Transcript of AMA with CEO of PointPay – Vladimir (CEO) Kardapoltsev

Dear PointPay family,

PointPay CEO Vladimir Kardapoltsev participated in a traditional AMA session on March 30, 2023. He discussed the current market situation and also outlined PointPay's marketing and development plans for the coming months as well as recent achievements.

Below is a summary of the AMA held on the 30th of March, 2023.

AMA Transcript

Vladimir (CEO): Hello, PointPay family. I'm glad to see you all here today. As usual, we have a lot of news at PointPay and plenty of your questions as well. So without further ado, let's get started. Today I'm assisted again by Diana, who has kindly managed to collect all of the questions from you. Hello, Diana.

Diana (Host): Let's get started and listen to the latest news and announcements from Vlad.

Vladimir (CEO): From the big news that happened today, we have completed our 24th burn as of this morning. It's 3.1 million PXP tokens. It's another absolute record, and we're still committed to doing regular burns, but less frequently. Last year we did them every single week, then we moved to every single month. Now we're doing them less frequently. But legally I'm not allowed to confirm or deny any schedule. The next one will be in the next few months.

We've completely changed the way we do our burns. Every single burn will be higher. The next burn will be higher than the current one. And it will happen in the next few months.

Some time ago we had our highest rating on CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko. At the last AMA session, I mentioned that we just got listed on CoinGecko, which took us quite a while. We had a CoinGecko rating of 141. It's a different rating than CoinMarketCap because we had 87 there. We are comfortably in the top 100 and our project is making great progress.

That's the number that all the investors look at, and all the partners that we work with, and all the new projects that we list on our website on our launch pad, they all look at the rating on CoinMarketCap. Not too long ago we were at 150. We're slowly taking market share and our deserved place in the crypto world. Now 87, pretty good to be in the top hundreds. By the end of the year, we'll be comfortably in the top 50, I'm 100% sure of it.

A few weeks ago we launched two contests. One is a trading contest where every week the user who trades the most tokens on our exchange will receive 5000 PXP tokens. Just go and trade. The first winner had in a region of 2000 of volume. It's not like a profit or a loss, just numbers generated in commissions, just the volume.

The second thing we've started is the suggestion competition. The suggestion is a competition where you have to post your user ID and the idea you have for the platform or the bug. If you find a bug that is pretty serious, we want to know about it. Send us a detailed description. Or, if you want our project to maybe go in a different direction, explore some different possibilities, list a new token, or introduce some new feature to our platform, write it all there in as much detail as possible. The people who wrote in the most detail were in the minority. If it is a bug, include a browser, versions, OS, and so on. If it's an idea, you can leave a reference as a link. It really helps.

Let's move on to the global news that is happening around the world.

The situation with the three banks that collapsed in the USA: Signature Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, and Silvergate. That's worrying news for a lot of tech companies that had a lot of money in their banks. But it's a good reminder: never put all your eggs in one basket.

In Europe, the situation has also reverberated with the acquisition of Credit Suisse by UBS. We also see something going on with Deutsche Bank at the moment. It's not over yet and we will see some more developments in the next few weeks.

Some news on the USDC and DAI temporarily losing their peg to the dollar. That was pretty bad news and worrisome, but the situation was resolved in a good way. On the other hand, we have good news as cryptocurrencies have received a new influx of funds, trading has increased, bitcoin is now rising. That's all the effect of the banking collapse.

We're watching the market and the price of bitcoin has gone up, it's now $28,000. The last time I checked it could go down or up and I think it's now around the 2020 mark.

I think that is all I want to talk about on the platform and globally. We've discussed all of our major news for what's happening in the banking world and then the cryptocurrency world. Let's move on.

Next week we will publish a short summary of what we did in our first quarter. Just a short article summarizing what we accomplished as a company in the first quarter.

Let's move on to the updates for this March.

Traditionally we start with the interfaces. On the web, we've:

Improved the design of the site header. We've completely redesigned it so it should be released today, maybe tomorrow morning. Updated the header of all our products. Now it is more intuitive, it is easier to use, and you can see the balance there as well as your trading level.
We've updated our FAQ pages. We've expanded it and written more articles.
We've enabled SSR for our Launchpad and payment products. We migrated our Launchpad and payment products to a separate environment, which will make it easier for us to develop.
We've improved our 2FA reliability and debugged the platform. We had some external testers and internal testers, and we had some people from the community test it to a face, and now things are almost perfect.
We've implemented the user onboarding functionality, which should be released either this weekend or Monday. It's a simpler and more intuitive and user-friendly way in terms of user experience. When you log in, we kind of walk you through what you need to do to get engaged in our platform.
We've also finally redesigned our user levels. Updated the terms and the design. It is now even better and more intuitive.

Let's move on to the mobiles. That's the second way that you engage with our platform. As I mentioned before, we develop Android and iOS separately. Let's start with Android.

We're 80% of the way through the redesigned Withdraw by Address flow. It will improve the user experience and make the application even more intuitive and faster.
We've improved the quality of the applications in key areas such as
staking page,
selection of the cryptocurrency networks when you want to withdraw or deposit on different addresses,
the display of the percentages,
the user levels,
the cryptocurrency rate change,
redesigned all of the main dashboard and quite a lot more.

Let's move on to the iOS map. That's what you have on your Apple devices.

We improved the withdrawal flow and all the areas I mentioned earlier. In particular, we've also redesigned the Launchpad voting screen. We're planning to have a lot more projects listed on our platform by the beginning of the summer. We redesigned the way you can hide balances. That's a very popular feature.
We've also improved the accuracy. We shortened them because sometimes they were too long.

For both of the apps,

We've completed a new version of the Launchpad Token Sale window. We've added new information to improve the FAQs and we now have different stages of fundraising there. Launchpad is currently fully completed on the mobile apps.

CryptoBank

We've released the Statistics Service, which collects data on staking, regular accounts and savings accounts so that we can perform analysis and provide you with reports.
We've also improved the FAQ for the banking page.
We've done the refactoring of a large amount of system parts on the backend, we've improved the transfers from savings in the regular account, improved the internal commands within the unit, improved the sorting mechanisms when you sort your transactions or when you try to buy crypto and we've improved quite a lot the payment system methods for the Mercuria payment provider.
Also, now the platform would tell you that some payment provider would be best for you. Now we've improved the system and read your IP to know what country you are in. We will be able to show you only the payment providers that you can actually use in that country.

So let's move on to the other pillar of our platform, the exchange.

We've improved the order book and the accuracy, we've improved the matching performance and now it's faster and it allocates the assets even better.
We've also improved the iceberg orders.
The trading view charts were lagging a little bit. We've improved the performance of the trading chart refresh. Now you'll get even better visual information about the asset you're trying to trade.

Let's move on to the internal services of our platform until we move on to the questions.

Treasury, that's the department that deals with withdrawals and kinds of internal accounts, internal audits, etc.

We've updated the deposit scanning and monitoring services to update user balances more quickly.
We've improved the error recovery process for the Memo ID. For example, if you send us money without the Member ID, it will get stuck in the intermediary's account. And we will have to physically retrieve it. Don't forget to include your Member ID, but we've kind of reworked the system so that it shouldn't be a problem.
We've added some additional monitoring to improve the reporting for the customer support team. They will have even better information when they load the reports. And when they're trying to run audits on specific accounts. In terms of security, we've integrated nieces for the development of the EKS cluster within the platform.
We've done the security audit service, and we've done some optimization work that makes our system more scalable.

I think I'm done with all the major updates. I think those are the main changes we've had this month. So let's move on to questions. Diana, please go ahead.

Diana (Host): All right. Here the first question is, can you tell us more about the competitions? What are they for? Because it doesn't seem like they're meant to attract new users to PointPay.

Vladimir (CEO): I disagree. First of all, the more people hold our tokens, the more people will have them on our platform. That's number one.

Number two, it increases user engagement, maybe not in terms of new people joining our platform, but it increases the engagement of the users that are already on our platform. As you know, we raised money quite a while ago, almost two years ago. That means we have a lot of sleepers. I call them sleeper users who joined our platform two to three years ago and they keep a lot of money on PointPay but they don't trade. They don't do anything. They just keep the money. We want to make sure that those sleeper users are activated, which will generate commissions for us.

That will also improve our ratings on CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko. We want you to visit our platform, even if you don't do anything, it still helps us. If you visit, our rating on similar sites will improve, and Google mechanisms will recommend our site to other users. It will certainly help our business first of all, and secondly, because of the way the Internet works, it will eventually attract new users.

With our new competitions, we are testing our platform. We want to make sure it's perfect. You'll report a bug and we'll make it better. We want to create a bug-free platform. In the future, trading competitions will continue. But they will continue in a slightly different way, we will have a leaderboard where people can see how much they are trading, etc. It will probably be developed towards the beginning of the summer.

We have a lot of users that write to us, we have a lot of users that report bugs on our website. Essentially it's not going to attract new users maybe, but it's going to help the new potential users that are going to come to our platform in a few months to see a platform that doesn't have bugs. So that's one thing. And secondly, they will see a platform that will have a good rating on CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko because we will have high trading volumes and high website traffic.

That's my answer to you.

Diana (Host): Recently, there was a post of the top positions. CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko, what was the background on which they were achieved?

Vladimir (CEO): As I said, they have completely different methodologies at the beginning. If you're interested in the methodologies, they have a separate page there.

CoinGecko's methodology is much more thorough, they take a lot of information from so many different sources. All are based on the ratings as well as the trust score, and they have to have been the token audits, the platform audits, the penetration testing, and we have to submit our team information, which we did. Now I think by the beginning of the summer we'll have the penetration testing and the internal and external platform audit from an independent crypto audit company, I can't remember what it's called. But we're kind of preparing for that right now. And when we get that, our trust score will go up by one or two, which will put us comfortably in the top 100.

CoinMarketCap is much simpler. They look at user engagement on similar web, they look at the APIs, etc, etc. So their methodology is much simpler, but it's different. And as I mentioned before, the CoinGecko, look at all the platforms, all the crypto trading platforms, centralized, decentralized, etc, etc.

So within our class on CoinGecko, we are confirmed 141st. So that's within all crypto trading platforms. I think within the centralized 87 within all of the platforms 141, that fits within the picture of where we are at the moment, but that will certainly increase in the future when our trading volumes will increase when we will have more visits to our website. And as we get those audits for the platform.

That's the answer to your question.

Diana (Host): Before you mentioned the situation regarding SVB, Silvergate, and Signature banks. So what do you think about what happened to them? What are the implications?

Vladimir (CEO): Well, anyone can make a mistake. The more money, the more responsibility, the more risk. The banks that didn't look at it closely - they closed down because of business mistakes and business decisions. As far as I know, it was mainly due to the fact that the banks were investing in long-term bonds, government bonds, and the yields on those bonds were quite low.

We all remember the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008. I'm old enough to remember it. Interest rates were in the five to eight percent range. But then after that, after everything happened, all the banks were risk-averse. And interest rates went to zero. There were times when they were negative, like in Japan. But then all of a sudden the banks raised their interest rates. For example, the British, the Bank of England, raised interest rates to four and a half percent, and people are saying that they might go up to five percent a year. When people started withdrawing money, the bank couldn't pay.

But you know, it's a good thing that we learned a lot from the mistakes. Did you know that Biden said that all deposits would be protected? The government was able to save the deposits. The problem was that 90% of the deposits were unsecured, which means that pretty big corporations had a lot of money in their banks. Some of it wasn't uninsured in terms of the larger impact within the industry, which is probably why we're seeing the rise in the price of bitcoin with all the banks collapsing. I think that's my view. I'm not a great economist, even though I studied economics in college, but that's my understanding of what happened. If you want more in-depth information, there are a lot of videos on YouTube and maybe read something in Forbes. But yeah, that's my take on it.

Diana (Host): How are the preparations for the marketing campaign going? The Crypto market is showing good growth, isn't it time to act?

Vladimir (CEO): As I said in the previous AMA sessions, we're kind of looking at the market. Obviously, we've seen a rebound and the end of the crypto winter, but now I don't know what's happening. You know, it could be the crypto fall, the bitcoin price is jumping up and down. It's booming now. But you know, with the SVB, Silvergate, FTX, etc., who knows what could happen next.

We are waiting for some kind of stability. If there is a boom, we will certainly be there. But right now I think the market is still quite volatile. And I think there will be further developments. We're watching the market, we've got some great things to do, and we're going to have a great platform update at the beginning of the summer.

We've completed the redesign of the entire platform, all the applications, all the internal mechanics of the platform. We still have a little bit of work to do, it's at least a month or so. But if the market continues on the trajectory that we're on now, it's going to be great because we're going to go to market on a high. When our platform is completely ready. We will be able to do the marketing campaign.

But right now we have to wait and see because the market is quite volatile. I don't think it's the end of the growth of bitcoin, but I think there will be a lot of regulatory changes, especially in America and maybe in Europe. There have been some developments in the European Commission, they're kind of rethinking how they're going to treat crypto assets. We are going to see a lot of regulatory changes this year. And we will have to see what happens there because that will definitely affect the market.

But yeah, I think on our side, and in terms of the marketing campaign, we are kind of targeting the beginning of the summer. I think it's a great time to, you know, summer crypto summer, I think the summer will hold great things for us. And then hopefully we'll see the marketing campaign. But obviously, by the beginning of the summer, we'll see some negative ways in which the crypto sphere is developing, we'll see some negative regulatory updates, and maybe we'll have to postpone it for a couple of months. But I personally see that, yeah, the summer, the summer will be about the time that we plan to launch the campaign.

Diana (Host): Some users think that withdrawing from the PointPay platform is a long and complicated process. Is there a way to make it easier or faster or not to go through the KYC process?

Vladimir (CEO): Well, first of all, no, you have to go through the KYC process. We are a regulated company. We're regulated in Europe and we're getting licensed, we're in the process of getting licensed in America. You have to go through KYC, it's a regulatory framework. We don't want our business to be shut down. We have the licenses in Europe, we have the license in Lithuania. And that license says that we have to collect information on every single user. There is no question about that.

In terms of the way our withdrawal works, right now most of the withdrawals, if it's a small withdrawal, are processed literally within seconds. If it's a larger withdrawal, we're officially saying it might take longer, in the neighborhood of 24 hours. It shouldn't be a problem at all. If you pass the KYC.

But for example, we had a very, very large withdrawal this week. It took us a little over 24 hours to process it because we had to verify the account. As I said, because of the regulatory framework, for example, for withdrawals over $10,000, we have to do a lot more verification for those account holders.

Under the new system that we will be rolling out in early summer, it will be much faster. I think we will get that 24-hour wait down to an hour for the large withdrawals. And literally within seconds for most transactions. So that's where we are.

Diana (Host): Will there be a special token burn at the start of the marketing campaign?

Vladimir (CEO): As I said, I'm not allowed by law to say. By the way, our burn schedule does exist. But it's not public. I am not allowed to comment. But I can tell you that the next burn will be 3.2 million PointPay tokens.

But we have a lot of events planned for the launch of the marketing campaign. And a token burn might be one of them. It may not be one of them. Neither confirming nor denying.

Diana (Host): Does PointPay planning to create its own blockchain and move the PXP token to it?

Vladimir (CEO): Well, I'm actually quite surprised by this question. Of course, there are examples of projects that have done exactly that. They created a token and then they created a blockchain. Right now, because we've added a lot of networks to our platform, it costs you. I remember when it used to cost you up to $70 to withdraw money from somewhere. Now it's less than $1. I personally don't think there's a business need for it right now.

But if you look at the Binance network, it is pretty much a complete copy of the Ethereum network. Maybe PXP 20 network could happen within the next few years. But at the moment I don't think we need it with the current prices of Ethereum and other networks. But it could happen.

Diana (Host): When do you plan to add a PXP token for PointPay purchases? It would be more convenient to buy and use directly on the platform without unnecessary transfers.

Vladimir (CEO): As I said, we are planning to add the ability to buy and sell PXP through our services. But not now. As I mentioned before, it's one of the requirements of the team because we are still pursuing the Tier One exchange listing. Hopefully, that will happen this year. But one of the requirements that we're not allowed to do is list our own token on our own exchange because all token volumes have to be independently verified.

Now you can trade PXP on five exchanges. And they're pretty much all major platforms within the top 50. Once we get listed on the tier-one exchange, we will list PXP on the PointPay exchange shortly after. But at the moment it is not doing any favors.

Diana (Host): Okay, thank you. Will there ever be a way to add a beneficiary to our accounts to preserve our assets? For example, if someone becomes ill?

Vladimir (CEO): I heard about this suggestion, probably from the same person. Yes, at the moment we have no plans to add such a feature. Maybe when our platform gets a lot bigger we will, but there is no business case for us to do that, to be honest.

Because this question was asked a few times before I consulted with our legal team and they told me that if it's the case that some of the token holders will die and given that they have passed KYC on our platform, we know that the account belongs to them. Their heirs or the executors of their estates will have to write to us saying that they want to get their money back and, if there is a will, we will give that money to that person. That's how it will work.

If somebody dies, they have to write it in their will, leave a note saying that I have money in PointPay and I want to leave it for somebody. If there is no will, we can't do that. Write to us for customer support, we will forward you to the legal team and they will deal with the situation on an individual basis.

Diana (Host): Well, that was the last question. Thank you very much for your answers.

Vladimir (CEO): Thank you very much for your help, Diana. Also thank everybody for your questions.

With the arrival of spring, we're actively preparing our platform to blossom. And I know that all of you can hardly wait for the marketing campaign to start and for PointPay to blossom. Thank you all. Again, don't forget about our trading competitions. Don't forget our suggestion competitions.

In the next few days, you will see the results for our Q1. Go ahead and read it, it will probably be released next week. Thanks again Diana for collecting the questions and helping me out today. And thank you all for supporting PointPay. That is all for now. See you next time on the last Thursday of April.

Thank you all and have a great time!

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