2020 was a great year for COTI with many achievements, as we have recently reviewed.
We’d like to thank our community, again, for all its support.
2021 will be a year during which much of our work will be translated into products that will be distributed to our wide merchants’ basis and our growing user base.
When we set out to make our plans for 2021, we remembered the lessons that we have learned by 2020, about the importance of remaining agile and leaving room for good surprises.
The crypto space is very fast-moving and as an agile company, we need to constantly evaluate where things are going and adjust our plans accordingly. For example, DeFi wasn’t as big in early 2020, when we made our plans, as it is now. We saw rapid growth and have evaluated that what we can do best is a decentralized Crypto Volatility Index, that wasn’t yet planned at the time we set our roadmap. Another example is our decision to implement our MainNet 1.0 to new exchanges before upgrading to MainNet 2.0. After the Kucoin hack, listing the native $COTI on other exchanges became a top priority. We also had the great surprise of signing Dafabet, one of the world’s biggest gaming platforms, which took a considerable amount of tech resources for integration, which is great news of course.
With that in mind, we have decided to plan on a 6 months interval, to give better predictability to our community while still remaining very agile.
The following is the roadmap for the first half of 2021:
The roadmap is divided into the following main themes:
- COTI Pay — everything related to our consumer-oriented offering, like Viper wallet, Bank accounts, and debit cards, Apps, etc.
- COTI Pay Business — everything related to our merchant oriented products, including credit card processing, Blockchain Dollars, Ultra eWallet, etc.
- Infrastructure — everything related to the Trustchain, Nodes, Staking, etc.
- Licenses and regulation — licenses acquired by our group to grow our operation
- DeFi — a new line of activity that will include everything that we’ll code for the benefit of the DeFi space, with the decentralized Crypto Volatility Index as our first work.
In detail:
COTI Pay -
We plan on focusing a lot of our efforts in Q1 on the successful release of our Bank accounts and Debit cards, issued with VISA and Simplex. There are already thousands of applicants who applied for these services, of which 500 applied in the first few minutes. This unique offering will enable COTI users to store fiat natively in their COTI Pay wallet and pay with their fiat balance to any merchant who accepts VISA, both online or in-store. COTI bank account users will also receive a personal IBAN that enables the transfer of funds to and from any bank account in the world, so they can send and receive fiat as they would with any other traditional bank account with the added value of buying and selling crypto easily.
We released the COTI Pay app for Android in Q4 last year. The much-anticipated version for iOS users will be submitted to the app store in early Q2, completing the availability of COTI Pay to all platforms, mobile and desktop alike.
COTI Pay Business -
During Q1 we are going to introduce a new version to Ultra eWallet, version 2.0, which will allow merchants to process USDT through a gateway that will be added to their cashier. The current version of Ultra allows merchants to process credit card payments and bank account transfers to their cashier, using Ultra eWallet and the Trustchain as a transmitter of the value. With version 2.0 we’ll allow these merchants to work with users who already have USDT in their 3rd party wallet. Dafabet, one of the world’s biggest gaming platforms has requested this feature to be added and we expect to substantially grow our business together by enabling it.
Later this year, In Q2, we plan on introducing a new version of Blockchain Dollars, version 2.0, that will include the ORO system. As some of you remember, ORO is an optimization engine between various Fiat to Crypto providers. When a user wishes to pay fiat to get crypto, ORO picks the provider that will give him the best chance of succeeding and uses it. We have been busy with the business development around the system, signing major providers like Simplex and Moonpay. Our next goal is to finalize the core technology of ORO which we plan to complete in Q2 and then roll out to Blockchain Dollars first and Ultra eWallet afterwards. ORO will support a vast range of over 20 Fiat currencies in order to have a very wide coverage and thus support as many users as possible and use as many cases as possible.
As part of our work with our long term partner, the Cardano Foundation (issuer of $ADA), we’ll be releasing a new version of AdaPay to support the Shelley MainNet. This comes during a time of a surge of demand for the usage of the AdaPay system and we’re humbled to be able to help such a major crypto organization. We’ll expand more on that in a follow-up announcement together with the Cardano foundation.
Also in Q2, Paywize, our credit card processing solution for merchants, is planning on becoming a payment institution in order to offer its customers the following services: issuing and/or acquiring payment instruments, money remittance, FX services, ancillary services, and more. This will support the growth of processing revenue that Paywize clocks from its wide merchant base.
Lastly, for Q2, we will release the one-click payment requests feature for merchants, which is one of COTI’s unique solutions that adds a frictionless payment option to any chain or infrastructure by embedding a PayPal-like button to simply and instantly accept digital payments with only one click.
Infrastructure -
COTI’s Trustchain is the base infrastructure for our systems and products and one of our greatest achievements to date. It supports our growth and since inception in June 2019, our DAG system has approved tens of millions of transactions, on a 10K TPS rate, without a failure. We are one of the few fully functional DAG-based MainNet’s in the market and definitely the only one to introduce MultiDAG, allowing the issuance of tokens on top of a DAG base structure. Our staking 2.0 program, rewarding node operators, and stakers for taking part in a payment processing transaction, became one of the most popular programs in the space.
Around February, when our staking 2.0 program is 1 year old, we plan to roll out the staking 3.0 program, which will allow more users to join and more node operators to participate. With staking 3.0 fully operational, substantial amounts of $COTI will be locked out of circulation. The ever-growing processing volume on our network will make it possible and will allow a lot of users to enjoy it!
In Q1, we plan on finalizing the MainNet 1.0 exchange integration as well as paving the way for a new native listing. We will then be free to continue our development of DAG 2.0 and Trustchain 2.0, allowing an even greater speed and scalability to our infrastructure. We predict we’ll be able to launch the first versions of both versions during Q2.
Lastly for Q1, as part of our improved MainNet 1.0 integration, we’ll integrate the native $COTI to Ledger and thus allow users to securely store their coins outside of the exchange. This has been a long-awaited request from our community and while this was already possible with the erc20 $COTI, we have also been working hard to make it possible for the native $COTI too.
Licenses and regulation -
We have always believed that meeting strict regulatory requirements will pave the way for institutional adoption of cryptocurrencies and thus have been working hard on obtaining various licenses in different jurisdictions to support our operation and clients.
As mentioned earlier, Paywize will pursue a payment institution license during Q1.
COTI also has plans to extend our current exchange licenses to Asia, notably to obtain a license in Singapore, as some other major exchanges do.
Such a license allows us to legally handle conversions between Fiat to Crypto and in a regulated manner, which is a good way to support our enterprise clients who only operate in a regulated environment. COTI already has an exchange license in Europe and expanding our licenses stack to Asia means the growth of our reach and global offering.
As some of you may already know, we have been working relentlessly to obtain an Electronic Money Institute (EMI) license. This is the sort of license that companies like PayPal have and essentially allows COTI to issue digital money and quasi-currencies. In fact, this allows us to become a digital bank, without offering loans. An EMI license is obviously not easy to come by and we are deep into the process for quite a long while. We hope to complete the process and obtain the EMI license in Q2.
DeFi -
We have been talking about DeFi for the last two years and have been promoting new types of financial solutions since our inception. In 2020, DeFi has finally crossed a tipping point and has reached its well-deserved place in the crypto space.
We have made room in our plans and in the past 6 months developed and launched the first decentralized Crypto Volatility Index.
We are very proud of the results and will actively develop the index and trading platform in 2021. COTI users were the first to get the governance token of the protocol, $GOVI, at no cost and will continue to have added benefits for holding $COTI while using the platform.
We’ll be publishing a dedicated article for the roadmap of the Crypto Volatility Index after the release of its MainNet, but we can already share that during Q1 we’ll launch the MainNet itself, allow for on-chain staking of $GOVI to collect platform fees, allow liquidity mining for $GOVI by locking liquidity of various tokens to the platform, support various currencies as liquidity for trades, integrate to other wallets and continue to optimize the protocol.
During Q2, we want to introduce margin trading to the trading platform, which is a huge advantage for traders.
On our quest for the index, we’re being supported by some amazing industry experts, which we are thankful for. We’ll discuss that more after the launch of the MainNet.
Lastly, for Q2, we plan to finalize our integration with our longtime partner Celsius, which has been wildly successful in 2020. Such integration will allow the users of COTI Pay and COTI Pay business an easy way to get access to loans and interest from a prominent CeFi partner like Celsius, directly from their wallet.
To summarize, we believe that our 6 months plan keeps us agile and ready to take on new business as it arrives. It’s an ambitious plan that follows great achievements in COTI Pay, both for consumers and merchants, Infrastructure, Licenses, and a unique spot for DeFi.
We are builders and have kept delivering for the last 3 years. 2020 was great and 2021 will be even better.
We wish you all a wonderful year and remind you to stay COTI!
For all of our updates and to join the conversation, be sure to check out our channels:
Website: https://coti.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/COTInetwork
Telegram: https://t.me/COTInetwork
Github: https://github.com/coti-io
Discord: https://discord.me/coti
Technical whitepaper: https://coti.io/files/COTI-technical-whitepaper.pdf
