The following is a transcript from our April 2019 YouTube AMA with Daniel and Nathan Worsley. Thank you to the community for your submissions and we hope that you enjoy the AMA this month.
Nathan:
Hey everyone. I'm Nathan from LocalCoinSwap. I'm the Chief Technical Officer on the project and I'm here today to answer some of the community questions in our latest AMA.
Daniel:
Hi, everyone. My name's Daniel and I'm the Chief Operating Officer here at LocalCoinSwap.
So let's get right into the AMA for April...
Q) I love the latest UI update, what do the new badges and symbols on the trades mean.
Daniel:
So we have a have a full overhaul of the front end of the site, which includes new badges for the different trade advertisements that you can see on the homepage and when searching through the different listings. Now we have a little lightning bolt badge, and what this means is a fast respondent. So, people that respond quickly to trades will all have this, this sort of lightning bolt symbol next to their name, so you know that when you initiate a trade with them, they're likely to respond quickly. We also have a legacy trader badge which looks like a trophy and what this means is it's a trader that we verified as having high volume and lots of trades on a competing platform.
Now, this might be LocalBitcoins or LocalEthereum. So we want to reward traders who have a good trading history on other platforms. So they have a step up and they can bring their customers over to LocalCoinSwap and start trading on there with a lot of reputation from day one.
Q) Do you think that this is the end of the crypto winter?
Nathan:
The only thing I know about the future of cryptocurrency prices is that I don't know, and that anyone who claims they do know is either ignorant or trying to fraud you in some way. So I can't say whether crypto winter is over and neither can anyone else in the market. The only thing you can be sure of is that if anyone tells you they know, then they're lying, they don't know. So I hope that the crypto winter is over and we see a rise in prices again like we had in 2017. But who knows? cryptocurrency is very unpredictable and anything could happen.
Q) Are you planning on listing the Tron based USDT Tether token?
Daniel:
The current implementation of USDT Tether that we have listed on the platform is the Omni Layer Tether. So the Omni Layer is a range of tokens that are built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. Now the Omni Layer Tether is actually the original and the most popular USDT token that exists. So we don't really plan to list any other USDTs at this moment, because they're all worth the same value and it doesn't add anything to the platform to support multiple variants of Tether. So at this stage, No, we won't be listing the Tron based USDT. However, in the future, if this becomes the most popular and the most sought after Tether, then we may implement it then.
Q) When will we see the update to the metric page, selectable date range, mobile optimization, and pie charts?
Nathan:
We do actually have some updates for the metrics page planned for the future, but I can't give a date on that because we have a lot of priorities we want to cover first, updating the metrics page is not saying that's going to drive revenue to the platform, so our focus for development in the coming months are going to be for specific things that we think will drive revenue for the platform.
We've got a little bit of a new project in the works that will be telling you about shortly, and coming up we’ve got some updates to the profile pages, the contract experience for trading, and a few other bits and pieces that more directly target user growth and revenue.
So yeah, stuff like updating graphs and pie charts and mobile optimization for the metrics page, it is something that we want to do, but it's not our priority at the moment.
Q) Any possibility to see a new crypto project listed soon?
Daniel:
So we've recently listed a few new projects on the platform, the most recent of them was NEXO. We haven't seen yet huge amounts of trading volume in these altcoins and these new projects that we've listed, so our key focus for the coming months is going to be increasing trading volume in the currencies that we currently have on the platform mainly being Bitcoin, Ethereum, and some of the other sort of tier one cryptocurrencies. The things we're going to focus on now, rather than listing new currencies is also improving the platform in a way that will help convert users. So, reducing the amount of trades that expire, increasing the amount of people that come onto the platform and turn into a revenue-generating trader and things like that.
Q) Can we again have receipts of Pre-ICO purchases as I try to get them from the ICO website?
Daniel:
Once the ICO had been completed, we actually removed the ICO website and in place, we [edit] actually added the exchange, so you can’t actually have access to the Pre-ICO purchase receipts as they were on the ICO site, but if you need any information about your ICO purchases, then just email the team at team@localcoinswap.com or raise a ticket through our Support Portal and we'll be happy to supply you with all the information that you need regarding any of your ICO purchases.
Q) Do we plan to delist any digital currency that has not been traded? Or that has not been traded or is looking less likely in terms of maintenance costs and expenses?
Nathan:
Yes, absolutely. We have a few tokens at the moment on the platform that ERC-20 that are moving to a mainnet, and if those tokens haven't seen significant trading volume, then we're not going to support those tokens when they move to a mainnet. The reason is that implementing new cryptocurrency is a lot of work and it takes away from other more productive things that we can be doing. If we spend weeks implementing a cryptocurrency that's taking away from a lot of other things that we could be doing, and if we're only going to see a tiny amount of trading volume in that cryptocurrency at the end of the day, then it's just not worth it.
So I don't have any specific examples off the top of my head, but if you look through our ERC-20 list there will be a few coming up with the mainnet that we won't be supporting anymore. Obviously, if demand changes or the market changes in the future, then we'll be happy to implement the mainnet when the time is right.
Q) What were your initial expectations when you created the April promo with a $5 return and how is the result been?
Daniel:
The initial expectations for the April promo were that people will come to the platform who may not really be ready to trade or may not be comfortable trading peer to peer, and then they will initiate their first trade simply because they would be getting $5 for free. Now, the hope was to convert these users into regular traders on the platform to then generate more revenue from them in the future.
Now, the results so far has been slightly less than expected. We thought we were going to have a big rush of people coming to take part in this promotion, but unfortunately, the turnout has been reasonably low. Now this isn't really an issue because not too much development work or really marketing work went into promoting this and all the systems that have been developed can be used for different promotions in the future. When you're implementing new ideas for marketing, you never really know what's going to be successful and what's not and all you can do is try things. and if they don't work, switch over, pivot and try something new.
So we're going to have more promotions and more competitions coming up in the future, and hopefully, ones where we expect to see better results.
Q) Will we be able to download a CSV file of past trades on the platform for our records?
Nathan:
If you need a CSV file of all of your transactional trading history for any reason, at the moment, it's not a feature, but you can email support and we can provide those transactions for you. Coming up, I will look at providing a way to download those in an Excel or CSV format.
Q) Will you implement soon, API documentation?
Nathan:
Actually, the API is something that we've been working on quite hard recently and it's quite close to being ready for being launched, we've already had a functioning API for quite some time, but this will be an API with some specific features just to help you trade algorithmically, including the ability to respond to chat messages, and to bypass the MFA or Google Authenticator when logging in. So this will work through a special token code that you'll be able to get through your settings page. I can't give an exact date on when it will be ready to launch but it's probably about 75% complete at the moment. And when we launch it, it's going to come with a full website documenting every feature of it and how to use it. So yeah, that's actually something I'm quite excited about.
Q) Are we seeing a steady flow of new signups and how many to date
Daniel:
So far we have just over three and a half thousand signups and registered users on the exchange. Now we had a big amount in the first week or so after the hard launch, and this was due to A) the hard launch and also B) because a lot of people were signing up and registering such so that they can redeem their dividend tokens.
Now since then, we have actually had a steady sign up, we're seeing an average of 10 to 30 signups a day, since then. So that's sort of a good amount of signups, and now we're working to convert those users into traders on the platform.
Q) Staking is taking over with centralized exchanges. Some are now offering payouts as a custodial service. Could we do something similar?
Nathan:
In terms of staking with our ERC-20 token, I don't think it would work with our token economics. I just can't think of any way that we could actually integrate staking into our platform with the LocalCoinSwap token. If there was another token that we were implementing into the platform that had staking, then yeah, we could definitely look at implementing staking in that token on our platform, but to directly answer in relation to our native token, I just can't see any way that it would work with our token economics model.
Q) The team said that it directed all its efforts to create efforts to creating volume on the exchange, but for half a year of existence, the volume is still low. When will we see results? And how?
Nathan:
Well, yeah, the volume has been low. Since we opened the exchange, it has been increasing like we have week to week, we've generally seen higher volume than the week before. Obviously, the pace of growth has been quite slow, but I mean, this is to be expected. We've launched in a very difficult market, we've got some tough competition. And, despite spending a lot of money and efforts on marketing, you know, it's always difficult to gain traction. To answer when will we get results? Well, we're trying everything that we possibly can you know, if there's any kind of avenue for marketing that we don't know about, let us know, because we're willing to sort of, we're willing to investigate any way that we can drive volume to the platform.
Lately, we've been focusing on new feature development, which we think is revenue focused by looking at data metrics from the exchange and seeing where we can correlate sticking points or areas that we’re losing customers to try and pinpoint the features that will directly lead to volume. It's an ongoing process and we're always trying as hard as we can.
Q) What is the best performing cryptocurrency this quarter so far
Daniel:
So far, we've seen decent trading volume in about three main cryptocurrencies, those being Bitcoin, Ethereum, and our native LocalCoinSwap cryptoshare token. Now, we sort of always expected these cryptocurrencies and tokens to be on the high side of trading volume compared to other currencies on the platform, because they have a history of being peer-to-peer traded on other platforms, and of course, LocalCoinSwap Cryptoshares being our native token, we expected to see higher trading volume in that than some of the other tokens. So yeah, they're the sort of main ones that we've seen trading volume in so far, but we have had also some trading volume in some other cryptocurrencies including Dash, Monero, some Litecoin and things like that, also some BNB.
Q) Now the price of the token is around three cents. Does the team consider this to be a fair price? And why in your opinion did the price fall to this level?
Nathan:
Look, economically speaking, there's no such thing as a fair price. The fair price, so to speak for any kind of asset is just what people are willing to pay for it at the time. We don't really have any control over market supply and demand, and thus, we can't directly control the price of our token. I mean, the value of our token has never been based around the price you can sell it for. It's always been based around trying to grow and drive dividends which are given out to token holders. So I can't give a specific reason for a price falling or rising other than it's just the interaction of supply and demand in the market.
Q) Are there any upcoming events we will be going to now that we have a solid exchange for promotion?
Daniel:
So we are open to attending some public events and we're also looking to create some more competitions and promotions around the platform itself. So we can't announce too many of these ahead of time because we've had a bit of a history of competition stealing some of these ideas from us, but if you have any ideas on that you think we could use to help to promote the platform, then feel free to send them through and I'll be happy to look into them further.
Q) Will LCS complete the BNB swap soon?
Nathan:
I don't think that LCS will be supporting the Binance chain. Firstly, it's a competing chain. Secondly, it's a lot of development effort that's not likely to go into anything that's going to drive revenue to the platform, and third, we were disappointed with CZ breaking his promise to the cryptocurrency community to shill any product or any platform that supported BNB. We reached out to CZ and the Binance team. They didn't shill us and I've got to be honest, after the experience that we've had with them, it's very unlikely that will be supporting any kind of Binance related tokens in the future.
And that's all the questions we've had so far today.
So there are a few more questions, but a lot of them were repeats of questions that we've had in previous AMAs, so we decided to leave them out. Now we'll have another AMA potentially in a different format next month. So, in the meantime, please feel free to join the chat on Telegram and shoot through any further questions that you have to any of our staff across Telegram, the Support Portal, via email or even just submit them for the next AMA next month.
Thanks a lot, guys, see ya.
Here is a list of Ask Me Anything (AMA) events to read in your spare time:
Thank you fto everyone for your participation in our AMA this month and we look forward to chatting with you further throughout the month.