Business
Tail wind from the press coverage on GoldX and on the Fintech Malaysia award boosted February and early March numbers. However, customer acquisition stuttered in mid-March. New ads and audiences were introduced and trend has now reversed, and marketing spend has been increased to catch up with lost customers.
The HelloGold marketing team is making preparations to break into new acquisition channels, both online (SEO, email) as well as offline (activation, traditional media). Brand visibility will increase markedly in Q2.
On 22nd March, HelloGold was invited to the Malaysian Ministry of Finance Open Day. The team had a field day introducing the app to hundreds of attendees including the Malaysian Secretary General of Treasury, Tan Sri Irwan and Minister of Finance II, Datuk Seri Johari. Check out highlights from the event here.
Tan Sri Irwan instagramming his time at the HelloGold booth
HelloGold have also announced a partnership with Klean to “turn plastic into gold”. Press coverage has been warm (such as Vulcan Post, Says, and Business Insider). On top of the exposure, it is also opening new business and brand building opportunities. We hope to update more on that soon!
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure has taken a literal meaning!
On expansion into Thailand, the senior team had a productive meeting with officials from the Bank of Thailand. The expansion team is now finalising the regulatory side of things before kicking off Thai operations!
Roger, Robin, Ridwan, and Wykeen all smiles after the meeting with BoT
Technical
Updates to workstreams currently worked on by Tech:
KYC v2. KYCv2.2 development is complete and are now pending final tests before release. This release will allow expats in Malaysia to complete KYC in the app and start buying and selling gold. The new feature will open up another untapped market for HelloGold. It is also an important step towards the goal of opening up HelloGold’s app to a global market.
Wallet Integration. Tech implementation to integrate Axiata’s Boost wallet has been completed. Some changes remain to be completed on Axiata’s side and Business Development is working closely with them to ensure that users are provided with another way to top up cash into the app, beyond relying on traditional banking systems.
Product Blockchain. Tech has been running two nodes of the product permissioned blockchain in a staging environment as well as conducting verification tests. By integrating the new blockchain node with the existing Transaction Engine, existing transactions can be propagated into both the existing non-blockchain database and the permissioned blockchain node. The latter serves as a secondary ledger of customer transactions. To do this Tech needed to:
- Complete the relevant smart contracts
- Finish the gateway which allows the mobile apps to push transactions to the permissioned blockchain
- Build a temporary body of code to emulate the phone or key and handle transactions
This is now in place and the Product team is currently building the interface to run the traditional backend in parallel to the blockchain backend. More work remains to ensure that HelloGold can run both backends concurrently without any issues.Preparing the core systems for regional expansion. The transaction component of the app is undergoing development and refactoring to enable support of new features such as multi-vault, multi-country, and more scalable end-of-day processing which includes reporting, management fee calculation, and batch processes. Additionally, Tech is also preparing the backend and mobile apps for the next market launch targeted to be in Q2.
Tokens
Utility of HGT
The Telegram community poll on suggested utility options has been completed. We’re glad to announce the first feature added to HGT with more to be announced! More detail on that here.
Burning fuel for the rocketship…
Telegram Promo
Our Big Up promo launched on Telegram has helped us to grow a strong and active Telegram Community. At the time of writing, we have surpassed 1,000 members and are hoping to grow even more before ending the promo on 16th April. If you haven’t joined already, head over to the Telegram group and register on the form today!
Aiming for the 120,000 HGT mark next!
Events
We were in Paris early in March to attend EthCC, a big gathering of Ethereum developers and enthusiasts — more than 800 attendees, 200 speakers and lots of engaging conversations. It was a great occasion to meet up with the European Ethereum community and to catch up on latest developments straight from the horse’s mouth. The team was especially interested to see the talk on Gnosis Safe as we are big fans of the Gnosis Multisig! You can find a list of all the videos for the EthCC conference here.
While in Paris we were also invited to present on HelloGold at a meetup organised by StartupToken. It’s always great to have in-depth discussions about the HelloGold mission with others from around the world in person instead of just online.
Harith talking at the StartupToken meetup
At the end of March, Robin was in Beijing to speak on HelloGold at the Fei Niao Blockchain Summit. The energy throughout was palpable — the conference halls were packed with a rapt audience from start to finish. Robin was approached by multiple members of the media including from Jinse, IterDuo, and Shen Lian(Deepchain) and we hope to share with you the articles soon!
In April, the team will be at Blockchain Expo in London as well at the SUSS Global Inclusive Blockchain Conference in Singapore. Let us know if you’d like to meet!
Interviews
Robin appeared on the Bad Crypto Podcast on the 29th of March together with the hosts, Joel and Travis. If you haven’t listened to it yet, check it out here.
Telegram AMA
As voted on by the community, we will be having our first Telegram AMA with Robin on his experience in the gold industry at 11:00 AM UTC, 12th April. Join our Telegram channel where we will soon start to poll for the top questions the community wants to kick off the AMA with!
GOLDX reward distribution
The rewards for March 2018 will be distributed on 9th April 2018. The total allocation will be 1.500 GOLDX, a 29% increase from the previous month.
Please remember to keep HGT in your own wallet and not on any exchanges to receive the GOLDX!
We will continue to provide updates on a monthly basis. Please do get in touch with us in between updates if you have any thoughts, suggestions or recommendations.
The HelloGold Foundation Team