Crypto.com made a big announcement yesterday that they will be launching in the United States on July 14, 2019. They followed up today with a one hour AMA with the Founder and CEO Kris Marszalek on Twitter.
We have compiled below a summary of the AMA with some explanations for people new to the project. If you want a quick understanding of the projects you can watch these two interviews Altcoin Buzz did with Kris in February 2018 and March 2019.
Some of Kris’s favorite adjectives are ‘massive’ and ‘inevitable’ and in my opinion they do indeed summarise the future of crypto.com. Here are the key points of AMA on 26th June 2019, with some information regarding the background/notes of the topic which is my personal observation and opinion –
Regarding USA Launch
- Pushing the USA launch took a lot of time and effort from every part of the team and they have sorted out cybersecurity, product, technology, marketing, regulation, and compliances.
- It’s a huge milestone and achievement for crypto.com and has been working on this for two years.
- Background/Notes – MCO cards launched in Singapore in 2018, however, there had been delays in launching the cards in other territories and the community was not very happy about it. But now the announcement of the launch of the card in USA, in my opinion, is coming at a good time though not without competition with the likes of Coinbase and a few others. You can find more about this launch and information on their partner bank here.
Stats Shared
- Over 600,000 App installs
- Over 20% monthly growth rate
- Over 6,300,000 Million $MCO have been staked since it has been added to Crypto Earn that gives users upto 8% interest.
- Background/Notes – The circulating supply of $MCO is only 15,793,831 MCO and the total supply is 31,587,682 MCO. Due to competitive reasons crypto.com does not share stats on number of cardholders yet.
Regarding CRO airdrop Cancellation for MCO Holders
- Kris was quite displeased that he has to take this action but assures that there was no other way as they have been working very hard on the launch for past two years, jeopardizing it to continue the CRO airdrops would not be the right decision.
- He referred to the Kin lawsuit filed by the SEC and Crypto.com’s legal & compliance team’s learning from it. These new regulations have also got Bittrex to delist 50 coins, Binance to stop serving US customers and as regulatory and compliance requirements are tightening, there was no choice but to comply.
- Kris urged the community to not look at the sentiment of the airdrop cancellation but how these actions were taken by the company affect the underlying numbers and KPIs and believes they are set for a stable growth even though the CRO airdrop has been stopped.
- Background/Notes – For the legal requirement in US one asset cannot be paid as interest and dividend in another asset, regardless of region, hence airdrop of CRO on MCO holdings was problematic. The decision is also similar to what has happened with Celsius Network recently who have also changed their token policy.
MCO Card
- Massive Improvement on the old design
- All those who have staked 5,000, or 50,000 MCO for their card, will get automatic enrolment into Crypto Earn and will start receiving interest calculated from today, 26th June 2019.
- The development and launch of the tech feature and Payout of the above should be in September 2019.
- MCO Card also have VISA approvals for EU and they will be working with the same issuer as Singapore, Wirecard and the EU entity is called MCO Pay Limited
Buying Power – New Feature
- Buying Power is new Margin Trading tool for retail customers, providing a more conservative and safer system than Bitmax and upcoming feature on Binance, which are more for experienced traders.
- Expected release Q3 2019.
- Mentioned taking que from Robinhood and their solution for this.
- Background/Notes – Though unexpected I feel this feature will complete crypto.com app as a complete tool for crypto enthusiasts who want to dabble in crypto, want to invest, gamble a bit on leverage, buy things, earn interest, take a loan or simply buy and hold crypto with ease.
The Crypto.Com Chain CRO token discussion
- Listed on OKEX.
- The goal is to get people to use CRO more than any other currency.
- They are working on interesting utility with powerful features for CRO on the APP.
- Access to 900 brands gift cards using CRO pay rolled out first to CRO node holders with public testnet expected in Q3.
- CRO is coming to Crypto Earn and will be slightly different from other offerings on the feature currently.
- Background/Notes – CRO is still new to me, and I have a bit of a bias here as I prefer to buy/invest in working products with good token utility such as ETH, BNB, ENJ and MCO over projects like ADA. I also feel CRO is bit overvalued at the moment and there is little clarity as to the distribution plan for the coin whose holding are quite centralized. Maybe further updates will clarify more on this.
Kris discussed key indicators for choosing a project to be listed on the app and stated that they do detailed due diligence before listing any –
- The reputation of the project
- If it is delivering on promises
- Security audits on smart contracts
- What exchanges they are listed on and liquidity
- Size of the community
- Legal opinion for compliance
- No listing of security tokens
Other New Features and Updates
- New referral program – will be launched in July, it will be the 4th of 5th iteration of the program but will hopefully liked by the community as it will be extremely simple.
- China Office – Also achieved another milestone of setting up an office in Shenzhen, China for engineering and product development.
- Bank withdrawal of fiat should be enabled the end of September, early October 2019.
- Crypto Invest – New updates coming to this feature and will be available in new markets soon.
- Fast Transfer – Expected Launch Q4 2019, Crypto.com is working with a new 3rd party partner for this feature.
Other points
- ICO holder cards have been pending due to VISA approvals
- 5 Items have been ticked off on the roadmap
- Crypto.com is delivering faster than promised.
- ICY white cards will be shipping to US customers instantly, whereas Singapore customers will still have to wait.
- Further Asia expansion is dependent on approvals from VISA. Territories they will not be targeting right now are China, India, Japan, and Indonesia.
- No update on Canada card launch although an issuing partner has been identified.
- Briefly discussed marketing strategy in US using both online and offline channels.
- Believes that crypto.com will be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Facebook’s Libra coin and that it is the biggest news of the year as it tentatively brings 2.3 billion users to the crypto space. “More people than we can handle”
- Talking to Bitgo as insurance partner (NOTE: Bitgo is the same company that has provided insurance to NEXO)
