CoinMetro Facebook AMA | 8th June 2018

Today Kevin joins us back from the main CoinMetro offices in Tallinn, Estonia to answer some of your pressing questions! Read on to hear everything from Kevin's opinion on top news in the crypto world, to updates on the upcoming beta exchange demo, to Cryptokitties and more!

VIDEO ARCHIVE OF THE FACEBOOK AMA

This Week In Crypto

# 1. Estonia Rolls Back Its Plan to Issue National Digital Currency

• Kevin is sad. :(
• Estonia was initially bullish on crypto but the EU pushed back enough. 
• Kevin believes EST coin will become a reality at some point.

# 2. Bithumb cleared by South Korean Gov’t of any wrongdoing.

• Good news for crypto in general. 
• Bad actors aren’t helping anyone in the crypto space

# 3. Japan’s first ever rejection of a crypto application

• It’s a good thing that regulators are doing their job.
• Initially the bar is set too low, bad actors, or incompetent actors come in. 
• Then the regulators come back in and go overkill on regulation, and many good actors are left out.
• It’s good all around, however.

# 4. 1.1 billion in crypto has been stolen this year. 

• Kevin thinks it’s a low number, and that it was probably more that was stolen.
• It’s mostly social engineering efforts

Reddit Questions!

CoinMetro Team Structure

• CM is currently building out the team. Hiring is one of the most difficult things to do.
• “If we hire the right people, the train drives itself.” Kevin Murcko
• The business development team is being put together now.
• Banking and regulatory have been the initial efforts, Kevin undertaking the majority of those efforts.
• Token Sale is mostly a marketing and outreach business. 
• The Content Officer has made a lot of connections.
• Token Liaison is a new position that the team is looking for. This person will go to conferences and get tokens on the CM platform.
• COO offer is on the table.

Will CM support Bitcoin's Lightning Network?

• Yes! CM plans to support off chains as well.
• Not from Day 1, however.
• CM aims to be platform agnostic

What do you think of crypto collectibles? (e.g. Cryptokitties)

• Haven’t thought about it! 
• Maybe! There’s big business in collectibles.

Does the marketing strategy include shilling by influencers on Twitter?

• No, it doesn’t. 
• Would the team pay someone to deliberately shill on Twitter? No.
• Will people do it on their own? Yes.

Aside from low maker/taker fees, what will you do to encourage liquidity?

• There’s a lot of wash trading on the industry, it’s rampant in the industry.
• The industry is currently highly illiquid.
• Paying makers is a big thing to encourage liquidity as is having lower taker fees.
• CoinMetro is focusing on bringing real liquidity providers that can bring real, sustainable liquidity. 
• We know what type of traders that support a liquidity base, and which ones are there to take advantage.
• Currently in talks with a lot of liquidity providers, there are many unprofessional outfits out there. 
• Another strategy is to bring easily onboardable fiat. 
• The goal is that we have enough liquidity to support the base we have and grow that liquidity as the base expands.

Why aren’t there more visible marketing efforts?

• We don’t have a product right now, and we don’t think it’s good idea for brand awareness just yet.
• CM is a revolution against all the issues that are plaguing the crypto exchange space.
• CM is building the product first, and ensuring it’s the best service out there.

CoinMetro Twitter account issues

• Through the ICO, CM was working with external providers. 
• The team now has a guidebook and has been vetting content that goes on Twitter.

What rewards competitions will be in the initial beta demo release?

• Lowest/Highest gain, turnover, several based on different metrics.
• XCM, CoinMetro swag. 

Airdrops of ICO express tokens

• Do they scale with XCM health? Yes. It’s probably how it’s going to be done.

Will the debit card work on every region?

• It’s a pre-paid card
• Not every region
• It won’t work on OFAC sanctioned countries.
• Initially it’ll probably be added to the EEA/EU only. 

CM is working on liaising with banks to allow CAD (Canada)

Will there be rewards for beta testers?

• Yes! Contests for beta testers. 
• Bug bounties are possible.

Reliable signals/Social Trading?

• Social trading died in FX because of regulation.
• Hard to answer. 
• Kevin’s seen a lot of signals in FX and 99% don’t work over time.

Tick Charting

• We’ll have to check with the dev team
• Tick charts are difficult when you have low liquidity.
• They will be available when liquidity permits.

Why aren’t you afraid of Binance?

• From a realistic standpoint, it’s just one company. 
• Malta doesn’t have the best history when it comes to regulation.
• Kevin’s not 100% confident that Malta is the place to go for crypto.
• There’s very few industries in which there are monopolies.
• Binance’s success came along with the bullish run.
• People aren’t going to be willing to pay so much for listings for very long.
• You should never be scared of the competition.
• You should respect what they’ve done, and use their size against them.

What are your thoughts on the latest SEC decision?

• Not too surprised.
• The SEC is probably having a hard time classifying tokens.
• It won’t affect CoinMetro because they’re not based in the US.

PSD2 

• The challenger banks, like Revolut, Transferwise, are going to continue disrupting the industry.
• There will be a segmentation in banking. Banks are going to have to fight for business in the retail sector. 
• A lot of banks will start to create their subsidiary businesses.
• Kevin sees a day when Microsoft and Google have their own exchanges. 

Will the marketing be hyped for the live launch?

• Yes. But it’ll be done the right way.
• We don’t want to do marketing while the demo is underway and bugs are present. 

Do you think July is the wrong time for the release?

• Trading generally slows down in the summer, and it could be a good time to launch in the aspect that it’s a good time to scale into it. We can ramp up support slowly. 
• Building a happy community initially means that when the fall comes around, we have brand ambassadors gushing about their great experience on CM.

We can’t list a token in the ETCF unless it’s tradable on CoinMetro

Privacy coin update

• If the rest of the world allows for privacy coins, we’ll list them.

Intraday trading 

• We need to find a repository of historic data
• There are limits, and if we find the right repository, we can display them.

Facebook AMA

When does trading start?

• Beta Demo mode is still scheduled for between the 15th-30th of the month. 
• 2-4 weeks of demo trading.
• Live Beta should go live after then.
• KYC vetted contributors only.

USD is a difficult nut to crack, and it’s closer than last week by leaps and bounds.

• The team is in direct negotiations with the US regulators to ensure a good outcome for US contributors.

Re: Lawsuit FUD on the channel

• The team has a legal team so they can deal with any legal issues that arise.

Will there be another flash sale before release?

• Still haven’t made a decision about that. 

What is the purpose of 32.7 million XCM reserve? 

• The 100 million are there to underwrite XCM and keep it as a reserve.
• The team could try to sell them, but they don’t want to flood the market in the beginning. 
• Kevin would rather only use those tokens for liquidity when needed.
• The team expects to have revenue from the beginning of trading. 
• You can be positive of a company and have a worst-case scenario.
• Other sources of financing: Partnerships are always an option. They become more of an option as the company grows. 
• Why does a company go through a token sale? They do that to avoid loans, partnerships, etc… 
• XCM are not shares. In normal markets there’s a correlation between supply and demand, but in this market there are no known correlations yet.
• The fact that we raised more than the soft cap means that we can go into other jurisdictions and offer more products and scale out quicker. The faster we can scale out, the faster we can secure licenses and knock out competition.
• Token Holders are not shareholders. It’s one of the reasons why it’s so popular with companies. 

People that have bought tokens are not investors, they’re not shareholders. The risk of purchasing the token was the risk of purchasing the token. 

CoinMetro Update

• Kevin met with the ex-Prime Minister of Estonia. Had a good discussion about self-regulatory bodies.
• Had meetings with local PR companies, starting local government outreach. 
• Heard back from the Mexico office, the law group in Mexico City. CM will be applying to the regulation that’s coming out later this year in Mexico.
• The team is about to start the application process in the UK. MTF license or an EMI or PI license. Possibly all three.
• Talks about licensing in Australia is also underway.
• The team is looking for accounts, one in Estonia is already in the works. 
• EURO/SWIFT is in the works, as is USD.
• Regulation/banking has been the focus of these past few weeks.
• Kevin was in Switzerland doing some business developments. 
• The dev team has been super busy working on pushing out the CM exchange beta demo.
• There’s a new GO dashboard, and retooling KYC to streamline it a little more.