Connect Financial Community Update
Welcome everyone to another update from the team at Connect Financial for the second half of February 2022.
The ever-evolving landscape of Regulation and Compliance
Some of the community may have already heard about the $100M settlement reached between BlockFi and the SEC that was announced in the last week.
Generally, the settlement is being viewed within the industry as a net positive. While it is an expensive lesson for some, it has brought some much needed clarity to the sale and structure of interest bearing crypto accounts and how companies can provide this service within the U.S. regulatory framework.
Since the announcement, at least one of our competitors has withdrawn the ability for U.S. based customers to top-up funds in their version of interest earning wallets. They are also investigating other potential products that are compliant with current regulations.
We are always watching this space very carefully and analyzing how ANY regulatory or governmental nuance impacts our customers and capacity to serve you our full suite of products. We are in active discussions with our legal and compliance team about how the BlockFi settlement impacts our U.S. based customers. When we have some more clarity and direction, we’ll update the community as soon as possible.
While we would love to give the impression that changes like this cannot or will not impact us, we cannot. We are flexible, swift, and experienced enough to adapt to any change that is required.
Note, these events potentially affect only our U.S. customers that will use an Earn wallet at launch.
An overview of our MVP product.
It’s been a few weeks since we’ve reviewed in detail all of the functionality that will be available on the MVP at launch.
Here’s a quick review of the main flow and functions. As always, more information is available in our support documents and in the whitepaper.
- Create an account and manage your profile.
Through your profile, you’ll be able to control key account level functionalities like notifications, security, whitelisting addresses and managing your membership.
2. Stake CNFI to become eligible for a membership tier
After creating your account profile, the first step will be to transfer and commit CNFI tokens to your staking wallet in order to become eligible for a membership tier. In a future release phase, you will be able to purchase CNFI tokens directly without needing to leave the Connect Financial platform.
3. Select your card tier and fund your collateral wallet
The process for signing up for a credit card and committing collateral takes around 5 minutes and is managed completely within the platform. An order for your selected card will be immediately dispatched and arrive at most international addresses within 20 business days.
4. Manage wallets
From day one, you will be able to interact with a range of wallets, including your collateral wallet, staking wallets and general wallets.
Roadmap and release update
It’s been another busy month on the development side of the project. This week we are onboarding an additional two developers onto the team who will be focusing on our Solidity development, backend infrastructure and our platform-wide security.
Our product team and scrum master have been busy defining and prioritizing development user stories, and overall we’re happy with the speed and quality of the development efforts.
As always, the question that we get asked most often is “when card?”. For a product as complex and wide in scope as Connect Financial, it’s not realistic or fair to our community or our internal team to set a release date without being 99.99% committed. Even after development has
finished, there will be several weeks’ work of testing, hardening and retesting that could throw up any number of items that need addressing!
Although we’re not ready to commit to a launch date (yet), we do commit to releasing an industry leading platform that is launched right, the first time.
As we’ve mentioned in previous updates, the roadmap is always changing, and we enjoy sharing our progress with the community as we get ever-closer to the launch of the MVP. The items in Phase 1 Launch are all in varying degrees of “done” with those checked off being locked and 100% ready for launch.
Marketing
There is a significant amount of items that go into delivering a single product like Connect Financials Credit Card. These items go well beyond your typical development of a website, or the client portal. Every item on the checklist we spend time to thoroughly think, plan and source the absolute best to ensure our product exudes the quality and image that we have cast for it.
This update we want to give you a brief look into some of these items and reveal the near final product of what was the culmination of many months of sourcing, design and iteration for what may seem like an insignificant item.
These are the delivery packages for the Basic, Silver and Gold cards. I will personally apologize now for the smudges on the packages, I took these pictures after critiquing the packages for a while and they do not have the final print sealant on them as they were design samples for approval so the oil from our hands are those darker spots.
Ultimately, we are ecstatic with their turn out, with just a minor tweak being done to the top wording on the pull out.
Alongside this our packaging design for the premium and black cards have also continued its developments with structural design complete and preparations for professional manufacturing are under way. These are the packages that we are most excited about and cannot wait for the first unboxing reveals to be posted online from some of your favorite influencers.
Our team has launched a new article this week discussing the trends and innovative explosion we have witnessed within the Fintech and cryptocurrency realm over the past two years and their record-shattering results. New solutions within these industries are exceeding consumers needs within their finances. We discuss what they are and how they are bringing a world of flexibility, autonomy, and control back to the users to manage and expand their financial freedom and portfolio. Read Article: https://cnfi.me/3LPLN4X
We would like to thank everyone who has read, liked, shared and overall engaged with us on our Arbitrum integration press release announcement. Overall, it received over 3,000 views, over 2,000 likes and experienced an engagement rate of 29.83%. If you haven’t had a chance to read about our Arbitrum integration you can check out the press release here: https://cnfi.me/34ImLn8
Thanks to our followers that have moved over to our new Twitter handle updated a few months back. If you haven’t moved over yet, please come Follow us on our forever Twitter home at https://twitter.com/connect_fintech or become a subscriber at https://cnfi.me/3GiZIgH to be the first to read our fintech and crypto articles, whitepapers, incentives and promotions as they launch.
