, a novel layer two protocol (16 Jun)
  

Education

• A livestream of day 1 from the Bitcoin lightning network hack day in Munich (1 Jun)
  
• A livestream of day 2 from the Bitcoin lightning network hack day in Munich (2 Jun)
  
• Setting up Lightning network channels could be an investment for the future (3 Jun)
  
• Alternatives to LocalBitcoins to buy Bitcoin privately (5 Jun)
  
• Andreas Antonopoulos on Bitcoin as the “email” of the Internet of Money (11 Jun)
  
• Carl Dong explains the Bitcoin build system security (12 Jun)
  
• A simple explainer of Erlay, a performance improvement to the Bitcoin network that reduces node traffic (16 Jun)
  
• This week’s Donald Duck children magazine in the Netherlands is about Bitcoin (21 Jun)
  
• People discuss capital gains tax on bitcoin investments and trading (21 Jun)
  
• A discussion on how many people don’t invest in Bitcoin, but use it to store their savings (24 Jun)
  
• An overview of useful information for newcomers to Bitcoin (25 Jun)
  
• A reminder of Andreas Antonopoulos testimony for the Canadian Senate in 2014 (26 Jun)
  
• Edward Snowden speaks about privacy at a Bitcoin conference (27 Jun)
  
• A reminder that a Bitcoin equals 100M satoshis and you can own less than a full bitcoin (30 Jun)
  

Regulation & Politics

• LocalBitcoins is forced to remove its cash trade option (1 Jun)
  
• The Reserve Bank of India denies involvement in a draft bill to ban cryptocurrencies (8 Jun)
  
• Binance to block users from the US (15 Jun)
  

Archeology (Financial Incumbents)

• Someone’s bank account is frozen for 4 weeks because they sold bitcoin (4 Jun)
  
• 86 years ago the US moved off of the gold standard for the people (5 Jun)
  
• Warren Buffet claimed that Bitcoin is a ‘gambling device’ with ‘a lot of frauds’ loses $340M in a Ponzi scheme (6 Jun)
  
• The European Central Bank announces its new plans to print more euros and cut interest rates (10 Jun)
  
• Warren Buffet has 40% of his stock portfolio invested in banks and credit card companies (15 Jun)
  
• Federal Chairman Jerome Powell speaks on cryptocurrency (19 Jun)
  

Price & Trading

• People discuss marketing manipulation vs a free market in bitcoin trading (4 Jun)
  
• An overview of annual minimum bitcoin prices (8 Jun)
  
• Bitcoin reaches an all-time price high in Argentine Pesos due to hyperinflation (9 Jun)
  
• Relative to this day, there were only 70 days that Bitcoin was unprofitable to buy (23 Jun)
  
• An article in the Wall Street Journal Business section on the bitcoin price (24 Jun)
  
• An animation of bitcoin’s price graph from 2009 to the present showing many hype cycles (26 Jun)
  
• A reminder of how most traders lose money (26 Jun)
  
• The $1 of free bitcoin Coinbase handed out in 2015 to new users is worth about $50 now (27 Jun)
  
• A TV interview in the Philippines on the bitcoin price (27 Jun)
  
• People talk a lot about the bitcoin price but not so much about the increase in volume (28 Jun)
  

Fun & Other

• Another Bitcoin street art painting (2 Jun)
  
• If you invested $10 per day into bitcoin starting at its peak in December 2017, you would be up 46% (3 Jun)
  
• A recommendation on the book Sapiens due to its chapter 10 on money, which reinforces the vision for Bitcoin (5 Jun)
  
• Bitpay is overcharging its users for bitcoin transactions (5 Jun)
  
• Bitcoin art on hyperinflated Venezuelan Bolivares bills (10 Jun)
  
• Forbes accurately reports that nobody knows what Bitcoin will do next (13 Jun)
  
• The launch of the FiatMarketCap website (16 Jun)
  
• A Satoshi Nakamoto impersonator has been ordered by a judge to prove his claims of being the creator of Bitcoin (17 Jun)
  
• A reminder that there will never be enough bitcoin for all of today’s existing millionaires to own one (17 Jun)
  
• A discussion on bitcoin as a store of value (23 Jun)
  
• A CNBC news anchor on Facebook’s Libra project compared to Bitcoin (25 Jun)
  
• Google’s search algorithm is unaware that Bitcoin has no CEO (29 Jun)
  
• Former Vice President of the US, Al Gore, on Bitcoin (29 Jun)
  

Dear Pundians,
Thank you for participating in the AMA session with Pundi X co-founder and CEO Zac Cheah.
For those of you who may have missed it, the live recording of the AMA session held on July 3 at 10:00 am GMT+8, tackling Q2 progress and addressing questions and concerns by the community members, can be viewed here. A side note that today’s AMA video quality and setting was not ideal. We acknowledge this situation and will make improvement for our next AMA session.
You may also find a summary of the Q2 progress presentation as well as all the detail Q&A below.
## Pundi X Q2 2019 Highlights
* Pundi X has integrated more public chains into our products. In Q2, we completed integration of Binance Chain. NEM chain is in the work. As of today we’ve launched BNB, the Binance Chain native Coin and XEM, NEM native coin on Pundi X payment platform. We will integrate at least one more public chain in Q3.
* The transactions on XPOS for Q2 is 15.5 million in USD, which is close to 300% quarterly growth. The number of transactions is 29,367, which leads to a 11% growth QoQ.
* XPOS has successfully received FCC and KC certifications. A new certification for Latin American market is on the way. * To expand XPOS footprint, Pundi X’s integration with a new leading mainstream point-of-sales device is in the work. Stay tuned for the announcement.
* Pundi X Open Platform was launched in May, 2019, which now supports ERC20 and BEP2 token listing. Moving forward, we will continue to support tokens from other public chains.
* A 3,000 XPASS order from DigiX, a gold-based token, and a 10,000 XPASS order from BitCobie this quarter.
* XPOS is spread in use in over 30 countries. We’ve published a map of XPOS location of self-report XPOS merchant directory. You can find a list of selected XPOS merchants at [https://www.pundix.com/products\](https://www.pundix.com/products). * The QoQ growth of XWallet is tremendous at 43%. In the previous quarter, we have less than 20k users, whereas in Q2 we have hit 297k XWallet users.
More updates on XWallet:
* Supported BNB and NEM tokens; 2FA, face ID, and optimized SMS serviceAvailable on iOS, Android as well as in Samsung Galaxy Store
New features coming up in Q3:- DApp integration - Decentralized wallet- In-app crypto payments - Chat service, which will be compatible with a commonly used chat app- f(x) testnet features to be rolled out first in XWallet
## Other notices coming up in Q3 2019
* The Q2 token removal will take place on July 14, 2019, which will involve in total 34 billion of NPXS and NPXSXEM (22 million worth in USD) removal. In the past 365 days, we’ve removed a total of 36.1 million US dollar worth of NPXS and NPXSXEM.
Before Q2 removal, the total supply of NPXS ERC20 is 266,962,422,906.53 and NPXSXEM is 95,816,218,929. [See Q1 removal here.](/pundix/recap-of-ama-with-zac-on-july-3-and-q2-report-a23de165dd28)
* [NPXSXEM will be ported to Binance Chain from July 20](/pundix/npxsxem-will-be-on-binance-chain-c6485f17726b). * XPhone pre-order will start in late July with a new product name. Stay tuned. Check out the teaser video that we are releasing it across our communication channels. ## Q&A
## On XPOS
* **Where are we on official global location of XPOS?**
Zac: We have made a map on our official website that merchants can self report and feature their locations. It’s at [https://www.pundix.com/product\](https://www.pundix.com/product). We’ll be increasing and updating the map once we have permission form the merchants to update their locations.
* **The marketing from pundi has shifted from 100,000–700,000 xpos units by 2021 to 100,000. I understand the bear market has affected this but please share the strategy moving forward to hit your goal. How do you feel about hitting this goal?**
Zac: The 100K XPOS target has always been the initial goal and it’s stated in our whitepaper. And we are still working on achieving the goal by the end of 2021. Part of our growth strategy is to also explore the possibility to port our platform to traditional POS manufacturers to increase the adoption, which is ongoing at the moment.
* **1 year ago you sent 5000 XPOS somewhere. When, at least half of them, will be working? 3 year target was 100,000 by 2021. Now we have only 150 units, how do you expect to reach this goal?**
Zac: Yes, we have shipped thousands of XPOS to over 30 countries in the world. The 150 you’ve mentioned are the featured merchants which are published on the map. The active XPOS devices are deployed over 33 countries and we are actively talking to B2B partners to have higher wholesale and big deployments.
* **How many XPOS are live and used?**
Zac: We have gone through a very serious bear market, and some of the initial inbound requests for XPOS are not delivered. However, we are working slowly but surely with our Business Development team to not just roll-out into individual buyers, such as what we did on Pizza Day, but also to B2B partners. With the certifications approved, that will also help us to officially roll out to some of the key markets.
Individual merchants can use XWallet collection feature to accept crypto payment with QR code. For the merchants who have physical offline storefronts, they can use XPOS to enable the instant crypto transaction seamlessly. Moreover, as mentioned previously, we are exploring the integration on leading traditional POS terminal so that their distributors have option to enable crypto transaction feature. As for the challenge to adopt XPOS, it is the regulatory compliance in different countries. For this, our legal team think ahead and encourage our merchants to complete KYC.
I must be very honest to say the activation takes longer time than we expect but it will be worth at the end.
* **What’s the average number of transactions per xpos in use?**
Zac: The transaction number has increased very well. The number of each XPOS differs, due to the frequency of using crypto currency to purchase item or crypto assets. There’s no standard answer to this, but overall we see the transaction number and volume are going up.
* **How do you plan to reach the target of 100,000 by 2021?**
Zac: One of the challenges that we have is regulatory compliances in different countries. There are certain markets that do not allow crypto currencies and some require a clear approval for us to deploy XPOS. We are working on both challenges by talking to governments and applying for certifications. So how we plan to reach 100,000 XPOS user by 2021 is to work with distributors, B2B partners on a government / business level, and with existing POS companies to integrate our software solution into the system.
* **We understand as there was bear market and hence Xpos usage demand was low. Are you guys seeing growth of Xpos usage with current market conditions. Can you guys put some statistics comparison like last 30 days Xpos usage vs any month from bear market usage?**
Zac: It is very clear that as we moved out from the bear market, the demand for XPOS has been increasing. As we’ve shared just now both the transaction number and volume of Q2 have beaten Q1. We’ll be able to share more transaction numbers once we receive approval from our XPOS merchants.
One exciting thing is that, with the listing of different tokens, we also see users using these tokens as a way to transact on XPOS, which means we will be having more ways to transact and this is a growth point for XPOS.
* **When will there be more details for XPHONE and XPOS HANDY?**
Zac: For XPOS handy, we have finished production and it will be released in Q3
* **When will the iOS version of XWallet and XPOS be fully translated to other languages?**
Zac: Right now, the XWallet has Traditional Chinese, Korean, Spanish, German and English. With the latest version update, it now includes Portuguese. XPOS also comes with many languages and we hope to finish with more language, either working with professionals or volunteers. If you’re interested in volunteering, please contact us.
* **When will the Merchant back office have Product Registration and SKU id ability and also integrate with other POS software?** * **When will the top-up feature go away for XPOS to allow liquidity for XPOS**
Zac: We constantly update features in XPOS and merchant backend to make it easier for distributors and merchants to use. We understand that one of the ways for mass adoption is to enhance our distributor management system. With that, the distributors can manage manay XPOS at one time with different merchants.
Please stay tuned as we announce more and more functions of this feature.
## On Dubai
* **When will we see the deployment of the XPOS in Dubai?** * **Can we spend NPXS on the Dubai XPOS?**
Zac: As with all big projects there are a lot of moving parts, that includes working very closely with the local government, in Dubai’s case, the Credit Bureau of the Finance Ministry. Things are progressing for the Dubai project but due to confidentiality agreements with the parties involved, we cannot reveal much. All we can say is that we and our Dubai partners are working hard to have XPOS roll-out in the Dubai market and the UAE.
We are also discussing aggressively with Dubai partners whether to include crypto assets in the XPOS in Dubai. That clearly will involve local compliance and legal for that to happen.
* **Your system upgrades expect merchants to have downtime on their XPOS terminals, can you explain if you plan to run a business why this would be considered feasible (specially at the rate you have been doing your upgrades)?**
Zac: Yes, the benefit / strength of the XPOS is that most of the updates can be done on the fly. For example, when we have a token update on our XPOS where developers submit their tokens on Open Platform, the updates of this token are on the fly, which means that once we approve the token on our Open Platform, it will automatically appear on XPOS without any software updates.
The great thing that we believe about XPOS is not just the support of crypto assets, but also the ability to update most things on the fly, which means that whenever we have a good feature or a new token, the updates will be done instantaneously.
* **Can you guys arrange at least a community voting which is the next blockchain we would like to see next in XPOS? Voting will help to prioritize to chose the projects.**
Zac: One of the reasons why BNB is being listed on the XPOS is simply because of its popularity and also our user demand, in a way that we are already answering to our community’s request.
Right now, our main focus is getting all the tokens submitted on Open Platform to be listed on the XPOS. The submission process includes legal and compliance valid, so our legal and compliance teams are working hard to make sure that we have more tokens to roll out onto Open Platform, which means that they will be on XPOS, XWallet, and XPASS.
As to a specific voting mechanism, we’d like to consider that and hopefully we’ll be able to run a specific voting for the chain which users would like to see.
* **While comparing Xpos handy to Square POS devices at least with mobile it’s very cheap like under $30 and easy to use. When can we expect such light weight and cheaper version for XPOS? Is team working on such devices ?**
Zac: There are different POS companies around the globe and pour focus is to work with these POS companies with our software, so that a crypto sales feature will be part of the existing POS system. The more support of crypto asset usage using our software on existing POS, the better it is for global adoption.
We actually strongly believe that the pricing of our POS system is competitive in the market. And one of the great features of the XPOS is that the merchants will not need not to pay a certain percentage to existing acquirer but to be able to earn certain percentage from each transaction. That is the key differentiator for merchant to want to adopt this.
* **From the website with some of the key Countries for XPOS adoption looks great. However, the concern is for Venezuela, there is no reference link like the others have. Can you guys add the link with details to clear the ambiguity?**
Zac: Let’s give a little bit more patience so that we can actually release more information about our Venezuelan partnership. The good news is that we expect concrete news from Venezuela in the coming 2 weeks. So stay up-to-date about our Venezuelan roll out on XPOS, the best way is to subscribe to our telegram group for Venezuela.
## On Partnerships
* **Are there some major partnership in the works? I’m also interested in how you do immediate transactions? Do you anticipate scaling issues?**
Zac: The way XPOS is being designed is that when you use your crypto assets to purchase, it will have instantaneous confirmation because the action is an off-chain process. An on-chain action happens when a user who owns crypto assets in our system transferring the assets out of the Pundi X ecosystem to their own wallets; or to transfer crypto assets in Pundi X from an off-chain to a private wallet, which we will have very soon on XWallet itself.
That is why we are able to handle scaling. When a person wants to use crypto currency to buy a coffee, the transaction will happen instantaneously.
For specific partnership, especially with B2B partnership, we oblige to the NDA that we have signed. But if you follow us closely, you’ll know that we go to different parts of the world, talking to major companies to try to land more deals so that NPXS usage will increase dramatically.
* **Any big partnerships for making xphone or using the software for xBlockchain?**
Zac: These partnerships are also subjected to NDA, so please be patient for us to release more news.
* **When will XPOS have approval to process Visa and MasterCard payments?**
Zac: We have met representatives from these players including some of the key management people. They are obviously looking into crypto currency attentively, and we hope that there’s something we can do with MasterCard and/or Visa.
This is something that the community has suggested and we agree fully. Please allow us with some time to work on this. We have also showcased XPOS to the CEO of MasterCard. For what or when will anything happen, please wait for our official announcement.
* **What’s the status on Quantum fund and their contribution or involvement with Pundi’s project?**
Zac: We announced last year that we are creating a fund to invest in projects beneficial to our ecosystem. We’ve identified some interesting projects, and we have invested in at least 1 project. The reason why we’re investing in that project is because of the services that it will bring onto the Pindi X ecosystem. So the purpose of the investment of the companies is that these companies in turn will benefit on our ecosystem. This is our key consideration.
The team has evaluated the projects that will benefit the Pundi X / Function X ecosystem. Vic and his team will be able to reveal more details on the companies we have invested in and how they will contribute to our ecosystem in Q3.
* **Recent update on NPXSXEM is highly ambiguous as mentioned that it will be now BEP token and later once FX goes live it will get back to Fx platform. Why you guys had so rush to use Binance chain only for few months? Isn’t you guys switching to much in a short time span?**
Zac: Liquidity and utility have been an issue for NPXSXEM. Due to the design philosophy and the limit of token that can be created on NEM’s smart contract, we are only able to create a small number of tokens on NPXSXEM. By moving into the Binance chain for NPXSXEM, the BEP2 token version will be able to support all the NPXSXEM tokens, which means that we’ll migrate and also be able to make sure all the NPXSXEM tokens are under the same contract address.
We believe with the strong liquidity, we will be able to give our NPXSXEM token holders a good reason of what the token holders have been waiting for. We hope to bring NPXSXEM to match the level of NPXS.
* **When #XRP?**
Zac: Our OpenPlatform is a currency agnostic platform, which means that we will work on integrating public chain as well as tokens that are most requested by the users. We’ll also be looking into the listing of different tokens that are being mentioned by the community.
As said, we will have at least one more public chain integration in Q3, perhaps even more.
* **Are you as a company going to try and connect with libra? If they have said they want to be a payment remittance service, have Square, PayPal, Visa on board I as an investor would prefer you try to join them rather than beat such large competitors**
Zac: Of course, we’ll be delighted to work with Facebook and also the Libra coin. Pundi X and XPOS is a currency agnostic / currency neutral platform, if there’s opportunity to list Libra coin or work with Facebook in different ways to promote crypto currency adoption, we’ll certainly look into that and work on reaching out to them.
## On Trading
* **Can you confirm during AMA, Pundi team is not involved with any trading with their own token like selling over time to manage the fund to run the company.**
Zac: All the wallet addresses of the team holdings are disclosed and transparent. This is one of the first things that we did after ICO. Hence, our token holdings are transparent and everyone can monitor our fund transactions. Also, we have strict internal financial regulation and compliance, shows that we are here to build a long-term project.
The best way to make NPXS or the NPXSXEM to rise is real daily life use case.
* **When will you stop manipulating NPXS chart?**
Zac: Our focus has always been and will be building great products. The more product usage, the demands for NPXS and NPXSXEM will increase. Let’s address again that, Pundi X the company is NOT involved in any manipulation of the NPXS price.
There are trading teams, market makers, financial institutions that profit from the drop and rise of token prices in the crypto market. The good thing about NPXS is that we have managed to create a high liquidity by listing on 40+ exchanges and having global trades and demand from all over the world. We hope this and coupled with the fact that we are a solid product and roll out the use cases, the demand of NPXS will only continue to rise and will be able to deter any of the traders or speculators there is for NPXS.
These traders gain profit from manipulating tokens whether BTC or other tokens. In fact, the traditional financial markets have similar challenges as well. What I want to stress is that, we at Pundi X, do NOT speculate or manipulate the price. We work very hard to create demands for NPXS and as a company, it is only beneficial for us to see the prices of NPXS and NPXSXEM rise.
* **Can we please address the elephant in the room which is the Binance bot with huge sell walls and buy walls causing huge distress and concern among users?**
Zac: First, I cannot confirm nor deny that whether Binance has a bot. I think this is something that you need to ask Binance. We need to work with Binance because Binance has one of the biggest liquidities, if not the greatest liquidity, for NPXS. The best way to counter manipulators is to create more use case, more demand and more acceptance of our tokens.
* **Why on almost all exchanges do you not offer a USDT trading pair?**
Zac: We have USDT trading pairs on Bittrex, Bittrue, and more. In addition, we have fiat pairs in Korean Won, IDR, INR, and Turkish liras. We will continue to work on adding trading pairs for NPXS to make it more liquidate.
* **Why don’t you offer a stable coin sell and purchase on the xpos to help with adoption? Places in Africa with volatile currencies would go crazy for this.**
Zac: It’s a great observation. This is a request that’s been asked from many users. We’re working on stable coin listing on XPOS and hopefully it’ll come soon. Stable coin requires a greater compliance and legal validate, which we have been working on since months ago and we hope to have the stable coin up in XPOS soon.
* **When will you add an active tracker for coin burn, whether its measured in usd, NPXS or whatever you choose. The community has been asking for this on twitter, reddit and telegram for this entire year.**
Zac: It will be hard for us to have a daily tracker of the coin burn, but what we might be able to work on is a tracker which have shown all of the tokens that have been removed from the usage. Thank you for giving us this great suggestion and we will work on it in some form.
Zac: Our token supply has always been specified in our white paper, and as promised in our white paper, we will continue to remove tokens through usage and use cases, which we’re working on all the time.
* **Price movement. When will NPXS go to which price?**
Zac: We cannot comment on the change of the price. Our focus is on building products. We hope by doing that the NPXS value will go up. Again, there’s no way that we can comment on the price.
**I believe that burning tokens every 14 weeks keeps the price suppressed and will only lead to huge pumps and dumps. Imo, If the burns were more frequent, the price would move organically.**
Zac: We continue removing tokens quarterly per advised by our legal and compliance team.
**Is it mandatory npxs swap? What happens for token we have in binance?**
Zac: No it’s not a mandatory NPXS swap for FX.
**How many NPXS or NPXSXEM was converted?**
Zac: In Q2, we will remove 29B NPXSXEM and 9B NPXS.
## On XWallet
* **Why not put in XWallet like the place where we can buy and sell like restaurants and shops?**
Zac: You are correct. In fact, if you look at XWallet, there is a merchant feature, whereby you can register as a merchant. By becoming a merchant, you will be able to print out your QR code and stick it on your restaurant. People are able to make payment through this QR code. This will act like a mini-XPOS.
* **In addition to that having multiple different blockchain in XWallet will increase the XWallet adoption. Hence, we would like to see aggressive game plan and execution from the team and would like to hear that**
Zac: That’s a great suggestion. Every day we want to increase use cases for XWallet. In fact, our XWallet update is one of the most frequent in the market. Within 5 months, we have over 10 updates on iOS and Google Play. This does not include soft update which happens every several days. In my view, the effort is very tremendous.
* **Is there any plan to add Swap option within XWallet so that people can trade the coins within XWallet?**
Zac: Yes, there’s such plan and in fact there is an upcoming feature that people will be able to use coins in XWallet to exchange into other things. The exact form and format have not been reviewed. We hope to share more when we have concrete example. But what you suggested is what we are planning for months ago.
* **When will XPOS and XWallet have fiat on ramps?**
Zac: This is a good question. It’s not only involved with regulatory compliance but also involved the technical part. This is also something we are planning for months. Once approved, hopefully we are able to support fiat currency on ramps and off ramps on XWallet.
**On Others*\*
* **How is the internal organization doing? Currently how many employees work for Pundi? Currently how many job positions are open?**
Zac: Pundi X has grown tremendously. We are now having over seven offices around the globe. I’m sitting in the Singapore office. We have office in Jakarta, Taiwan, Tokyo, Shenzhen, São Paulo and London. These are the places we have physical offices and house approximately 100 full time employees of Pundi X.
The positions open from Pundi X are legal associate in Singapore and other offices. We are looking for more R&D people, especially in Taiwan. We are looking at marketing and PR people in different parts of the world. And we are looking for POS distributors. As a POS distributor, you will work with our business development team and also our technical team to roll out many XPOS which you have a network to control in your local market.
* **Would you consider removing the KYC to allow u.s. holder to stake and be rewarded?**
Zac: We would love to have more users, including US. However, our compliance and legal advisors have not allowed us to accept US holders to stake and be rewarded.
I’m sorry to say that but this is after serious consideration to make such a decision. In fact, it is a very hard decision because we have healthy user base in the US.
will continue to monitor the situation in the different markets and be compliant. There are also ways to be rewarded when using XWallet service without KYC. We are looking into to explore more on this and launch new features. Hopefully we are able to bring the beta version for you to test this week or next.
**On XPhone*\*
* **Where are we on pre-sale announcement of Xphone? It was highlights of Q2 goal. If we are getting delay, that’s ok. But at least community will have some clarification why it’s getting late and when approximately it coming?**
Zac: Pre-sale order will start this month. It’s likely the end of July. Pre-sale will take place in different channel including the official website and XWallet. Apart of our own channel, the pre-sale will go live on a 3rd party channel. People will be able to pre-order crypto either in crypto or in fiat.
* **Can you discuss in AMA, is participants can pay with Crypto or Credit/debit card or in both ways?**
Zac: As a crypto company, we prefer payment in crypto, but fiat, Visa, MasterCard, and other traditional payment methods will be accepted on different pre-order channels. Stay tuned for pre-order which will happen in late July.
* **Will the Xphone be open to purchase in all regions of the world?**
Zac: Yes, pre-orders will be able to be done on-line, and products will be shipped from our offices to users in different parts of the world.
* **Will the blockchain mode on the Xphone be operable during the testnet or will this function not work until mainnet?**
Zac: XWallet and XPhone are the first channel and avenue for Function X testnet, so once the testnet is operateble, we will start to engage certain services on XWallet and XPhone into Function X testnet, and ultimately into mainnet. Slowly but surely.
* **Does Xphone have hard protective cover,extra Sim slot, also is it enhanced with ip68 water rating?**
Zac: XPhone will not be waterproof, so please do not submerge XPhone into water. XPhone will definitely be eavesdrop-proof because we’re using a blockchain mode, only you and you control your own conversation.
* **Which country accept the Xphone?** * **Will I also be able to use the SIM-card?** * **The blockchain modus will work in every country (what in the absense of nodes)?** * **Will the XPhone I buy now support updates in the future?**
Zac: People from any country will be able to buy XPhone on-line. You will be able to use a SIM for we have built a SIM slot. Wherever you are, the XPhone can be turned on to become a node.
Will XPhone support future updates? Yes, of course. Just like the XPOS, we support silent update. It will be like how we support XPOS, many updates. The updates will always be supported on XPhone.
**On Function X*\*
* **When is the detail white paper coming for FunctionX? Why the team is very resistive to have well documented white paper? We need scientific approach and well documentation on FunctionX to have developers to be more involved.**
Zac: Yes, developer involvement is a key criterion of the growth of Function X. We have done 2 things, one is that we have set up Function X Foundation which is led by David Ben Kay and will involve third party adviser and board members. Second, we have set up a developer relations team led by one of our own members as well. This team will work on creating developer documents, developer demos and sample, so that excellent developers can tap into working with Function X resources.
The first version of developer documentation is ready in English and Chinese. We are still polishing up the documents and hopefully to release them soon.
We are also working with third party developers, and are engaging at least 2 third party developer companies, so that we can help create their services on Function X and also XWallet.
We are hoping to showcase a smooth and usable service to the audience, we think this is the key criterion of the Function X growth.
Thank you for this suggestion. We need to update more often on github developer documentation as well.
As for the white paper, we did not have one per se because Function X did not do an ICO. But we will continue to update our white paper and include not only technical details, but also details on the chain and how we can get more developers and users so that the future hardware will be added as a node and you will be rewarded financially, at least through our ecosystem genesis fund. Please stay tuned and there are a lot of things going on in the company. Each and one of us is working hard.
* **Why does the FX ecosystem need a decentralized OS?**
Zac: The mantra of Function X is decentralization and having private control of your data. A full private control of your data comes with a decentralized system not just in transmission of your data, but with the operating system built fully for decentralization , which includes a transmission protocol replacing http. The apps uploaded into Function X will be decentralized as well as the data that is stored on the app, which means that how BitCoin or crypto assets are verified on different nodes will also be part of the way we store data and content.
The decentralized OS is key to fulfilling a decentralized environment for a more private and free usage.
* **What about FX are you most excited about?**
Zac: We are actually creating a shift of how people view of blockchain and how decentralization is not just about transacting commercial commodity, but also data, including your identity, are all decentralized. That is what we are most excited about.
The only way for us to achieve this is to have developer support, for we need the developers to build on the foundation we have to offer those exciting services.
* **We understand that developing a new blockchain is time consuming. As a community we are in a dark space to understand where exactly the development of FX right now.**
Zac: We are working hard on creating the testnet and eventually the mainnet. For the latest updates of Function X, what I can encourage you to do is to go on and subscribe to the Function X telegram group where discussions are made. We have formed the Function X Foundation and created the developer relations team, so that the Function X progress will go smoother and with more partnership from outside, whether it’s developers, third party companies, teleco, etc.
* **When FX goes live on the mainnet, will FX coin be used to stake and earn NPXS? how will staking work on that new mainnet?**
Zac: The NPXS/NPXSXEM staking will last till March 9, 2020 as announced. What we are committed is to create more use cases. For FX tokens, the use cases will be focusing on the Function X Chain and the use cases on Function X that include DApp on Function X and different hardware/software services.
* **When fx testnet will be available?**
Zac: First I would like to thank you for your constant support. In Q3, we plan to open Function X testnet so that we will be migrating and creating certain use cases that can be used on Function X testnet, starting with our own XWallet. Which means, the XWallet will migrate some features into Function X testnet, and slowly followed by our other Pundi X products, including XPhones, XPASS, Open Platform and Function X own developer related products from third parties.

Hi /Bitcoin! Thank you for reading!
In the last two months since I posted here, my team and I have been hard at work trying to make everyone's lives a bit easier for cryptocurrency and tax. In fact, we will be able to launch some tools this summer that will help optimize your trades from a tax perspective - as you make them. We think there's a chance we could even make it tax advantageous to use crypto vs. fiat... more on that later. For now, we would love to get your feedback on what we're working on.

The TLDR: We made Cointaxes so you can estimate your tax liability and whether or not you have FINCEN obligations for free on our site. It was important to make this summary information free because our mission is create confidence and certainty around cryptocurrencies.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments (I'll probably respond to every comment here!)

Watch a Cointaxes' YouTube Series answering the top questions How are cryptocurrencies taxed? Why should you pay this year? Am I taxed when I convert into fiat or pull money out of my exchanges? What about mining and airdrops? All this and more is covered!
We launched a tool to help measure your FINCEN requirements for FBAR & FATCA

In my last post, I mentioned a "fun" fact around FINCEN requirements. The media is talking about this more (i.e. CNBC - "How cryptocurrency investors could find themselves behind bars"). The good news is it's really simple for the ledger technology we built to check if you cross the $10,000 or $50,000 thresholds. On our site, Cointaxes, you can add your exchanges and then check if you have crossed the threshold. Importantly, we wanted to make this critical information available for free. Particularly because the the deadline is April 15.
If you fail to file the FBAR, the deadline will be extended to October 15. You can read more about this on official government sites General FBAR information, FBAR FAQS (not super helpful IMO) and the online form itself.

About Cointaxes

Cointaxes was formed and funded with the mission to establish confidence and certainty around cryptocurrency. We have a base tax preparation tool with support for Coinbase, GDAX, Binance, Bittrex, Poloniex, and Kraken.
We made Cointaxes so you can estimate your tax liability and whether or not you have FINCEN obligations for free on our site. Your detailed reports or Form 8949 for tax filing is behind a modest paywall compared to what we've seen other tools out there charging.
We see global adoption of digital currencies as an inevitability. The uncertainty lies in how effectively and smoothly this once-in-a-lifetime shift occurs. As a tax preparation service, we have a special seat in the cryptocurrency ecosystem directly related to this uncertainty: it is our job to help both citizens and governments around the world understand how to use and treat digital currencies.

• We will regularly invite regulators, lawyers and tax experts to private discussions and public webinars to ensure you will have a firm understanding with each regulatory shift as the world adopts cryptocurrencies.
  
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Newsletter update

If you want to stay on top of regulatory and tax related crypto news (as well as when we roll out shiny new tools) then consider subscribing to our newsletter.
If you signed up for our newsletter two months ago - sorry for the lack of content! We've been too focused on trying to get this product up and running in time for the deadline (barely made it!) We recently expanded our team and will be able to be much more consistent about the content we're creating!
Important Disclaimers: For this post and any of my replies to your questions below... this is not tax advice and should not be relied upon for making any tax decisions. We always recommend speaking to a tax professional before making decisions related to your taxes and our guides are not a substitute for tax advice.

Hi Bitcoiners!
I’m back with the 33rd monthly Bitcoin news recap.
For those unfamiliar, each day I pick out the most popularelevant/interesting stories in Bitcoin and save them. At the end of the month I release them in one batch, to give you a quick (but not necessarily the best) overview of what happened in bitcoin over the past month.
You can see recaps of the previous months on Bitcoinsnippets.com
A recap of Bitcoin in September 2019
Adoption

• The average profile of someone who uses Bitcoin (2 Sep)
  
• Bitcoin is at a $2250 premium in Argentina after the president imposes capital controls (9 Sep)
  
• SegWit adoption is 50%, with Blockchain, Binance, BitMEX, Bittrex & others still not adopting it (16 Sep)
  
• The Tor Project now uses BTCPay Server to accept bitcoin and lightning donations (19 Sep)
  
• An update from Bitcoin in Venezuela (29 Sep)
  

Development

• Jack Mallers creates a bank to Lightning channel integration in the non-custodial Zap wallet (19 Sep)
  
• New BIP draft on Erlay, which reduces node bandwidth consumption by at least 40% (26 Sep)
  

Security

• Norwegian bitcoin millionaire jumps down 2 stories after man with shotgun broke into his house (8 Sep)
  
• A Security vulnerability in the Lightning Network was reported (27 Sep)
  
• People debunk misconceptions around Google’s quantum computer breakthrough with regards to Bitcoin’s security (29 Sep)
  

Mining

• Bitcoin’s hashrate passes 100 Exahashes per second (5 Sep)
  
• 31 Bitcoin block reward halvings remain (7 Sep)
  
• Bitcoin network has 8x more mining power than at its price peak (9 Sep)
  

Business

• Jack Dorsey continues to advocate for Bitcoin with no chance of a Twitter coin any time soon (4 Sep)
  
• Bitpay suspends bitcoin donations to Hong Kong Free Press (11 Sep)
  
• Lolli CEO Alex Adelman on CNN (11 Sep)
  
• Square Crypto grants $100k to open source BTCPay Server Foundation to continue development (14 Sep)
  
• Bakkt goes live with their Bitcoin monthly futures contracts (23 Sep)
  
• Bakkt COO Adam White discussing their futures exchanges launch on CNN (24 Sep)
  
• Apple Pay’s Vice President confirms they are watching cryptocurrency as it has long term potential (25 Sep)
  

Education

• An article explaining Miniscript, streamlined Bitcoin scripting (8 Sep)
  
• Understanding Bitcoin’s price movements for beginners (8 Sep)
  
• A guide on Bitcoin privacy for non-technical people (12 Sep)
  
• The Bitcoin Bible book by a 17 year old (13 Sep)
  
• 13 hours of Lightning Network education from Chaincodelabs’ summer residency (18 Sep)
  
• A discussion on Bitcoin and smart contracts (29 Sep)
  

Regulation & Politics

• France will not tax crypto-to-crypto trades, only when converted into fiat currency (12 Sep)
  
• France and Germany agree to block Facebook’s Libra (14 Sep)
  
• Travis Kling on CNN about Bitcoin as an insurance policy against monetary and fiscal policy irresponsibility (19 Sep)
  
• Ukraine plans to make Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies taxable (28 Sep)
  

Archeology (Financial Incumbents)

• The European Central Bank restarted printing €20B per month (12 Sep)
  
• The Federal Reserve creates another $128B to support the financial market (19 Sep)
  
• PMC Bank in India restricts account holders to withdrawing $141 in 6 months (26 Sep)
  

Price & Trading

• Someone got a Localbitcoins transaction reversed and gets into trouble with their bank (16 Sep)
  
• Comparing various bitcoin bear market recoveries (21 Sep)
  
• $1.2B in btc was moved to an exchange triggering price movement and big volumes (25 Sep)
  

Fun & Other

• A DIY BTC price ticker (2 Sep)
  
• A reminder of why Bitcoin (3 Sep)
  
• Hong Kong protestors use decentralised mesh messaging app that China can’t block (3 Sep)
  
• Bitcoin’s existence as an insurance against an Orwellian future (3 Sep)
  
• Bitcoin Rap Battle Debate (5 Sep)
  
• Bitcoin has now died 375 times (5 Sep)
  
• A $13 DIY BTC price monitor (7 Sep)
  
• A DIY Lightning ATM (9 Sep)
  
• Akon talking about Bitcoin on The Breakfast Club radio show (10 Sep)
  
• A flowchart for buying bitcoin or not (10 Sep)
  
• A 1 btc tip given 6 years ago on Reddit (10 Sep)
  
• Bitcoin logos on the Hungarian Underwater Rugby Team at the World Cup (13 Sep)
  
• 1.2 btc has been donated to a street artist who created 5 bitcoin-related murals (15 Sep)
  
• Bitcoin mining jokes (20 Sep)
  
• People discuss the richest bitcoin addresses and lost bitcoins (21 Sep)
  
• The origin of shitcoin (21 Sep)
  
• A reminder to be friendly to newcomers who want to learn about Bitcoin (26 Sep)
  

Hey guys!
About two weeks ago I decided to book tickets to Singapore to pay a visit to the COSS team. I was and still am heavily invested in COSS and I thought it was my duty to push the do your own research idea to the maximum and actually go there and meet them!
So, today was my first day in Singapore and it's been very busy! I spent the morning preparing my first official meeting with Rune and I headed to their offices around 2pm. They are a little bit outside of the city center, about 10 minutes drive. They look quite nice and leave a lot of room for growth, which is good cause a lot of people are coming in house in the next few weeks. The meeting went for about 2 hours and we talked about almost everything regarding COSS. Rune has been incredibly welcoming so far, I landed yesterday night and as soon as he knew I was in town he invited me to have dinner with him, so today was our second meeting, first official one. After the meeting, I headed back to my hotel caught a bit of sleep and started redacting the interview. Tomorrow I have a meeting with their head of compliance and will do the same thing, only much shorter. I'll also start vloging my adventures in Singapore :)
Here is the 1st part of the interview:
*Hi Rune, thanks for having me, how did you come up with the COSS idea? *
Rune Evensen: Originally, back in 2013, I to develop a one stop solution for social media. I was looking at the current platforms and realized twitter is undersharing, facebook is oversharing and LinkedIn is for professionals. You needed a different account for everything so I started building a solution. Unfortunately it was all 3d rendered and way too heavy. It was designed like a house with different rooms. I spent two years on that project and we were supposed to build-in something like facebook credits as an internal currency, but not a cryptocurrency because at that time I did not know about them. But when I showed my idea to people, especially here in Singapore, more and more of them asked me why don’t you make it as a cryptocurrency instead of credits? Then I started to look into it, that was in 2015 but I found it quite complicated with a lot of hurdles especially for a beginner. So instead of working on a one-stop solution for social medias I figured I should build one for cryptos, because everybody talks about mass-adoption, but it is mostly IT guys, nerds and traders who are into cryptos. It is still way too complicated for people to get into it. So I started to plan my one stop solutions, many long nights of work. To get a better understanding I signed up for a FinTech course at MIT. During one of the weekly sessions there, we were supposed to submit a business idea that we had and could implement into blockchain. That was the first time I publicly presented my idea. We 1200 people in this course, and the average score for the assignment was 25, my project got the best rating, 100. They described it as a great business idea with real potential to take COSS to the masses. That was quite an endorsement! I needed this endorsement to actually build this idea. I had a consultancy company in Singapore with some staff. First I brought some of them in the project, then I met Dan from Romania and some months later we had the first drafts of the white paper. In November 2016 we moved to our offices in Singapore, in April 2017 we went live with the beta. Until then we were 100% self-funded, and that was the time all the ICOs were popping up. At first we started looking at institutional investors, but they wanted too many shares of the company for money that would last us a year at best. I did not want sell a majority stake of my company in which I already put so much time, efforts and money. The next natural step was to do an ICO and this is why we created our COSS token and came-up with the idea of the fee split allocation. We had to come-up with a clear use case. We then built our advisory board, we picked our advisory board according to our road map and not specifically for the ICO. For example Anson Zeall who is the president of ACCESS, Singapore’s Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Industry Association. So we chose them so that they could help us to complete our roadmap. We did every possible mistake during the ICO because we had no experience in it, none of us had done it before. We did not realize the power of community at the time, we did not even have Telegram at the time! You need to start building a community months before the ICO, you need thousands of people on Telegram and people being active in the community. This is the key to a successful ICO. Nowadays we are actually asked for advices by companies doing their own ICOs because we did everything ourselves during ours. We did not do proper marketing too, we thought we could push it through social medias, that was a big mistake. Nowadays, you need at least half a million to start your ICO for marketing budgets etc… Some companies even offer funding to ICOs! I remember we were approached at the time by TokenMarket and they offered us to take care of everything in our ICO. For 4 months of their work we were asked between 30 and 40k USD. Nowadays they do not work for less than a million. It’s been a bumpy road, that’s why we call it the RollerCOSSter! We raised 3.2M during our ICO.
How much did you estimate you needed?
Rune Evensen: We were very ambitious because we made an audit through ICO ranker and at that time they scored us the highest they had ever done. So we thought we would reach our 50M hardcap really easily. We were asked by the community what we were going to do with the unsold tokens, we did a community vote and the result was that everybody that joined the token sale would get 10x more token than expected. We decided to stay on Ether with the ICO money as opposed to go to FIAT. We only convert as we go and we still have two third of ETH we raised, which at today’s market price are worth 6M USD. For those who believe we have not hired more staff yet because of financial reasons, that is absolutely not true. We are very careful with the way we use our money, yes we have a big office but we decided to rent it a little bit outside of Singapore’s center cause it is a lot cheaper. We got a big office because we know we want to hire a lot. We are 7 persons working at the office at the moment and 4 more will arrive in February. Three persons for compliance and one developer, Jay.
That was actually my follow-up question, how many people are on the current staff?
Rune Evensen: We have a very decentralized team. We currently have 7 people in house, then we have the core dev team in Romania, which is Dan’s (one of COSS shareholders) team. It’s a 20 people team but only two of them are working a 100% on COSS. Then we have the UI team in Amsterdam, with 5 people working on COSS. We have our content manager also in Europe, we have our graphic designer in Indonesia, we have our internal security expert and our lawyer (also a shareholder) here in Singapore. So we have a big team, but people need to understand the difference between team and staff. For instance we have Gary here in house for support but he’s managing a four people team that we outsource. They all came here for training but do not work here. We are also planning to add 6 or 7 more in house developers. Mong (COSS’s 1st in house dev) has determined what kind of team she needs and she has free hands to hire and build the team.
Just to clarify, if she finds someone that would fit the team, she is allowed to hire him/her immediately?
Rune Evensen: Of course, we still need to discuss it together. She cannot sign the contract all alone. But yes, she is free to hire! We want it to be as quick as possible. The very good ones often have a job, then we need to make good offers to convince them and once they accept they need to give notice to their former employers so that takes a bit more time. If there are some devs out there that can start immediately and fit our needs, then we will bring them in immediately.
Is it fair to say that Mong is COSS’ CTO?
Rune Evensen: Yes, her contract does not say CTO but she is definitely acting CTO. It’s the same for me, I am leading the company but I do not have the CEO title.
What does your typical day look like?
Rune Evensen: I’m normally at the office between 8 and 9, sometimes I try to hit the gym before coming there, not too much lately. At the office I spend a lot of my time acting as support role on Slack and Telegram, I help everybody that DMs me with issues. Maybe I made myself too available because now I am getting a lot of them everyday. Of course we have meetups with compliance team and the devs. Mong has taken over a lot of communications with the dev teams oversea. She is coordinating and leading the Amsterdam and Romania team. Before she came on board that was also part of my job. I also took part on the KYC process, which is now the compliance team’s responsibility. I’m also the one negotiating when a coin wants to be listed.
The priority is to get off your support role?
Rune Evensen: Yes, as soon as support is up to speed, and can handle all the issues as fast I as I want to I will get off this role and go back to only leading the company.
You announced FIAT will be introduced by the end of Q1 can you give us more details?
Rune Evensen: We will introduce FIAT through credit card for Bitcoin and ETH. We will add more FIAT pairs as soon as the engine is up and running. I do not have an exact date for the engine. We are in the process of designing the architecture we need and want to use. Once that is done I will be able to give a more precise timeline. This should happen by the end of the week or next week.
One question that comes up a lot, why don’t you buy the same engine as Binance?
Rune Evensen: We want to build something from scratch for a few reasons. One reason is security, we want to have full control of the code. But mostly we want the engine to fit our business model, that requires different solutions than a standard exchange. So even if we bought Binance’s engine we would need to build a lot on top. We will speed up as much as possible the release of the engine, as long as that does not jeopardize security or quality.
There are now over 80 devs on the Trello board, what is their role?
Rune Evensen: They are giving us feedbacks and come up with solutions. For instance what can be done to increase the speed of the site. Some of them are working for Microsoft, Facebook and other Fortune 500 companies. Of course they are already very busy with their job and they are only helping us because they have an interest in COSS. Some of them reached out and sent their CVs to us. That’s something I always rejected before because we did not have in house devs. I did not want to get more outsourced devs and put them under an already outsourced dev team. Now that we have a leading team in Singapore, I’m passing those CVs, of highly qualified people looking to contribute more, to Mong. Some of them will become COSS team members. That’s really the true power of community that I talked about in my Medium update. Yes we have the FUD, from time to time, but to see the activity we have on Telegram and Slack, I really believe we have an amazing community. I know you guys also have a huge french community. France is actually our second biggest market behind USA.
Let’s talk about security, it’s always an important concern from users. How do you improve and assess the exchange’s security?
Rune Evensen: We are doing regular penetration testing, you can never say that something is 100% hack proof. My personal recommendation is to leave on exchanges only what you intend to trade and send the rest to your hardware wallet. You can get your fee split allocation on Ledger very easily. We do our due diligence and have never been breached, but some users have through their emails. I’m also amazed by how many people have not yet set-up 2FA. We might make it mandatory.
You mentioned earlier that you still have 6M worth of ETH from your ICO. How much volume does the exchange need to cover your costs?
Rune Evensen: Right now, when we have 2 to 3M daily volume, we are paying weekly to COSS holders between 70 and 100k. That means we get the same amount for ourselves and that’s almost enough to cover our expenses. If we reach 10M daily volume we should be very healthy financially.