Hi Ladies and Gents,
A change to our community engagement in view of our push towards community-based governance means that instead of the customary AGM format, here I’m writing you the details which will be posted in our forum for you to access, comment on, and ask questions about.
Similar to my message six months ago, I would like to pay my condolences to those affected and impacted by the pandemic induced global crisis and hope that you and your loved ones are safe.
Financials
The start of 2020 was very challenging for us as the pandemic caused a global market panic and unfortunately crypto followed main street as opposed to the hedge we had hoped it would be.
That meant we had to liquidate a portion of our crypto on the cheap and the all-time high rise in the latter half of the year that carried on to the new year has helped compensate for the earlier hard times.
We still have a combination of short-term and long-term assets. We have to divest our investment in a fund where we were tied in for 10 years and managed to find a buyer before the recovery of crypto.
We have approx. $5.5m in long term assets and $8.6m in short term assets, we also have close to 200M PLR tokens between the foundation and the DAO. Despite these, we have to create a viable revenue stream for the project to function as a going concern.
Retrospective
We had an ambitious roadmap for 2020 that involved quite a lot of partnerships and integrations to bring DeFi alive in the Pillar wallet.
We have achieved most of what we set out to do while we had to adapt our approach in rolling out WBTC Cafe and involve more players in the Dank Meme collaboration.
The meme community collaboration has led to the development of our MemeSwap offering.
New offerings
MemeSwap is initially targeted at the Meme community that are versed with the intricacies of web3 in interacting with memes. We are working through our adoption plan with this community and based on the learning we have tweaked the product offering. The ultimate aim is to bring the offering to the Dank community in an easy to digest fashion and network the two communities and make the Pillar platform the place to be.
MemeSwap takes advantage of Etherspot – our new innovation which I will delve into further down – in allowing participants to work on side chains like xDai and save on mainnet gas prices.
Etherspot I keep on saying, what is it?
It’s an innovation by our technical team that leverages all the underlying technologies we have been building such as Smart Wallet, state channels work (basis of PPN), and further research that enables users to transact over EVM based chains and side-chains where the fiddly parts of the blockchain are abstracted away. For example, if a user is buying a portion of a meme using MemeSwap’s sharding of memes (a portion of a meme), the likelihood is that the user would not be thrilled in paying $10 in gas fees on Ethereum mainnet and would prefer to stick to the xDai chain to save on the tx fees. However, if the user has her funds in the Ethereum mainnet, she would like to move some funds to xDai without any fanfare that we currently have to go through. Etherspot enables that transfer without the user having to know how to connect to xDai or even bother to know about it. Imagine how useful this would be to the myriad of dApps that run on EVM side chains. Hence memeswap has had a dual purpose as a reference application on Etherspot as well as its inherent offering.
We are engaging a couple of dApps in view of allowing them to bridge the gap between the side-chain they are deployed on and their Ethereum based users. This is a big play for us as we will want to showcase these dApps and push for wider adoption.
This innovation is a key part of our strategy to mitigate the revenue generation challenge the crypto wallet sector faces.
Despite various integrations, the revenue generated from wallet transactions is not high enough to mitigate the cost of running a highly technical team.
This challenge is not only specific to Pillar but it’s an industry wide issue for wallet makers where everyone is competing on quality and range of service without charging any fees from users. This is exacerbated with the modern wallets that utilise Smart Contracts in that to access all the range of benefits the Smart contract-based implementation offers the initial onboarding has a gas fee. We are working through various approaches in mitigating these costs including leveraging Etherspot in spreading the cost over multiple transactions.
The applicability of etherspot to a wider audience opens a potential revenue stream in collaboration with dApp service providers.
I will not be outlining a full year’s roadmap in this document and I’ll outline what we will do for the first quarter, that is because:
a) We have discovered that the crypto space being so dynamic, we have had to change and adapt our plans on the fly and alter, add to and descope some of the features we have outlined from the outset.
b) The community participatory governance model is ideal to manage the uncertainty as the list of features, integrations, and new developments will be discussed in the governance forum and be scheduled for the quarter(s) to come depending on the time it takes to implement the development.
I don’t not want this report to turn into an even longer essay however I expect that some of you will have subsequent questions.
Thanks for your time and patience
Michael
