Business
The team at HelloGold has grown to 33, with even more coming in later this week. The team is still looking for more talented and passionate personnel; please reach out to hr@hellogold.com if you are interested to join the cause of democratising access to financial services.
On the marketing side, customer acquisition took a short breather after the strong finish to 2017 but has now ramped up again, thanks to a sponsored post that went viral and a robust pipeline of marketing activities planned all the way up to the Chinese New Year.
Viral post by Majalah Labur on Facebook
Sales were especially strong in the last few days of January. We saw the highest number of customers buying gold, many of them brand new. In parallel there are now 8,500 followers on the HelloGold Malaysia Facebook page and the latest posts are reaching a record number of people. Engagement is picking up!
One of the posts shared on the HelloGold Facebook page
Over the next week HelloGold will be launching the Chinese New Year promo, campaign and event. The marketing spend will also gear up so we expect a spike in the app sign-ups.
The number of KYC’ed customers now stands at more than 12,500. Active customers are at 5,600. Moving forward, there will be a stronger focus on engagement in addition to the all-out effort to grow customer volume. The background to this is that there is a long tail of customers with low activity and balances — HelloGold needs to re-engage them to build a healthy customer portfolio.
Last but not least, HelloGold is revisiting the brand. It is being stretched in all directions and needs a more compelling overarching idea and consistent brand execution. More to be shared on this in due time.
Technical
The following are updates to workstreams currently worked on by Tech:
KYC v2. Development of KYCv2.1 of the HelloGold app has been completed. The Tech team is currently in the midst of completing functional tests after which the team will then put the app through an independent security audit. The rigorous process is put in place to ensure a quality release. As a recap, KYCv2 is a major revamp of the app to facilitate a better customer on-boarding experience.
Wallet Integration. Tech has completed the back-end development to integrate the Axiata wallet. The additional screens in the app are currently being specced out by the Product Development team before they are returned to Tech to be coded by the iOS and Android developers. This is an exciting development that gives HelloGold customers more options to fund their gold purchases.
Enhancing in-house blockchain capability. The team has conducted a code review of a few smart contracts for another organisation that has plans to operate in the cryptocurrency space. This review was a great learning experience for the team especially as Dave, the blockchain lead dev, was able to guide other team members by reviewing actual code to be used in a production environment.
Preparing the core systems for regional expansion. Ongoing analysis work is still being conducted to redesign the system core to better support expansion plans in terms of the expanded range of services and also the expected flexibility required for each region HelloGold expands into.
As part of efforts to build the community, Dave is presenting at a number of technical conferences this year. On Jan 26th, Dave and Zulh combined with Raman of Crypto Jobs List to present a workshop at JSConf.Asia — a massive conference for Javascript Developers. Entitled “Ethereum and Javascript. What’s the big deal?”, the workshop taught on how to write a smart contract, compile and deploy it, and how to interact with it using javascript.
Dave teaching the young‘uns
On technical updates for the tokens: we had been talking about launching GOLDX since late 2017. The most important criteria was that we migrate all GBT balances precisely and that nobody should lose any gold in the transition from GBT to GOLDX.
To this end we opted to have the contract audited twice — even though it was heavily based on the GBT contract which had previously been audited and battle-tested.
Auditors #1 were our old friends ChainSecurity who had been such a great help with our original set of contracts. ChainSecurity have a great set of automated testing tools and are experts in blockchain security.
Auditors #2 were ZK Labs — home to several London based members of the Ethereum Foundation including Matthew Di Ferrante and Nick Johnson. We asked them specifically because they are extremely experienced and understand both Solidity as well as EVM implementation from the inside out.
Both audits came up clean, so we deployed the GoldX contract. The deployment had a few tricky moments and unexpected side effects, but extensive tests were performed to ensure that the accounts had migrated correctly. In all, the process took a little bit more than the four hours budgeted — more like 24 hours!
Tokens
GOLDX Launch
The big news from January is the launch of GOLDX!
As part of the launch, Robin appeared on CNBC Asia’s Street Signs segment to introduce gold backed tokens while a press release was shared by news sites around the world.
Robin explaining GOLDX on CNBC
Following on from the launch, Robin has been invited to talk with a number of content producers, such as Crypto Rich on YouTube and Vulcanpost, a lifestyle/tech blog. We welcome these chats and look forward to talking to those who are interested in finding out more about GOLDX and the overall HelloGold project.
To check your GOLDX balance, you may refer to this article: https://medium.com/hellogold/where-is-my-goldx-678f9dde7077。
Buy GOLDX
As markets continue to bleed, crypto investors may already purchase GOLDX directly from https://www.hellogold.org/! To note, this is a soft launch. As we gain feedback from customers and our processes become more robust, we will automate the process and ramp up visibility of the product.
Click on Buy to purchase your first GOLDX!
GOLDX reward distribution
The rewards for the month of January 2018 will be distributed on 8th February 2018. The total allocation will be 0.978 GOLDX, a 37% increase from the previous month.
HGT trading promotions
January saw large movements in the HGT price and volume. As these happen, the team continues to work hard on delivering fundamentals for the business and increasing exposure of HGT and GOLDX to the market.
There are currently two trading promotions for HGT. The trading promotion on COSS.io provides a total reward pool of 1 million HGT to the top 50 traders of HGT on the exchange (details here, login required), while the promotion on Gatecoin.com rewards the first 400 users who have traded a total of 50,000 HGT (details here).
Brand ambassadors
We have been traveling recently for discussions on partnerships and participating in events including the Miami Bitcoin Conference and the Blockchain Middle East Forum. Meeting the locals and supporters here have encouraged us to finalise a plan for appointing brand ambassadors to represent HelloGold in their local communities. For those who believe in HelloGold’s cause, have some spare time to help us, and are active in your local crypto communities, please feel free to contact us at foundation@hellogold.org with the subject: Brand Ambassador should you be interested.
Robin speaking at the Blockchain ME Forum
Moving forward, we will 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