Hi I X Swap fam! If you missed our last community AMA, here’s a recap of what went down to get you up to speed with the latest IX Swap news and updates.
Joining us during the AMA was our new Marketing & Community Manager Tom Carns and our very own Head of Listings and Partnership Darren Wong.
Note: The Q&As have been edited for clarity.
According to the roadmap, what is your next most important priority? Do you have enough funds and a strong-enough community to achieve this goal?
We will be shooting out our revised roadmap in a couple weeks, but our biggest focus at the moment is acquiring more listings and pushing out our API solution to connect the wider STO market.We believe that the API solution is a bit of a no-brainer in the industry. Some STO projects find it challenging to move beyond the idea stage, and we can help them turn that idea into reality.
Building this solution has a real-world use case and by working with licensed financial institutions, we can help projects roll out their STO features, leverage their capability as a POC environment on tokenization, and enable STO platforms that never had any secondary prior to do so.
How do you plan to spread awareness about the project to countries where English is not spoken well?
There are really strong platforms we are in talks with that will allow us to tap into these markets, supported by their respective channels that have a large reach in areas that don’t speak English.
We are aware that there is a lot of value in non-English speaking countries and having a community in each is paramount to the success of a lot of coins.
As mentioned in our previous AMAs, we are slowly building local communities around the world as we grow our STO influence in these regions, and build our brand as we build with local projects. We believe that makes it much more relatable in individual communities.
What is your strongest advantage that you think will make your team a leader in the market?
We are the world’s first decentralized exchange (DEX) for security tokens built with AMM capabilities and backed with regulated licenses.
IX Swap is already a leader in the market that is paving the way to make STO trading easier and more accessible, but we also understand that being the “first” doesn’t always guarantee that we will always be the best.
This is why we are always working around the clock to continue on improving, building, and growing. Fortunately, we have the advantage of having a great core team driven by an even greater vision, along with a good execution plan of the product lines and business modules down our pipeline.
The IX Swap team members have various backgrounds who bring with them different experiences in finance and blockchain. Together, our team has a history of starting and growing other start-ups before IX Swap, which is why we understand more than anything else what factors are crucial to sustain a business and fill in the gaps so we keep growing.
We enjoy being at the edge of new technology and disruption, which means we are also very aware of what is happening in our space. And that is another of our advantages — we understand the gaps and the challenges in this industry and strive to address them as we build the liquidity infrastructure in this space that has never been done before.
The business team is also working on some exciting stuff that would work well regardless of the current market conditions, and we hope to roll that out soon.
Regarding the current market situation being too unstable and holding back investors, can you give us some good reasons why I should buy the IXS token in this current market situation? And also why should the current token holders keep holding?
For the current holders, we understand that the recent fall in crypto markets has been tough across the whole market. The security token market is currently going through a rebirth. This is a nascent space, and we are still very early.
This means we are ahead of the curve in terms of development and innovation for the STO space and will reap the rewards as the ecosystem develops.
We encourage IXS holders to stake their tokens in our staking pools in the meantime so they can keep earning more IXS while we ride out the bear market together.
For our new investors, we want to assure them that the security token market is still at its infancy and have yet to see the significant growth phase as we have seen in other sectors. The market cap of STOs globally increased from $900 million when we started this project to $12.7 billion in just the last year itself. This industry still has a lot of room to grow with TAM of $7.5 trillion.
Looking at this from another perspective, IX Swap is currently considered a small cap project, which means it won’t take as much as a big cap to move. While some of the bigger coins will need billions to get back to where they were, IXS will only need millions. This means it is easier to get back to prior levels for IXS than most of the big caps, given our range of products, as well as the project that we keep on building and growing.
Do you have local communities in countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, and South Korea so they can better understand your project?
We are currently looking to expand our community into these areas because they are high-growth markets. On the F-NFT side of things and once we roll that, these markets will be more important than ever.
Right now, we are trying to make the English-speaking side as strong as possible, but we will look into branching into these areas soon.
Revenue is an important aspect for all projects to survive and sustain, so how does your project plan to generate profit and revenue?
Good question given the current market condition and yes, being agile and nimble in the space is definitely a key attribute for a company to be able to adjust and survive in times like this.
This is why we have currently set our sights on pushing our STO integration and connectivity solution aimed at STO projects and platforms so they can connect to our liquidity infrastructure through our APIs.
This will allow issuers that don’t have a secondary solution to be able to plug in to infrastructure via their platform to allow the trading of both of our STOs through quick and seamless integration.
This essentially allows STO platforms to use IXS tech so they can easily trade their tokens and apply that utility to their clients, which will connect the space even more.
In light of this, we’ve adjusted our roadmap to accommodate the viability of these revenue models in the current climate, which means we will be releasing updates on our roadmap and business revenue model as we go. We are here to stay for the long term.
When will we get more STO listings?
We have a few listings in the pipeline and are looking to roll them out in the next few months. We had to make a few adjustments as well, in light of the wider financial market conditions.
How’s our funding looking? What’s our treasury runway?
We are actually healthy in the treasury with a fair bit of runway, and we are generating revenue from the pools we have now. In our current business iteration, we also have the SaaS model integration solution that we are pushing out to connect other STO platforms to our infrastructure. This will allow them to create their own secondary through us. This is very relevant as most issuers have no secondary or are isolated.
IX Swap’s goal right from the start is not just to list security tokens but also to bridge the infrastructure of as many licensed STO platforms as a decentralized exchange (DEX) and as the technological solution to provide this utility.
We also have other business revenue models that we look forward to rolling out, such as the FMP and the launchpad, which we expect to increase our revenues significantly.
Lastly, we keep our funding in USD and stable equivalent (not UST or crypto), hence our treasury management is on track. We don’t believe in taking the risk of punting on crypto as we genuinely want to build out real-world use cases for blockchain as a whole.
Our team has been in this space since 2017, so we’ve seen so many projects rise and fall without proper attachment to real-world use cases, hence that’s the main mission at IX Swap.
How is the team morale at IX Swap?
Our team morale is better than ever. Our core team has grown stronger, the regulatory side of things is finally starting to fall into place, and while we had some restructuring during the past few weeks, we are not that affected by the overall crypto market condition, which we are very grateful for.
The real challenge is how effective our marketing campaigns are. How do we reach the masses and the right audience?
We believe it’s a balance between a strong B2B and B2C marketing plan. It’s quite clear that holders of IXS want new listings and new listings make the platform more attractive.
As for specifics, we believe that visual and auditory mediums are two of the most effective ways to get our messaging across and make our target audience understand. They show the most return across social platforms, so we will focus on those as well as the education side of things.
How much has engagement improved since using more hashtags?
It has improved, and we’ve seen a jump in engagement on our posts. This could also be attributed to having a strong and tight-knit community, along with new interest in our project as reflected in the numbers on new visits to the website, which remained really positive even in the downturn.
Do you believe tokenizing costs are a relatively high barrier to entry? If so, what are your thoughts on reducing those costs in order to incentivize people to tokenize?
Tokenization costs itself is not exactly a high barrier to entry compared to the traditional route. Tokenization makes normal processes faster and helps facilitate asset liquidity, which are crucial to private smaller firms that previously would have struggled to fundraise for themselves in a traditional setup.
Financial fees on the structuring will also be similar to how it is currently in the real world, but with tokenization, there are some very obvious advantage — the efficiency of accountability, being able to interact with Web3 structures where most of the values are at, cheaper way to fundraise, and with lesser administrative costs depending on the use-case for tokenization. There’s no one-size-fits-all as we build out our infrastructure that is designed to be dynamic and easy to use.
In terms of incentives for issuers to tokenize, this is based on a real-world use case, rather than speculation. For example, tokenization allows closed-end funds to enable their investors to exit before the maturity for a private fund since they don’t provide redemption. Hence the use case of tokenization is the incentive.
On top of that, additional features such as lending and staking aside from collateralization are added perks especially for stocks that will be tokenized. These were not available before.
When will the F-NFT platform launch?
The platform is actually ready, but our business and strategic decision is to hold it back during this period when the NFT market has been significantly hit.
We have our marketing plan ready too, and we will roll it out organically once we believe the conditions are right. We are in no rush right now to push out this project for the sake of launching it. We want to do that when it makes sense from a marketing perspective. We are also ramping up on the security side of our F-NFT project.
In the meantime, we’ve prioritized other milestones in our roadmap that have better functions in this current market. Look out for our updated roadmap, which we will release in a few weeks.
Any year-end number of target listings?
This will be announced accordingly. We have a couple of listings in the pipeline that we are finalizing, so don’t worry — there are more STO listings to come on IX Swap.
From a marketing perspective, we understand the importance of having more listings, and it is something we are working day and night to provide for the platform. We have to work with what we have and look for some of our new listings that should be coming down the pipeline, thus opening up more avenues for us.
Looking at the number of listings IX Swap has now, what are the partners doing?
We are getting listings, and we are also building avenues to generate more listings. Our current hold-up is mostly because of the market conditions that compelled some of the potential listings to hold back, but we are moving again towards listing new tokens.
It’s quite different from getting a crypto listing due to the numerous compliance checks and audits that we have to observe before clearing it on both sides. Hence, it tends to take longer with more documentation required.
For issuance platforms, we are working on the metrics that issuers will have to observe to ensure an easier and more seamless onboarding.
We have to deal with different factors especially in the US, such as transfer agent fees and trust deposits due to the nature of the market. Along with ironing out rules with certain jurisdictions, our platform also came live just two months ago. Since then, we have been running demo testings with our partners to advise their clients further.
Isn’t there a new website interface in the pipeline and why is it not released yet?
Yes, we have a new website design, and we will be rolling that out regardless of the other aspects previously mentioned.
It was previously mentioned that the F-NFT platform’s focus is more on income-generating NFTs. Is that still the strategy or are we trying to push high-value profile pic NFTs too?
Yes, this is still in the pipeline but we are pushing back the dates. It is not a great time right now to roll that out as a lot of NFT owners we know are also getting jaded. We will present an updated timeline push, so make sure to watch out for our updated roadmap.
And there you have it for our latest AMA. Make sure to follow us on our social media channels so you won’t miss any of our upcoming AMAs — with another one coming soon. Keep your eyes peeled — details to follow.
About IX Swap
IX Swap is a next-generation platform that leverages DeFi services backed by regulatory compliance to facilitate safe and convenient issuance, listing, and trading of security tokens and fractionalized NFTs.
By bridging the gap between traditional finance and innovative blockchain-based solutions, IX Swap is paving the way in democratizing access to traditional financial markets that have never been done before.
Originally published at https://ixswap.io on July 6, 2022.
