Here we go with our June recap! 

 

Korporatio aims to create a new generation of cutting edge, truly global businesses, led by entrepreneurs who are citizens of the world. A new era in which everyone is empowered to incorporate, innovate and realise their dreams.

 

GENERAL 

We are officially crossing the first half of the year mark. And yes, 2020 is probably one of the weirdest years ever. Quite a lot of things have happened but luckily, Korporatio is growing step by step and the team has been quite busy during this month.

 

DEVELOPMENT IN JUNE

We finally got the green light to receive online payments! Yes, this is a huge step for us. I’ve touched base previously about what will happen with this new feature but let me explain a bit more as July will be the month where we set everything live. 

Users will have the option to pick three different merchants to pay online: debit, credit and a popular e-wallet. We think these options cover quite a bit already so our users can choose whatever method they wish. Wire transfers will still be valid as before so this upgrade is really just an additional set of options, not a replacement of what we currently have available.  

You spoke, we listened

With this update, we are finally able to answer some of the feedback you have been providing us for months:

First, new information related to each jurisdiction. We will provide articles and a dedicated section on the website so all users interested in the Smart Company model can take their time in deciding between jurisdictions and read anything they want. 

Second, trust. Those of you who don’t know us have justifiably asked:

“How can I trust that you will not run away with the money if I pay via wire transfer?”

Well, it’s a fair question, and we believe this new set of options will present more protection to everyone. 

Third, more transparency. It’s our mantra at this point to communicate as much as possible to everybody. Along with debit/credit cards payments, we will also publish Smart Company incorporation forms. This means that for those of you interested, you can check our prices directly and decide if we are a good option for you. 

Such an update marks the starting point of our next phase and also presents much better service to the public. Once published, we will be able to move to another highly requested feature: referrals! 

It will take a few months to ensure a fully automated referral model. The most important part is to structure it in a way that it makes sense for everybody, but we are very excited to have the chance to deliver exactly what the community is asking. 

Making our product more robust

Couple of other things that have happened on the development side that I wanted to share. We developed an internal tool to continue deployment of smart contracts in case the network starts rejecting our requests. I will go more into detail about this problem at the end of the article. If you are in this space, you already know what is currently happening with Ethereum’s gas price. 

We have also started development of proper onboarding documents to send directly to all our new users. We normally run one-on-one calls with users to explain the dashboard and ensure they are familiar with everything. Unfortunately such an approach is not possible anymore due to the increased number of requests we are receiving. We will still provide onboarding calls to anyone who requests. But as a starting point, we want to automate the onboarding process as much as possible to make our model more scalable. 

One last thing, in the past few days our Portis integration has stopped working properly. We are looking into it and we should be able to fix it during this week. 

MARKETING IN JUNE

There is quite a bit to cover in this section. Let’s start with some videos!

I was asked by the team of Hardforking to record a short video about the history of cryptos. Feel free to check it out here if you are interested to learn more about it. Not going to lie, it was quite difficult trying to articulate so many thoughts in such short amount of time. However, it was a very unique experience, at least for me. 

One day after that I also got asked to jump on a conversation about ETH 2.0 and the current situation of DeFi. Another video available if you have another 30 minutes of free time. Critical thinking is something very important to me, and having the chance to chat with 3 amazing individuals was an experience I was very lucky to have.

Not sure if you remember, but a few months ago Talenkraft interviewed me for their section ‘Founder’s Friday’. They have issued an e-book about all the stories they managed to collect. If you are someone studying how to start your first company, maybe you will find some valuable tips in that file. You can download it here.

We’ve got videos, we’ve got e-books, so let’s also add some audio!

Edward Thomson, which is one of the faces behind Polkadot has run a podcast about the use of blockchain in the gaming industry.

At around minute 68:00 he starts talking about Korporatio and how the Smart Company can be used by guilds and clans in games to manage their activities and basically, creating companies from games activities.

We are obviously stretching a bit with the possibility of the Smart Companies, but considering some of the use cases we currently have such as Instagrammers or Painters tokenizing themselves, we believe there is a niche in the gaming industry as well. 

 

ETH GAS PRICE

It is not the first time we speak about this topic. Back in April I’ve mentioned already how the gas price situation is a bit out of control at this time. Unfortunately, the situation has not improved since then. 

Let me try to explain a bit what is happening. To do anything on the Ethereum blockchain, you need to pay a fee to miners in order for them to verify your transaction. They also keep the blockchain in order. The blockchain is currently limited to around 13-14 transactions per second. If there are more transactions than what the blockchain can deal with, miners will start serving those that pay more. A micro unit of ETH is called WEI. As WEI is a very small fee for transactions, we generally talk about GWEI. In the past, an average cost required to run a transaction was around 2-4 GWEI. Right now, we are at 30 GWEI, which increases up to 45-50 GWEI during the day. 

In other words, this translates into a 10x increase in cost to use the Ethereum blockchain. With ETH price also increasing, we are looking at a realistic t increase in price of 20x-25x compared to the USD value. Small companies, including us, are crashing due to this as these fees in running the development is going over the top. To give you a real example, we are currently incorporating in Wyoming at a loss. Margins have been reduced a lot and the situation, unfortunately, doesn’t look like it will get solved anytime soon. 

What are your thoughts?

We would love your feedback, as usual, as ETH 2.0 will not help till phase 1.5 is implemented. We were even considering trying to switch to a layer 2. This means to interact with Smart Company dashboards, users would need to add an extra step in the process. This step will require users to switch the network from their wallet in order to view and interact with the dApp. Yes, it would be an extra step. Ideally, we’d prefer to keep things as simple as possible, but we are not sure it will be beneficial for the company and our users to keep such a solution. To be fair, high gas fees also means higher costs to execute actions such as creating a vote or approving a new shareholder on the dashboard.

We trust our community as always, therefore we would love your feedback on this matter 🙂

 

For this month, this is everything we have to share, as usual, if you like to chat feel free to join our Discord at discord.gg/g3m33DZ