Connect Financial Update
Thoughts on Ukraine, Russia and the evolving regulatory landscape
It’s been a difficult week for me and the Connect Financial team as we watch with concern and sadness as the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine unfolds.
While it’s not our role to comment on geopolitics in this forum, as a financial institution that is deeply integrated into cryptocurrency, I feel that it is appropriate to comment on Connect Financial’s position with regards to sanctions, user banning and complying with government regulations.
Firstly, the whole team at Connect Financial is deeply passionate about the decentralization of financial systems and the opportunity for unbanked and underbanked people to participate in the global economy.
With that said, decentralization does not mean without limits. As a responsible and appropriately licensed company, we are obligated to follow a range of international standards which can affect residents of certain countries and jurisdictions. In the case of Russia, we will closely follow any international sanction rules that are set out by the relevant authorities.
What we won’t do is make arbitrary decisions around what services we provide to whom outside of any international or local regulations. We have carefully designed our systems to be able to adapt to changing circumstances quickly and limit certain services to regions if we are required to do so.
Managing your membership when the token price changes.
Some great questions were raised in the Telegram group this week around how the membership requirements change should the token price change over time. I want to take a moment to explain how a few scenarios play out when it comes to committing to a membership as the token value changes over time.
Membership levels and eligibility
To become eligible for a membership, you need to commit CNFI tokens for a period of at least 6 months. The amount of CNFI tokens required is determined by the USD equivalent at the time of membership.
Once you select your preferred membership tier, a quote is generated based on the current price of CNFI tokens. Once the quote has been generated, it is locked for 24 hours while you transfer over the required amount of tokens to the staking wallet.
What happens if the price of CNFI changes over time?
As mentioned above, when you stake CNFI tokens to become eligible for a membership, you are committing them for a period of 6 months. At the end of each 180 day period, you may rebalance your staked CNFI tokens and withdraw them back into your unstaked balance.
For example, on June 1st, the value of CNFI is $0.75. In order to qualify for a platinum membership, you stake 133333 CNFI tokens ($100K USD equivalent). Six months later on January 1st, the price of CNFI is now $0.92. You may withdraw 24,637 CNFI from your committed allotment in the staking wallet and still retain your Platinum membership.
What happens if the price of CNFI goes down over time?
Once you have staked sufficient CNFI tokens to qualify for a membership tier, your tier level is locked in. We won’t ask you to add additional CNFI tokens at a later date in order to maintain your membership level.
UIUX
Our UIUX designs continue to evolve to support our MVP. As we’ve shown in previous updates our card application flow and membership with its corresponding stacking capabilities have completed UIUX and are well under way their UIUX implementation with our developers. This week we would like to share and showcase our new wallet UIUX. There are still components that are within UIUX developments, but we will be moving this development in our next sprint phase.
Wallet Main
Within the main wallet screen from the left navigation you get everything you need to quickly review, digest and manage your Connect wallets from transactional based wallets, through to collateral wallets and stacking wallets. Instantly see overall balances, specific assets balances, review total actions including sends, receives, transfers, new wallets created, etc. and if applicable any collateral spend.
When you click on any of the main wallet segments drop down arrow instantly it expands to clearly identify all the wallets you have with their high-level details.
To deep dive into a specific transactional wallet simply click the arrow to be taken to a page with specific dashboard metrics and reporting to that wallet account, view all assets and associated balances, all transactions history and all assets history with marketplace tickers to know what you’ve increased/decreased in asset value over the last 24 hrs.
When we dive into the collateral wallets the information is presented in a manner on screen to easily associate the credit card attached to the collateral wallet, the total balance, how much of the total balance is locked in collateralization and loan details. Diving deeper into the loan details you can link off to view the credit card details with its associated transactions, quickly view loan spend to available credit and all other key facts surrounding your collateral agreement, collateral wallet activity and if a bill payment is due to keep your collateral in good standings.
Our UIUX design is continuing its focus on updating the stacking wallets deep dive UIUX and crypto/fiat deposit modal. Stay tuned in the coming week updates for more visualization of our UIUX developments.
Marketing
Last week we had shared our card packaging and are pleased to expand the announcement that our basic, silver and gold packaging is well underway with a final print production test prior going to manufacturers. We are also deep in the developments for the more sophisticated packaging to support our platinum and black box and look forward its completion and unboxing events.
We are thrilled to share our new card packaging designs to support card delivery for the first 3 tiers of our cards (Basic, Silver and Gold) have been developed with a print test received. We will be going into professional manufacturing in the coming weeks. 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 well on their way.
Last update we released a new article ‘Fintech & Crypto — Bringing a World of Flexibility, Autonomy and Control.’ This article has truly broken ground in setting new engagement expectations receiving over 48K engagements, over 2.4K likes and 564 new visitors to the site in the past week. We’d like to thank all those have and continue to engage with our marketing content. Please keep an eye out for new articles to launch as our team continues its steady developments in establishing industry specific and thought-leadership articles. If you have missed a few of our more recent articles you can check them out below.
Fintech & Crypto — Bringing a World of Flexibility, Autonomy and Control. — https://cnfi.me/3LPLN4X
Announcing L2 Arbitrum Migration Integrated and Live Press Release — https://cnfi.me/3LPLN4X
Fintech & Crypto — Closing the Gap for the Unbanked and Driving Financial Inclusion Worldwide. https://cnfi.me/3o0Cepy
Another thank you to all 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.
