Transcript of AMA with CEO of PointPay – Vladimir Kardapoltsev, 28 September 2023

Dear PointPay family,

PointPay CEO Vladimir Kardapoltsev participated in a traditional AMA session on September 28, 2023. He shared the latest news about PointPay, made several announcements, as well as answered your questions!

Below is a summary of the AMA held on the 28th of September, 2023.

AMA Transcript

Vlad (CEO): Hello, PointPay family! Welcome back to our traditional end-of-the-month AMA session. As always, I'm joined by Diana, who has diligently collected your questions from the form we posted last week. Additionally, she'll be gathering questions from our Telegram chat, Discord, and YouTube chat. So, let's get started.

Diana (Host): Hello, everyone. Let's dive into the latest news and announcements from Vlad.

Vlad (CEO): Thank you, Diana. Let's kick things off with the most recent update on our platform – the staking rate increase that ran from September 1st to September 15th. If you deposited PXPs from an external wallet to PointPay during that period, you received an extra 1% on your selected staking. This offer proved to be quite popular, and while it has ended, we might have something similar in store very soon. We understand how important it is for you to stake your tokens and get the best possible percentage.

We've also had a couple of cryptocurrency listings recently. We conducted a questionnaire ranking competition on Twitter, and you, our community, voted for Quant to be listed on our platform, and so we did. This shows our commitment to engaging with our community. We'll be running more similar competitions in the future, so please participate and vote for your favorite tokens. Keep in mind that they need to be well-known and widely traded to be considered for listing, as liquidity is crucial. Look out for a similar competition next week, as we plan to list more tokens to support our community-driven platform development strategy.

As we approach the end of the third quarter of this year, we'll be publishing a Q3 report soon, along with our goals for the next two quarters, covering Q1 and Q2 of 2024. Make sure to check it out.

Our legal team has been hard at work, and we've successfully added a remarkable 123 countries to our iOS app. Some of you may recall that the iOS app wasn't available for a while during the summer, but we've made significant progress. We started from zero, added Lithuania and the US, expanded to cover the entire European Union, and now we have users in 123 countries. This includes significant regions like the European Union, Brazil, the US, and several African countries. We'll continue to work on expanding this list even further. Notably, we're working on India and China, which have unique regulatory challenges.

We have successfully expanded our presence across a wide range of countries, including all of the European Union, the United States, the majority of South America, and most of Africa. However, there are some exceptions, such as countries like Iran, which is under sanctions. Initially, we had some Iranian users, but due to the ambiguous situation, we had to ask them to withdraw their funds, as we are unable to support them. Similarly, we cannot operate in North Korea. That being said, we are available in more than 123 countries through iOS. For those not in those 123 countries, you can access our platform on Android or via our website, which is freely available. Keep in mind that iOS regulation is stricter, which is why the availability differs.

Furthermore, we've introduced a new staking option on our platform, ATOM, which offers an impressive 8% APR for 30-day staking. Many of you have taken advantage of this opportunity. We plan to add more listings to our platform. This is just the beginning. Some of you have converted your precious crypto into these staking options, which is great to see. We've also had Polkadot staking, and it's still running. Additionally, we'll be introducing more staking options in the coming weeks to attract more users to our platform. It's a short-term staking but low risk, so if you have Atom or Polkadot, consider staking them.

As well, we've expanded our asset offerings with the addition of Turbo. This token was requested by our community, and we collaborated on a mutual listing and marketing activities. It has been successful, with many Turbo users joining our platform. Turbo is primarily intended for NFT trading and promotes art. The platform is AI-managed, aligning with current crypto trends. We've also listed Quant on our platform, as it was voted for by the community. We value our community's input and carefully consider your suggestions. Quant is now available on our platform, so feel free to trade it.

Whats more, we've been diligently focusing on our B2B services, with several businesses joining our platform and taking advantage of our business accounts. As I might have mentioned earlier, we offer business accounts on our platform, and we've had around 15 businesses register and successfully complete KYC verification. We plan to expand this service further, and they come with a slightly different fee structure. Overall, it's been a success story, and we are actively promoting this aspect of our business.

In terms of global news, September has been relatively uneventful as everyone was getting back to school and resuming their activities after the summer holidays. However, in the world of crypto, there's one significant development worth mentioning. Binance recently announced its decision to leave Russia, and this is indeed significant news. Binance is one of the most popular cryptocurrency platforms globally, and its presence in Russia was substantial. This move opens up new opportunities, particularly in the B2B market, as many Russians were using their services. Russia's relatively lenient banking environment allowed for a thriving crypto market, though it did come with some challenges and possibly illegal activities. However, Binance's decision to align with global sanctions and expand its presence in America and Europe led to this departure. They will transfer users to an existing exchange, although the specifics are not clear. This development will undoubtedly affect the crypto landscape in Russia. Other platforms, including Telegram, are looking to capitalize on this situation, and we may consider our strategy in this evolving market. We had previously scaled back marketing efforts in Russia due to its complexities, but it remains a significant crypto market. We'll observe how the situation unfolds.

Vlad (CEO): That wraps up the global news, and it's been around 15 minutes. Now, let's proceed with the questions. Diana, please.

Diana (Host): Alright. So here we are. So the first question is does point pay have a specific plan regarding the number of new targets on the platform like three five per month.

Vlad (CEO): Well, we don't have a fixed plan for adding tokens to our platform. We're aware that some platforms have a vast number of pairs, many of which are inactive. We didn't want to go down that path. Our approach is more thoughtful. Firstly, we consider whether there's a demand in the market for a particular cryptocurrency. If there's no market, it's not advisable to list it. Users can easily access such tokens on decentralized platforms like Uniswap. However, if there's a strong market, we will consider listing.

Currently, we've been adding around two cryptocurrencies per month, but this number can vary. It's essential to emphasize that our strategy is largely community-driven. We've identified about 100 cryptocurrencies that we believe have a good market and are actively traded. However, with some of these, we'll need to actively engage the community. For instance, we might select a currency that's trading about a million or two million dollars daily and collaborate on co-marketing efforts. This way, we attract users who are interested in those tokens. Our strategy now revolves around attracting users.

It might not lead to thousands of new users at once, but small steps matter. For instance, when we listed a currency like Worldcoin, we attracted around hundreds new users. Each user is valuable to us. It's part of our gradual plan. We aim to list more cryptocurrencies, although not all of them simultaneously. It's crucial to ensure that these tokens are actively traded on our platform. Listing hundreds of tokens without trading activity can negatively impact our rating and the reputation of those tokens.

This approach helps bring in new communities and provides us with valuable marketing opportunities.

Diana (Host): Lately, there have been very few mentions of bug fixes and improvements. Is this no longer priority?

Vlad (CEO): I understand the concern, but addressing bugs and making improvements is still a priority for us. In fact, every week for the past two months, we've been running a bug and suggestion competition. It's been quite successful, and it helped us identify and eliminate many bugs. Most of these were related to translations rather than fundamental issues with the system. Unlike our old platform, which had more significant bugs, we now have a good handle on the major problems.

We're planning a major update for the German language, as our German community translator conducted a comprehensive audit and found some translation errors. We've also received valuable input from users in Japan or Indonesia who provided a thorough review of our apps. While there are still minor issues to address, we've reached a stable level where the platform is not plagued by frequent problems. This allows us to focus more on development.

In addition to our internal efforts, we're planning to set up an external bug reporting platform, similar to a bug bounty program. This will involve an independent company where we deposit a sum of money, say $5,000 or $10,000. Users can then report bugs through this platform, which will determine whether they are substantial or not. Many major exchanges use such services, enhancing transparency. We believe our platform is transparent and stable enough to have bugs reported through an external service, rather than us or our CTO making subjective judgments. This external service will concentrate on more significant issues within our platform and is expected to be introduced by the end of this year.

Implementing this will also earn us additional points on platforms like CoinGecko, which will improve our ranking. Such bug bounty programs are a common practice in the industry, and they also serve as a marketing strategy. It's essentially a way for us to demonstrate our confidence in the platform's security and transparency. Users can attempt to hack our platform, and if they succeed, we'll reward them. This approach signals our belief that our platform is robust and open to scrutiny. Consequently, we've reduced the frequency of publishing bug fix reports in recent months. This change reflects our belief that we have largely addressed the minor issues, and our focus is now on broader aspects of platform development.

Diana (Host): Is PointPay currently only working on b2c services, or is b2b also in development?

Vlad (CEO): We do offer B2B services on our platform, although it may not be widely advertised yet. We have special accounts, known as business accounts, within our platform. As I mentioned in my earlier introduction, we had around 15 businesses apply this month to use our platform. These businesses use PointPay as a way to purchase cryptocurrencies for their operations. They operate with a different fee structure compared to regular users because they connect through APIs to their external terminals. This is how our B2B services work. We plan to promote them more in the future.

Currently, we primarily sell these services through our sales team at conferences and similar events. We've been averaging about 10 to 15 new clients per month, which is a promising start. We also offer KYB (Know Your Business) services. When businesses apply, we verify the legitimacy of the business entity and then provide them with API keys to access our platform for cryptocurrency purchases. This is part of our expansion strategy, but it's currently in a beta stage where we're testing the platform. We have around 50 clients so far, and we hope to attract many more in the future. While this is not yet a public offering, it's something we're actively exploring. We may create a public page for it in the future, but for now, it's a trial-and-error approach. These businesses enjoy favorable terms, knowing that it's part of our testing phase. However, we do plan to expand this aspect of our business further. I believe that catering to businesses is a crucial avenue for our future success because crypto adoption is a global phenomenon, and businesses need reliable crypto transaction solutions.

Diana (Host): How many assets are planned to be added to the staking feature? Should we expect new terms and conditions?

Vlad (CEO): This month, we've added one more staking asset, which is Polkadot. We also have Atom on PointPay available for staking, so currently, we offer three staking assets. Atom will likely be removed in the next couple of days as the 30-day staking period concludes. However, Polkadot will remain available.

In the coming weeks, we plan to introduce new staking assets. We'll be closely monitoring how users engage with this feature as we fine-tune the way it works on our platform. If we see that staking is popular and attracts a significant number of users, we'll expand this part of our business further. It's worth noting that a year or two ago, we only had one staking asset, which was BXP. Now we have three, and I anticipate that we'll add even more in the future. Some of these stakings might have longer terms, similar to what you see on platforms like Binance, where staking is offered for a select number of assets. We might consider similar approaches if they prove to be popular.

At the moment, we're testing the waters to gauge user interest and engagement. We have users who have deposited assets and are staking on our platform, which is promising. If we see continued interest and growth, we'll definitely expand our staking offerings. So, stay tuned for more updates on this front.

Diana (Host): Currently=, PointPay is present in 123 countries, how much does this cover the geography of PointPay users?

Vlad (CEO): Well, the majority of our users, let me clarify. It's not 123 countries for all platforms. It's 123 countries available on iOS. In fact, we are available in all other regions on Android. Generally, Europe and America primarily use iOS, with around 30% of users on Android and 70% on iOS. However, in the rest of the world, particularly in regions like South America and Africa, the majority of users prefer Android, making up almost 80-90% of the user base.

So, in terms of global reach, we have all corners of the world covered. The countries not covered by iOS are covered by Android. We've got a substantial presence in the majority of Android-using countries, including South America and Africa, which are significant markets for crypto. In places like Brazil and Nigeria, where crypto transactions are common, Android is the preferred platform.

While Europe and America favor iOS, these regions generally involve higher transaction amounts due to higher GDP and income levels. South America and Africa, on the other hand, see smaller transaction amounts. So, it aligns with the economic conditions in these areas.

We are working on expanding our iOS presence in more countries, and our team is actively working on this. However, I want to emphasize that we are already covering about 95% of the global market. Some regions like Singapore have specific regulatory challenges and associated costs, so we are exploring those markets carefully.

To recap, we are available in 95% of the regions, and the 123 countries mentioned are specific to iOS. For the rest of the world, Android is the primary platform, and we are fully accessible on Android. You only need internet access and an Android phone to download our app, as Android doesn't have the country-specific restrictions that iOS imposes. We're prepared with the necessary licenses to provide access to our platform in all these regions.

Diana (Host): As Bybit is currently suspended in the UK this means margin trading would be as well, wouldn’t this be a perfect time to launch margin trading to grab as many customers from Bybit as possible?

Vlad (CEO): ByBit is indeed an excellent platform, and we are actively exploring the possibility of introducing margin trading on our platform. However, the key consideration here is how many people actually use it. In our research, we've found that only about 5% of users engage in margin trading, and they typically prefer larger platforms like Kraken and Binance, which also offer options and margin trading.

The market dynamics matter a lot. We can certainly add margin trading, but we need to assess whether it's worth the risk and investment. If it turns out that very few people use it, we would essentially be spending resources on a feature that goes unused.

Our research indicates that the majority of users prefer a straightforward exchange experience. They want simplicity and ease of use. They're not interested in navigating complex trading interfaces with multiple options and settings. They are often willing to pay slightly higher fees for the convenience of a quick exchange.

Margin trading and options trading are more advanced strategies, typically favored by professional traders. Most users, especially those in it for the long term, are not concerned about slight variations in exchange rates. They value simplicity and a hassle-free experience.

While we may consider introducing margin trading in the future, it's not a complicated feature to implement. We need to monitor user engagement, market demand, and assess the associated risks. It's possible that we might introduce it at a later time when there is a more significant demand for such services.

Currently, we believe our focus should be on encouraging more people to use crypto and trade in general. Attracting professional traders to our platform is a challenge, as they often prefer larger exchanges due to higher liquidity. Margin trading is on our radar, but we are carefully evaluating its feasibility in terms of risk, market dynamics, and potential return on investment.

Diana (Host): I really cannot understand why is not possible to trade PXP on PointPay platform? Explain me the reasons to this and when will be possible?

Vlad (CEO): We have made a strategic decision not to list the PXP token on our own exchange. Instead, PXP can be exclusively traded on other exchanges. The reason behind this decision is that we are actively working towards obtaining a tier one listing. To achieve this, we need to ensure that our trading volume is independently verifiable. Since a significant number of people stake PXP tokens on our platform, introducing PXP trading on our platform could lead to questionable data. Currently, all PXP trading occurs on four or five other exchanges, making the data independently verifiable.

Our goal is to gain the trust of tier one exchanges, and this involves them not having any doubts about the validity of our data. If a substantial portion of PXP trading were to happen on PointPay, it could raise concerns for tier one exchanges. Therefore, we have chosen not to list PXP on our platform at this time.

Our plan is to list PXP on our exchange after successfully achieving the tier one listing. We want to maintain some trading activity on tier one exchanges before listing it on PointPay. This approach will help us gain a strong presence on tier one exchanges and enhance the credibility of our data.

I understand your concern about withdrawal fees, but there are multiple platforms where you can freely trade PXP, and some of them offer competitive withdrawal fees. So, for now, you have the option to trade PXP on other reputable platforms while we continue to work towards our tier one listing.

Diana (Host): Are you seeing an increase account growth creation due to the increase in availability to other countries?

Vlad (CEO): We've always been available in various countries. PXP, our token, has been accessible worldwide through PointPay. Users can easily create an account on PointPay, then withdraw and trade PXP on several platforms like Uniswap and Bitrix. While the token price fluctuates, we anticipate an increase in its value once we launch our marketing campaign. We plan to boost engagement and utility on our platform, enhancing the use cases for PXP. This, in turn, will contribute to an increase in its value. Just like other successful coins, when we increase utility by offering discounts, fee payments, and other features, we expect the value of PXP to rise. With the recent introduction of a new platform version and a remarkable app for mobile devices, we're confident that as more users join and more use cases for PXP emerge, the token's value will see significant growth. We've already observed a notable increase in registrations, especially from the 123 countries where we've recently introduced PointPay.

Diana (Host): Are there plans for new time-limited offers? Did you like the results of this one?

Vlad (CEO): Yes, I'm pleased with the results of the staking offer we recently introduced. We're planning to run more time-limited staking offers in the coming weeks. We mentioned the PXP staking increase of 1%, and we might consider something similar in the future. This initial offer was designed to gauge user engagement and was limited to new external deposits. We had approximately 5 million PXPs deposited on our platform, with around 4 million of them being staked. This was a great response, and if this type of offer proves popular, we'll certainly consider running similar promotions again.

We are always exploring new ideas and incorporating a time element can encourage quicker action from users. So, it's in my plan to introduce similar offers by the end of this year, possibly multiple times. These offers could involve staking, deposits, cashbacks, user level upgrades, or fee discounts. I'm constantly looking for ways to enhance our offerings, so you can expect more time-limited promotions in the near future.

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

Vlad (CEO): Thank you, Diana, for joining me. It was an amazing experience. I appreciate everyone for tuning in, and I'm glad we managed to keep it under an hour this time, despite me not feeling well. Thank you all for your support. We have some exciting results coming up next week, and I'll see you on the last Thursday of October. Stay safe, wear a mask if necessary, and take precautions against illnesses. We have new marketing activities and exciting news on the horizon.

Also, for PXP holders, we'll be pushing for KYC verification. About 50% of you have already completed it, and we'll be launching an email campaign next month to encourage the remaining holders to do so. KYC helps us with regulatory compliance and demonstrates the authenticity of our user base. We have several conferences lined up for the coming months, and I'll personally attend a major one in Dubai in December.

That's all for our news and announcements. I hope you enjoyed the AMA session. Stay tuned for our third-quarter results and our strategic goals for the next year's first and second quarters. Thank you all very much, have a wonderful weekend and day, and I'll see you next month. Bye!

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💰 Earn up to 7% yearly with PXP staking program in PointPay Bank: https://pointpay.io/staking

💡 Check PointPay Live-Roadmap (PointPay development in real-time): https://pointpay.io/live-roadmap/

🏦 Remember, we are PointPay, and we are beyond banking!