Soft launch of the Covesting platform. What to expect.

Dear community,

Being crystal clear and transparent is the path that we have chosen from the very beginning. As promised, we are releasing a blog with clearly described stages of the upcoming platform release that will help us manage everyone’s expectations and explain the logic behind every step that we take. It will also provide some important insights and interesting facts for everyone who is interested in the processes involved in launching the enterprise-level infrastructure required to achieve our goals.

DLT license, Corporate Governance & Fundamentals
It is obvious that getting things done properly from the beginning is an important step in every enterprise that is set for rapid growth and expansion. Some of the companies prefer to setup their businesses in shady jurisdictions, run misleading advertisement campaigns, and run operations outside the regulated environment. Our team has extensive experience working in regulated corporations where transparency, compliance, and corporate governance are a fundamental part of the business. Every part of the Covesting operation has to be approved by the compliance department, every important business development step requires a board resolution, and all platform logic has to go through the analyst team of the Gibraltar Financial and Securities Commission. These things make the whole process much more lengthy and complicated but creates a necessary environment which will help the company grow into a truly global and trusted organization.

Before going live, Covesting has to receive an acceptance from the GFSC team, and going forward we will follow the guidelines provided by the regulator to remain within the regulatory framework.

Since the Beta 1.0 release, we have added thousands of lines of code, added numerous features, and connected additional liquidity providers. Many things have changed, and we will never stop improving the platform. It means that some of the platform operations are yet to be tested or receive a separate GFSC approval and that’s why we have decided to split the platform release into five stages: Release Candidate, Soft Launch, Full Launch, Copy-Trading, New features.

1. Release Candidate + Trading Competition (first half of September)
   
   Release Candidate is a sort of Beta testing stage where members are allowed to try out the updated platform, with many new features, synchronized with a Trading Competition. Users will be able to verify their accounts (pre-KYC is subject to the GFSC approval), report any potential bugs, and compete in the trading competition with generous rewards!

This will allow us to run final tests of the platform, spot bugs, and fix them before the Soft Launch later in September. As always, there will be prizes for both bug hunting activity and trading results.

Release Candidate will go live whether the license is granted or not. In case of the DLT license not being secured by the end of August — we will provide all participants with funds on their account, similar to the Beta (since we are not able to accept deposits any without the license). Detailed rules about how to take part in the trading competition will be announced soon. We plan to run the Release Candidate mode for 2 weeks before the Soft Launch.

1. Soft Launch (September)
   
   During the soft launch we plan to start operations with limited amount of digital assets for trading. We plan to start with the following assets:

Crypto (3rd party liquidity)

BTC: ETH/BTC BCH/BTC EOS/BTC XRP/BTC LTC/BTC IOT/BTC ZEC/BTC ETC/BTC XMR/BTC DSH/BTC NEO/BTC ETP/BTC OMG/BTC

Fiat (3rd party liquidity)

EUR: BTC/EUR ETH/EUR EOS/EUR IOT/EUR NEO/EUR

GBP: BTC/GBP ETH/GBP NEO/GBP EOS/GBP IOT/GBP

COV pairs (internal liquidity)

COV: COV/BTC COV/ETH COV/EUR

You can witness already now, that the Covesting platform Beta includes over 90+ digital assets, offering quick and responsive order execution on every single currency pairing, thanks to external liquidity providers that Covesting has established relationships with. However, we prefer to grow operations step by step. Our security team proposed to start with a limited number of digital assets, and grow the product offering week-by-week. This will allow us to resolve any potential trading issues quickly and efficiently.

A full list of digital assets will be released with the “Full Launch”. All users will be able to benefit from the full dashboard functionality, reporting, and internal messaging service.

Soft Launch is also called a “quiet launch”, meaning that we will not aim for instant rapid user acquisition. It is important to understand that apart from the front-end, trade matching engine, and blockchain transactions, there is also significant work involved behind the scenes. We have to gather statistics on the average amount of verifications that a single KYC team member can handle per day/hour, and build up the relevant resources to ensure that no platform user shall experience a delay in the verification process. We have to also make sure that back-office, reporting, and accounting processes are operating properly in a “production” environment.

We have already tested out marketing by targeting various groups and we have all the necessary statistics for achieving rapid growth, however it is important to service all the clients in the proper manner and offer the best-in-class support in the industry. We are in talks with several BPO’s to outsource some of the support functions in case the support team needs to grow quickly (we are talking about tens or maybe even hundreds).

One thing is for sure — Covesting will continue to offer second to none user service and the original support team members will be the ones to cultivate the level of professional service (once again, thank you to all Covesting support team members who are doing a great work on daily basis).

The Soft Launch will occur only after the license has been secured. We will operate in Soft launch mode as long as its required in order to be 100% that infrastructure is ready for scaling.

Remember, in case there will be a significant delay in licensing process in Gibraltar, we will still be able to launch with the existing license secured in Estonia, however this is not something we prefer of doing, taking into account that HQ of Covesting is located in Gibraltar. This is rather an extreme plan B that we have established.

1. Full Launch (September — October)
   
   After we are confident with the Soft Launch production environment with limited functionality — we are ready for rapid growth. All cryptocurrency pairs (90+) will become available for trading. Massive marketing campaigns will kick off from here. An affiliate program with professional CPA networks and partners worldwide will get a green light from our marketing team. Wire transfers will now be supported. Payment processing companies (credit cards) are fully integrated and every user can deposit funds using the preferred method. All trading facilities are fully operational.

2. Copy-trading (October) + Institutional Onboarding + Token burn
   Once the business logic and technological solutions behind the copy-trading module is confirmed by GFSC — integration will commence. By this time, the platform will have sufficient number of traders with at least 1 month of trading performance. We plan to introduce several types of traders to the platform — professionals (holding a relevant license) and non-professionals. Institutional onboarding and KYB will be introduced at this stage. We will welcome funds, family offices, etc.

The COV Token burn will start at this stage with a transparent and audited smart contract used to lock part of the COV tokens received as commission in the platform either through exchange fees paid in COV or through the copy-trading module.
Token burn mechanics will have to be approved by GFSC as well (we have a preliminary approval).

1. New Features and Modules (Q4 and beyond)
   From here the platform growth is unstoppable. We will continue user acquisition globally, introduce new features (we have a huge list of them: including algorithmic trading, derivatives, advanced order types, new social features etc.), and explore new opportunities as regulations around digital assets evolve worldwide. We will continue strengthening the Covesting brand and meet with institutional investors around the world. We will provide an API to private and corporate investors, list new tokens, and aggressively acquire communities globally. We will finally allocate proper attention and resources towards the Crypto Intelligence Portal and grow it into a great social, news, and educational platform. The most exciting times for Covesting team and community.

2. Hosted conference and community meetup. Party
   More information to follow a little bit later 🙂

As you can see, we do not expect to experience any major delays in the development process, even though we faced unplanned compliance related technological requirements that we had to deal with.

At Covesting, we are building a solid product for tomorrow and we thank every one of you for your continuous support, trust, and feedback that helps us to create a new standard in the cryptocurrency trading industry.

We have also added additional roadmap items which we haven’t planned before — Party (subject to the flawless operations of the platform after release of course). This would be a great opportunity to thank all our supporters and valuable community members and appreciate the hard work of the team. But we are not there yet! We cannot think too far ahead in regards to celebrations, as the whole team is 100% focused on delivery and we have a few more milestones to achieve!

Stay tuned and get ready for exciting months ahead!

Yours,

Covesting team