State of the Project and 2022 Plans

Hello everybody! As 2021 comes to an end, the Altruism Protocol team wanted to reflect on what happened during the year and what the plans are for the next year. We have a lot of information to cover here, so we’ll try to include a 1–2 sentence summary near the beginning of each section in bold in case you just want the big picture for each section.

Firstly, we want to give a big thank you to the community. While we certainly have experience in the cryptocurrency sphere, this is our first time creating a token and running a project. We have learned a lot and are constantly making changes to improve the project as best we can. Even with hiccups the majority of the community has seen the work happening and has stood strong to help us build this amazing project. We’re super excited to see what 2022 holds.

Note: The numbers provided in this article were correct at the time of writing in the end of 2021. They do not account for any fluctuations in price, pairings, or ratio changes since then.

Altruism Protocol Team

When we first launched Altrucoin, we knew we would need more than the four people we started with, but we had no idea it would grow so quickly. One of our biggest problems has been that the project is expanding more quickly than we can fill with team members, which is a great problem to have. We are working hard to get several more skilled team members to smooth out the process and grow the business.

We have mapped out a list of positions that we want to fill, with a small list of the most important ones for the short term. While we want to fill all of them in the coming months, the ones we are focusing on the most are: Senior Blockchain Developer, Senior Solidity Engineer, Web3 Full Stack Developer, Chief Marketing Officer, Customer Success Manager, and Financial Officer. As mentioned above, we currently have more work than we have people to do the work, especially for development work. With more developers we can take on more projects that make the company and our token holders money. To ensure that the intellectual property of the company is protected through enforceable contracts, we are searching for US citizens for the higher level developers, and of course we are looking for highly skilled developers that can create the quality of product that we want to produce. We have interviewed more than 20 candidates so far, and placed one person on a trial period. So far no candidates have met the above requirements, so no full time hires have been made.

Unfortunately, we have talked with many other projects and everybody is having trouble finding quality blockchain developers. We are currently listing on several job searching sites as well as using several recruiting companies, and will continue to search for each of the above jobs. We look forward to expanding the team as we find quality people for each position.

Private Sale Launch Platform

BankerDoge introduced a presale/private sale system as part of our capital raising phase for the token launch. It is sometimes used for the single presale of a token, and sometimes for part of a group of sales before launch, referred to as private sales even if they are open to the public. For this article, we will refer to them as presales.

The presale system has the potential to be very successful and available for a wide variety of projects. We have solutions being implemented to address the main problems we have seen so far, which are miscommunications with the projects, amount of time spent on each presale, and scaling.

BankerDoge originally created the private sale system on our site to allow us to raise funds before our big presale on DxSale and to have access to the funds immediately so we could use them to market the big presale. Our first sale was a regular presale with a hard cap and a general time limit. For the second presale though, we created a new type of system with a very low time limit in the beginning that increases every time BNB is contributed. With both systems working very well for our presales, we realized that this is a system that could benefit many projects that want to hold rounds of fundraising outside of large presale platforms like DxSale and PinkSale.

While vaults create continuous (if variable) revenue that can be transferred to holders fairly easily, presales generate one-time revenue. Because of this and the size of many of the presales, it is not feasible to have a portion of the presale revenue go directly to holders. Even if 100% of the revenue were to be airdropped, it would cost more in gas to airdrop than the average holder would receive. If we use profit instead of revenue, that disparity grows even bigger. Instead, the profit from each presale goes towards marketing and development to grow the project. As we create new features, increase the number of partners, and raise the price of the token, our holders will benefit.

However, we have seen some problems with the Private Sale Launch Platform so far. The system worked very well for BankerDoge when we had full control of every aspect, but as a product there have been some issues.

• Presale starting time — Most of our team is located in the United States. However, working with projects across the globe means that often the presales require accommodations that are taxing on our team, such as 4am start times that we need to be present for.
• Detail Tracking/Project Communication — Each presale requires a long list of details that must be planned out. While we have a checklist of exactly what information we need, getting these details set has proven to be a consistent challenge. Often projects that are doing a presale do not have a lot of experience launching tokens. This means that we have to spend time walking them through the process and giving recommendations based on our experience, then working that into the vision that they had for their presale. It also means that the project changes the details last minute fairly often or do not have some of the details since they are not familiar with the timeline for launching (such as when tokens should be made claimable).
• Scaling — As mentioned above, we currently have to spend a lot of time on each presale that is hosted on our platform. Because of this, we are limited in which presales we can accept and have it be worth the time. We are working on a process that allows the users to do almost all of the tasks themselves while still keeping the end user experience the same.
• Rugging — The BSC is famous for the number of projects that rug. Unfortunately every presale platform will have some number of rugs. The platform can take certain precautions to help protect users, but unless the only presales hosted are their own, there’s no way to guarantee safety. We want to balance the ability to accept a large number of projects with the safety of people who might want to invest. As such, we are working towards providing information on projects where available so that users can choose which projects they feel comfortable investing in. This includes the project website and telegram, dox status, audit status, and AMAs with the devs in some cases. As we move towards decentralized onboarding, we will continue to work on ways to provide as much information for end users as possible.
• Unique Features — There are a lot of presale platforms on the BSC. One area where we can improve is advertising the unique features that BankerDoge provides, most notably the time-extension system. This is a feature that can generate a lot of buy pressure and hype, but has not been adequately advertised. We will be working with presale marketing companies to better show off this feature and increase our value over other presale platforms.

One of the solutions that we have recently implemented to address several of the above problems is the admin dashboard. Originally created for the vaults, the admin dashboard allows the administrator of the project to specify certain details. For the presale system, the admin can choose the start time, total run time, minimum and maximum contribution, and price. With the admin having control over these details, changes can be made more quickly and with less input from our team, reducing frustration and time spent having to iterate through changes.

The biggest improvement for the future (in conjunction with the admin dashboard) will be decentralized onboarding. Currently the team has to spend a lot of time with each project collecting information, verifying certain details, then creating the smart contract and front end page for each presale. We are developing a system that will allow users to input the necessary information then automatically create the smart contract and front end page. This will allow the company to accept presales that otherwise would not be profitable, dramatically increasing the number of projects we can host. The decentralization combined with the marketing that will happen for our unique features will bring significantly more presales and provide a more consistent stream of revenue for the company.

Vault System

The current primary business of Altruism Protocol is the creation and hosting of staking vaults for other projects on the BSC. We have learned a lot over the past few months about launching vaults and features that users want. We have been steadily increasing the size of projects that we create vaults for, and are looking forward to creating new types of vaults as well as automating the creation of vaults. This will be one of the primary ways that stakers can increase the value of their bag.

Our System

While staking has been available in some form or another for a while in crypto, we have chosen to focus on one method of staking so far and have innovated with a few features that are available as part of the vault. Altruism Protocol has focused on vaults that use an entry and exit fee as one of the primary methods of reward generation, as opposed to liquidity farming. This means that a large portion of rewards for those in the staking vault comes from the entry and exit fees that users pay to participate in the vault. This rewards long term stakers by allowing them to collect fees from those that stake for a shorter time. There are a few other methods of reward generation as well.

However, this method of reward generation is not unique to our vaults. Altruism Protocol has instead innovated on a few other features, including time lock bonus, multi token reward support, and tokenomic support. A few other staking platforms offer the ability to lock for a specified time and get a small bonus, but we have taken that a step further to allow for dynamic locking. With this, users can choose from a wide range of times (determined by the project that the vault supports) and receive a bonus depending on the time that the user chooses to lock for.

Our vaults support tokenomics, which has been a major limiting factor for many other staking pools. With tokenomic support, stakers no longer have to choose between staking rewards and token redistribution/reflection. We also offer multi-token rewards, meaning that stakers can receive rewards in the token that they stake as well as another, such as BNB or BUSD.

Challenges

That being said, there have been some major challenges in some of the vault rollouts. By far the biggest challenge that we’ve faced has to do with gas fees, especially when the vault first opens. As the vault opens and people come pouring in, gas fees soar, quickly moving from 1–2 dollars to 8 dollars or more. A large portion of this is unavoidable, as higher volume raises gas fees on the BSC. However, we are also working on alternative ways to reduce gas by reducing the number of variables updated, especially in the first week or so. Directly doing this would take away some of the functionality, so we are exploring other ways of reducing variables. We are also standardizing some vault features to get more consistently smooth vault launches, and will increase the quoted development time for new features to allow more thorough testing with specific tokens.

Achievements So Far

Starting with TikiToken as our first partner in September, we have grown to 10 partners already in the span of three months, with over 10 million dollars staked on the platform! While most projects remain solo or have a partnership with one or two other companies, we believe that the crypto community can grow together and help each other. Each new vault that is launched is another community to work with and be a part of, and allows us to network further. Each new project that we work with lets us talk to bigger and bigger projects. As we move into decentralized onboarding, the number of vaults will explode, increasing the quality of the platform and the reach of the project.

Decentralization

One of the major milestones for the project will be automating the process of vault creation and presale creation. Currently the team goes through a lot of work to get each of these set up. There is a three day to two week period where we discuss with the project what features and details they will want, then we have to code each one individually. While we are able to reuse some of the base code, there is still significant project management and development time that is required for each one. The decentralized version will allow projects to apply and create the vaults automatically with significantly less input from our team. Several things will still be manual, such as verifying projects that want to be listed as partner vaults, but these will be paid services and will take significantly less time than the current process.

We have already created the mockup design for the new front end page, which will include new features such as sorting by APY, most recent vaults, vault level, vaults the user is participating in, and more. We will be making updates and upgrades to the system over time, but we are currently still on track for a Q1 release of the system.

Future Vaults

Finally, let’s discuss future plans for vaults outside of the decentralized process. Although we already have several features that are not found in other staking platforms, we also have new vault types planned for development. The biggest two that have already been discussed by the team internally are no-loss jackpot vaults and NFT vaults. We have also had a few of our partners ask about custom vault types for their users, which we are researching. As we get closer to release for any new vault types we will announce it to the community and provide more details.

Price of the token

While Altrucoin has done very well since launch regarding price, BankerDoge price has struggled to increase and has decreased since launch. This is likely due to meme marketing, team difficulty buying tokens, higher taxes, and auto-buyback. Let’s look at each one individually.

While Altrucoin was launched with a very small market cap (only about $150,000), BankerDoge was heavily marketed during presales and took advantage of the meme trend to maximize investment. While this was effective in raising money for the team to create the incredible products so far, it led to a lot of people investing looking for a quick 20x like you see in some meme tokens. Since the beginning, the project has been meant for long term development rather than to market and 20x then die a month later. However, this meant that many people started selling off when they didn’t see the massive spike after a few weeks or months. While those are not the investors that we are looking for anyway, it has led to a decrease in the BankerDoge price. Altrucoin, on the other hand, has shown that it will slowly and steadily increase in price due to the long term vision and investors that saw that vision.

Native Protocol Tokens

One of the most frustrating parts of raising the price for the team has been the funds that we have available. While there are a lot of funds in the protocol wallets, the vast majority are in native tokens (BankerDoge and Altrucoin). This means that we can’t use the funds that are in the wallets to purchase more tokens and raise the price. It also means that when we do airdrops, the tokens being used don’t raise the price as they were existing tokens. Additionally, purchasing more tokens with the available BNB just compounds the problem, as we then have even more tokens that we can’t use effectively. While some native tokens are needed for things like payroll, exchange listings, and possible LP injection, the inability to use them without selling and affecting the charts has been a major problem for the team.

With the new token we are including a function to make sure that most of the funds generated by the contract come in stable coins, while still keeping some in the native token. This way we will have enough native tokens to use them where needed, but we will still have more usable funds. Buying extra tokens with BNB isn’t a bad thing, but having excess tokens and having to sell would not be ideal. This new system should address this problem.

High Taxes

Each of the projects had different tokenomic tax structures. BankerDoge was launched at a time when higher reflections were common and one of the selling points for projects. However, the community has been vocal about the lack of volume that arises from higher taxes. While each transaction generates more reflections and marketing funds per transaction, the lower transaction volume does not seem to make up for it. Altrucoin has had a lower tax structure that seems to have worked well. A gradually lowering tax seems like the best combination, where taxes near the beginning of the project can help bring in additional revenue, but the taxes drop over time to help attract additional investors once they see the long term use cases of the projects.

Auto-buyback

Auto-buyback (RoboBoost) was introduced into the BankerDoge token contract as a feature that was popular in the BSC at the time of launch. While it was essentially a more complicated version of burning, it was popularized for the ability to create buys on the contract when sell offs were happening to help mitigate them. However, in order to raise the funds to do so, it sold when there were buys. This, combined with the higher taxes, heavily contributed to the charts struggling to climb. Often the buys from Roboboost were not enough to offset the sell (which was expected), and the sells pushed down any upward trend. While the team anticipated this to some extent, it was much more pronounced than expected.

RoboBoost was largely implemented as a marketing tactic to draw in investors who were looking for it during the presale period on BSC. With the exaggerated negative effects and smaller positive effects, it is definitely something the team does not want to continue with in the future. Instead we will go with the much less complicated direct burn method. More details for the burn feature on the new token will be available in the whitepaper.

Charity

Donations So Far

One of the core principles of Altruism Protocol is…well, altruism. It is the idea that we should help others not for some sort of reward, but because we want to improve the world and it’s the right thing to do. While this is a guiding principle for many of the decisions that we make as a team and a business, the easiest place to see the real world effects of it is through the charitable donations that are made. As a community, we have already donated tens of thousands of dollars to nature and conservation, mental health, and over one hundred thousand dollars to ocean cleanup. Over $134,000 has already been donated. These donations are visible examples of how we as a community can help make the world a better place to live, both for our generations and those that come after us. You can read more about the donations and how they are being used by the organizations on our charity page.

Team Seas

Our biggest donation as a community so far was the TeamSeas donation. TeamSeas is a campaign to remove 30 million pounds of trash from the oceans and rivers to provide a cleaner world, improve the quality of life for marine animals, and unblock rivers around many communities.

We have teamed up with Medacoin to make a massive donation to the TeamSeas campaign. We are proud to have several of the vaults designate a portion of the rewards generated to go to donations such as these, and to have projects join us on the mission to improve the world through our amazing communities.

Governance System

We have been very pleased with how the governance system has worked so far. It was something we introduced originally as a way for the community to have a weighted vote on certain aspects of the project, but has grown to include votes for how the funds raised for charities will be used. Everybody has reacted well to it so far and each of the votes have been a success in getting community input on how the funds will be donated. We plan to continue use of the system for charity votes, and possibly implement rewards for people who vote in order to increase the total voter turnout and increase community engagement.

Future Donations

We will continue to make donations to charities, both those suggested by the community and ones that we find that are good candidates for the funds. We also plan to expand the number of vaults that directly create funds to be used for charities in collaboration with other projects. We have joined Blockchain Alliance for Global Good (BAGG) to create a cross-project collaborative group to improve the world around us.

We also have exciting plans for future charity events. As part of our donation to International Animal Rescue, they will be naming one of the sanctuaries after us. We look to do more interactive work with organizations such as this, where we can interview the people leading the project, create NFTs to help promote causes, and more!

Growth Plan

Our main growth strategies for 2022 revolve around expanding the ecosystem and automating the vault creation and presales. The automation will allow us to accept significantly more vaults and presales which will increase the airdrops to stakers. The expansion of the ecosystem will grant additional utility and bring in more holders.

Ecosystem Expansion

We have several avenues of growth that will allow the project to increase in both size and price. The first is the expansion of the ecosystem. This includes the additional products that we have been adding, the ones that we plan to add, and the eventual DeFi lending aspect of the ecosystem. While the system is being switched from two tokens to one, the overall ecosystem will still have several components and leaves room for later expansion.

The bonding and treasury features that are being incorporated allow the project to have a stable price floor, increasing the appeal to potential holders. This also allows for future features to be added that work with the bonding system to increase the number of ways that holders can benefit.

Decentralized Onboarding

Until DeFi lending is released, the biggest contributor of growth will be the decentralization of onboarding and product creation. As mentioned above, currently the team has to manually create each vault and presale and sinks a considerable portion of time into each one. The decentralized process will allow projects to apply and create vaults and presales automatically. This will dramatically increase the number of projects that we can host on our platform, increase the revenue, and allow us to spend time on higher value projects.

Automated Migration

Another area that has caused some pain and will be important in the future is migration from one contract to another, such as moving to an upgraded version of a vault. Currently the team must work with each project any time an upgrade is needed, and the process to move all users to the new system is lengthy and error-prone. We are working on a migration system that will allow vaults to automatically move to the new version so that they can stay up to date with the latest features, security, and bug fixes. While it is an annoyance right now to migrate projects, it will quickly become infeasible after decentralized onboarding, when hundreds of projects need to be migrated. The new system will allow us to ensure the highest quality product for all customers and reduce points where errors could be made.

Additional Products

We already have vaults and presales as products, but plan on offering several more products this year. Each new product will allow us to reach a new audience, provide more value, and improve the company.

Private Vault Hosting/Whitelabeled Vaults

We already offer many products and services to other projects, and plan to add additional features and services. While most vaults are hosted on our platform, we understand the value of projects having the vault on their own domain. This will allow them to boost user engagement and retention on their site and have the users see their branding, colors, and links. Users will have a seamless experience entering the vault, while the project still benefits from our audience on the main vaults page. The two interfaces are linked, allowing users to stake and check their balance from either page.

Some such vaults will mention that it was created by Altruism Protocol, while others will be whitelabeled. One such example is the ELONGATE vault. This was a vault that we created for ELONGATE that does not mention us on the main vault page on their domain to further improve the brand experience for their users. We will offer both standard vault hosting and this whitelabel solution. For our community, the rewards work the same regardless of where the vault is shown, meaning that the platform fee taken still contributes to the APY of our vaults.

Governance

We implemented a governance system as a way for the community to vote on some of the business decisions and charity donations. This is something that is useful for a lot of projects but that very few have. We are working on creating and documenting the process to add the governance system to other projects, and plan on adding this as a product that they can purchase.

New vault types

We have created several distinct features for our vaults, including time locked tokens with scaling rewards, automatic burn or charity donations, and dual token rewards. However, all of these currently only apply to one main “standard” vault type. Two more vault types are already in development, and the team is constantly working on coming up with new vault types that would be useful for projects and holders. A vault that rewards with NFTs and a no-loss lottery vault are currently in development and slated for release later this year. You can check our roadmap for more details. We also have the ability to do custom developed vaults for projects who need specific features and functionalities. These will be released on a case-by-case basis depending on the needs of individual projects.

Auditing

One of the other products that we are working on details for is an auditing partnership. While we do not plan on doing audits ourselves at this time, having a partner that can audit projects works well with some of our other offerings. We are in discussion with an auditing company to offer an audit at a discount for projects launching through our presale platform. While this would only generate a small amount of revenue, it would offer additional security for projects on our launchpad and help to protect the company reputation.

Marketing

Marketing has been a constant pain point for the company. While we feel confident in our ability to market to other businesses and continue to sell products (B2B), we have tried several avenues of marketing to potential holders (B2C) but have yet to find a singular effective method. For this year, we believe our most promising options are new markets, increased partner cross promotion, project token utility, the new referral system, and continued search for a long term traditional marketing partner.

Access to New Markets

Thus far for both projects, the vast majority of our marketing has been targeted at North America and Europe. This is largely because many of the “traditional marketing” sites target those areas by default through English-only support, we are more familiar with those areas for search engine optimization, and the marketing companies we have worked with have been in those areas. While we do plan to continue marketing in those areas, there are a few notable regions left out of the current method that have major potential. These are the Russian and Asian markets.

Both markets have large potential and have been growing over the past years. We currently have limited access to the Russian market, with our only way in through a marketing company we have worked with in the past. There are a few other smaller leads that we are also investigating as potential ways in. For the Asian market, one of our moderators has a few connections for us to pursue.

While targeting any new market takes an immense amount of work, we believe that access to these markets will help the project grow even more quickly. We will be working on translation, market research, contact opportunities, and influencer collaborations. We will also be working on community support for those markets in the coming months to ensure we retain any new users.

Note: Since the writing of this article, Russia has imposed several restrictions on cryptocurrency which might affect the appeal of marketing in that segment. This is something the team will consider and consult with other projects and marketing experts on, and make any necessary adjustments.

Cross Promotion With Partners

One of the biggest opportunities that we have is with the audiences of the projects that use our platform. These are people that are interested in crypto and have shown a willingness to buy, as they already bought the token of whatever project is using the platform. We have done some very light cross promotion already, mainly with Medacoin, which has shown success. We are in discussion with the marketing teams of several projects about different ways of reaching each other’s audience, from airdrops to NFTs to targeted fire sales.

As we continue to grow the number of users on our platform, our total potential audience for cross promotion will similarly increase.

Platform Utility Token Purchases

We are also exploring the best way to incorporate the token into the platform while still maximizing the number of users that are interested in using the platform. There are several methods for this, ranging from requiring users to hold tokens to access anything to offering bonuses to those that hold our tokens. While requiring users to hold our token to use the platform would bring more purchases, it would also reduce the number of people willing to use our platform which would reduce the number of users staking, thus the TVL and airdrops. As mentioned, we are currently in the research phase of this to find the best way to increase the number of holders and purchases of the token while still maximizing the number of users on the platform.

Crypto Specific Marketing Company

As you know from previous AMAs, one of the companies that we worked with for long term growth was Kryptonite. As the month-long contract with them came to a close, we looked at the results and wanted to share them here, as well as possible options for traditional marketing companies.

We worked with Kryptonite in the past for press releases, reddit marketing, and display ads. For the most recent period, we wanted to focus on targeting people that were more inclined to buy. As a general rule, the more specific your demographic, the more likely they are to buy but the fewer people you reach. It is also often more expensive to target specific groups.

We asked Kryptonite to focus on two services they provide: crowd marketing and a promo campaign. Because we have done some marketing through Twitter and Telegram, we chose to focus on Reddit. This included posts, comments, and upvotes to get BankreDoge more active to the large Reddit Crypto communities.

The promo campaign consisted of display ads run on over 50 cryptocurrency related websites, ranging from Poocoin and Coinhunt down to more specialized Russian sites. This was meant to still give a small bit of exposure to the mainstream audience while also targeting more specialized groups.

There were numerous reddit posts and comments. For the display ads, there were just over 7 million total impressions, with just over 8500 clicks, for a click through ratio of 0.1%

The click through ratio and conversion to buyers was not in line with what we expected for this type of marketing and budget, and we did not renew the contract. We have met with several crypto marketing companies to get quotes and action plans, but so far none have been worth pursuing. There has been one company that shows promise, but is incredibly expensive at over 30k per month. When talking with other crypto projects to see where they have seen success in marketing, the main areas seem to be very occasional influencers (Twitter and Youtube specifically), and an active community that is constantly active on twitter and telegram. This reflects what we have seen in our project as well. Both of these were driving factors for the last piece of marketing we will talk about here — the referral system.

Referral System

The referral system that we built has three groups of people that it appeals to: influencers, shillers, and other projects.

Influencers: In much of product and service based marketing, influencers are paid both upfront and a commission based on the number of sales that come as a result of their promotion (affiliate marketing). Within crypto, this has been limited to just an upfront payment, as there is no way to know when people buy because of an influencer. The number of people going to the buy page can be tracked, but there is no way to tell if a purchase happened because of the influencer or not.

Our referral system brings the commission capabilities to crypto. With our system, influencers can give a link where users can buy, leading to a discount for those using the link, a commission for the influencer, and a way to track both the number of people buying and the amount bought.

Shillers: Community members shilling helps the project. Every time somebody purchases, it raises the price of the token, which increases the bag of everybody including the person shilling. However, with the new referral system, shillers can be directly rewarded from people that use their link. This means that people who shill still get the overall price increase benefit, but also increase the number of tokens that they hold every time somebody uses their link to buy tokens.

This also allows projects to more easily hold shilling competitions. Because each link can be tracked, projects can keep track of who causes the most purchases and reward those that participate or those who are most effective in shilling.

Other projects: Lastly, the referral system is targeted for projects. The same benefits above that help our project will also help other projects. They can partner with us to get a referral system. This means they can track influencer effectiveness, host shilling competitions, and reward those that promote their token the most. We plan on having a low barrier to entry for this to encourage the highest number of users to take advantage of the new system.

Business Efficiencies and Redundancies

As we continue to grow as a company, many of the processes that we have in place need to be updated to be able to scale. We have had a few issues with redundancy, where only one or two people have access to something minor, and we have to wait until that person is available in order to make changes. With these in mind, we took part of November to re-evaluate our processes and start setting things up to work smoothly in a larger setting.

For business processes, we have done research into the traditional ways that companies handle these and looked at how we can adapt them to crypto and our specific methods. We have already made a few changes on software used and the way that issues get documented, and are working with a business consultant to ensure that our current ways will scale so that we don’t run into issues down the road. We are also looking to bring on an advisor for crypto growth and business best practices to round out our previous knowledge.

For redundancies, many of the issues had to do with things being set up in wallets that were only accessible to one or two team members. While multi-signature wallets are used for any money related topics to increase security, some application controls were limited to certain members as it was quicker. As mentioned above, this sometimes led to minor delays that we would rather avoid. We have since switched to using wallets that all members can access to maintain smooth operations for all controls.

We are also working to create more documentation, both internal and external. As a team with only a few members who communicated daily, many things were lightly documented or just led by somebody who had the knowledge. This worked well for a small team, but as we continue to grow we want to have these things available to everybody in the team. This applies to existing members, but is especially important as we onboard new team members who need to be able to look up issues or questions that they have.

Externally, we try to make sure that holders and potential future holders have access to all the information they could need and answer as many questions as possible. Previously most information was kept in the whitepaper. This worked well for the token information. However, as we continue to add new pieces to the ecosystem (products, features, services, and more complicated utility), we are working to make sure information about each piece and how they work together can be found and that each holder has full access.

BSC Issues

There have been a few issues on BSC that have caused problems for our projects. The most obvious example was in late 2021 when every action was delayed, sometimes by up to a few hours, and prices did not show correctly on the platform. While this has only happened one time so far, we have still looked at ways to avoid this in the future by using different nodes and looking into any possible backups to help offset this. While we can’t control what happens on BSC, we can set up safeguards to help reduce any problems that do come up.

One of the other problems inherent to BSC (and really all blockchains) that we have run into is time-based starts. More specifically, when we start a presale, it takes somewhere between 10 seconds and 3 minutes from the time that we press start on the contract to the time that the blockchain processes it. For things like presales that can sell out in seconds, the difference between 6:00 and 6:03 is a big one. Unfortunately we cannot make the command get approved any faster when there is congestion, but we are looking at other ways of forcing a start at specific times. Research is still being done into this to make all launches as smooth as possible.

Finally, the BSC has some limitations. We knew about these going into it, but we have also been looking at other blockchains as well and have started research into advantages and limitations for bridging. We have not made any final decisions and still have a lot more research to do, but Ethereum and Polygon look like good contenders for a first bridge. Any bridging will come after the improvement of our platform once we feel that it is in a comfortable place and working on its own. Bridging will take a lot of time and planning, so we want to make sure we have enough resources to devote to doing it correctly.

Token Merge

This section does not contain any new information at the time of release, but acts as a summary of the information currently available through our medium articles (1, 2, 3)and information that has been released on social media.

As a quick summary:
In December, BitMart informed us that our token was involved in the BitMart hack. The team immediately froze the contract to prevent the hacker from being able to sell, and BitMart recommended that we redeploy the contract. We agreed that was best. This gave us the opportunity to add several upgrades to the token contract as well. The team asked the community if they wanted to just do a regular redeploy or to merge the two tokens. There was overwhelming support to merge the tokens.

We added several new upgrades to the contract from what we learned since launching Altrucoin and BankerDoge. With these upgrades and new features since the launches, a small presale gives the company a great opportunity to market and convert existing native tokens to stablecoin so that we can more effectively use it.

After discussing with our legal team and exchanges we are currently listed on, it was decided that Altrucoin was the best option for the new token name. It will allow us to more quickly re-list, avoid the uncertainty that came with a meme name, and simplify things on the legal side.

For questions about the contract freezes, tokens currently on an exchange, new token airdrop, presale details, liquidity usage, or dilution, please read the FAQ article we released.