Hi Everyone! Its been quite an eventful last 2 weeks! From the highs of the exciting announcements of the new Electroneum Blue M1 phone & South African MVNO partnership with The Unlimited at MWC in Barcelona, to the lows of the price drop this week and all the FUD across all social media, it has been quite a roller coaster ride! Good old crypto currency, never a dull moment!
During the past week whilst observing what people were saying in telegram chats, message boards and other social media, along with people direct messaging me, I noticed there were similar questions and complaints on the project, so decided to sit down and work with many of the big community figures and compile a master list of all the major unanswered questions, that we, the community were talking about across our social media. I then sent the list over to Nick Cook, COO over at the Electroneum HQ to get some answers. Nick has always been extremely helpful and truly a great guy – such an asset to a team that is already full of them! He agreed to set some time aside in his busy day to answer our community questions so a HUGE thank you to Nick everyone!
I would like to quickly remind everyone that what Electroneum has achieved in a little over a year is quite remarkable. There is a story I first heard when I started my business that I will share with you.
“A man came across three masons who were working at chipping chunks of granite from large blocks. The first seemed unhappy at his job, chipping away and frequently looking at his watch. When the man asked what it was that he was doing, the first mason responded rather curtly and said, “I’m hammering this stupid rock and I can’t wait until I can go home."
A second man was seemingly more interested in his work was hammering diligently and what asked what he was doing he answered, “Well, I’m molding this block of rock so that it can be used with others to construct a wall. It’s not bad work, but I’ll sure be glad when it’s done.”
”A third mason was hammering at his block fervently, occasionally taking time to stand back and admire his work. He chipped off small pieces until he was satisfied that it was the best he could do. When he was questioned about his work he stopped, gazed skyward and proudly proclaimed, “I…am building a cathedral!”
“Three men, three different attitudes, all doing the same job”
The Electroneum team members all have the attitude and vision of the 3rd mason in the story. They take great pride in their work and make sure everything they do is in line with the master vision of their Ecosystem. Many people look at what they are doing from the eyes of the 1st or 2nd mason and don’t really understand how it fits together, but if we start to connect all the dots at what they are doing, the cathedral will become visible through the fog of uncertainty.
Some of us are always looking to what is next, what will cause the next pump, when is the next deal? While all of these things can create short term excitement; the real value is in the long-term vision. We need to stop every now and then and look around at everything we have already achieved because there is a lot! We should celebrate it. Never forget how far we’ve come!
Electroneum have perfectly positioned themselves in a unique niche in the mobile payment industry, they stand alone, prominent and for the right reasons. They solve a real-world problem for the unbanked that traditional mobile payment solutions are unable to achieve. Mobile payment providers and operators are now looking at ETN as a potential strategic partner to work with and take advantage of the position that Electroneum has established through careful and strategic planning, preparation and hard work.
We need to ask ourselves this: What other projects have the experience and connections in the mobile industry that Chris Gorman has? The marketing experience and creativity of Richard Ells & Conor Doyle? The mastermind planning and management abilities of Nick Cook? What other project has established themselves to the level Electroneum has in both the mobile industry and in unbanked regions? Who has a product ready that solves a real-world problem, that is KYC/AML compliant with regulations across the world, along with money laws in their target markets? Who has built their products and ecosystem and is now piecing it all together live on the ground in South Africa? Who is perfecting a proof of concept and experimenting with marketing techniques and all this in a little over a year? I’m sure if you study all 2000+ crypto projects out there, we only have 1 project left on our list that is focused on mobile and checks all these boxes.
Sometimes we might lose patience and criticize and complain, why is this deal not done? What happened to that MOU? In the real business world, negotiating and finalizing deals with MVNOs, Governments and NGOs naturally take a long time. It is common for deals to take 6-18 months from the MOU, to a fully deployed productions on the ground. We all need to keep this in mind when asking why a specific partnership has not gone live yet.
So, without further ado, I bring you the answers and closure to the major questions we have all been asking so we can put these behind us and unite once again as a community, acknowledging all the great things already in place as well as those that are still to come from the Electroneum team. Onwards and upwards!
Q1: The cloud miner is not paying some people after they hit 100 ETN. There are a group of people with 150+ ETN accumulated that are just stuck without getting paid and are just accumulating more ETN mining. What are we doing about this?
Nick: This is related to selfies being stuck. We would encourage people in this situation to use the EXTEND function within the CLOUD MINING tab to determine if they need to repeat the selfie process. If you toggle the miner off and on and it does not ask you to take a new selfie, that means you have now been added to the payment queue. Keep in mind this process can take up to a week until the ETN is paid to your wallet.
Q2: Why does The Unlimited have no mention about ETN, No press release, nothing on their website or social media? We’ve seen the evidence and know it’s true, but why are they not promoting it?
Nick: We are currently in the proof of concept phase and are intentionally keeping it low key for the moment. We have asked The Unlimited to keep it off of their site and no press releases yet. We want to focus on small target areas within South Africa and need to keep exposure at a minimum to start with while we experiment with different marketing techniques. Once we are satisfied with the results, we will roll out fully across the country and will hit the marketing campaigns hard.
Q3: Far too often the team does not do what it says it will, or announces something then never mention it again, it’s almost like they ignore the fact it ever happened. This causes a lack of trust. The transparency levels have dropped significantly and there is too much radio silence causing concern for members.
Nick: We’re doing so much behind the scenes lately that we simply do not have the time to be continually communicating everything that’s happening to the wider community. We have enhanced our delivery focus to combat the previous FUD that we never deliver. We appreciate the community feedback and have a plan to do a better job on our communication with the community as we move forward together.
Q4 : When is the M1 going to launch for sale in South Africa? We hope this does not get pushed to the side like other announcements in the past.
Nick: It is in the process of happening already. We have several phones on the ground in SA and want to test their performance and reliability before pushing to a wider audience. We expect a first shipment in SA within the next 4 weeks
Q4-A: Can we get an update about the Joytel Launch please?
Nick : Joytel was delayed mutually by both sides to start after MWC and will be going ahead in the next month. The Joytel trial which will focus on user acquisition learning in Asia to enhance our understanding around messaging. This is very much a learning exercise, but an exciting one.
Q4-B: Where are we with One Development?
Nick: This is a hugely complex and long lead time discussion given that there are multiple entities involved including mobile operators and governments. As always when dealing with these types of entities the due diligence process and red tape takes an exceedingly long time and is not something within our control regarding timing, but rest assured this is in the works and moving along.
Q4-C: Why are there so few vendor marketing tweets?
Nick : This is something that is ongoing, and we are now in contact with several vendors in South Africa. At the appropriate time we will announce and talk about these publicly.
Q4-D: What about all the other original MVNO’s/MOU’s/Partnerships talked about from last year (FanFare, BR Media, RedOne, Unified Signal, Effortel, Mobile Streams, Argentina Telecom, etc)?
Nick: Conversations are ongoing with all the above as well as with other new MVNOs. At this stage of our lifecycle it’s important that we look at being precise with the process that we go through. What this means for our selection process is that we chose the right country, location, income levels, ARPU and ecosystem development potential. We are looking at developing proof cases for the world to show exactly what Electroneum can do.
Q5: Are there any future plans to get listed on any large volume exchanges?
Nick: We are always looking to get ETN listed on additional large volume exchanges, but as everyone knows, these can take time regardless of whether they are paid or not.
Q6: There are a lot of social media scam posts, someone needs to keep on top of these as they can be up for 2 or 3 days before removed. This is urgent as they have started to clone our “Top Fan’s” Facebook accounts to give positive feedback in an attempt to validate them.
Nick: We are looking to define an internal process for killing off scam posts, FUD and general poor comments throughout the day at various points to get this under control. This should be in place within the next week.
