Connect Financial Update
Welcome back everyone! We hope you all had a great holiday break from reading these updates. But, we are back and ready for 2022 with everything it will bring.
First off, thank you everyone for an outstanding 2021. We as a company hit many internal milestones and feel what we’ve been able to compile as a road map and have been creating is something truly wonderful. While the core product offering did not make it out last year, we know your patience will be well rewarded. We spent the majority of last week working on our 2022 goals, alignments, reassessing work flows and setting expectations for the next quarter.
Before getting into the details, we have decided to make one final change to updates, which has been suggested before a few times. We will be moving them to bi-weekly which lines up with our two week development sprints. The reasoning for that is the developers do not give formal updates or showcase until the end of the two weeks. We will put out other unscheduled articles, that are not formal updates, when the need arises for items going live (such as the upcoming L2 Staking).
Whats coming
The first phase in the launch platform will focus around delivering the ability for users to stake CNFI on-platform, select a membership tier, apply for a card and fund their collateral and transactional wallets. By the time that this functionality will have been released our significant first-run order of cards will have already been printed by the factory, certified for use and ready for delivery. During this time we will also be moving into our growth marketing phase, bringing many new users to the project.
The second platform release is timed to quickly follow the delivery of phase one, allowing for the activation of cards and the day to day usage and tracking of card spending. Users will also be able to apply for additional cards and make use of OTC trading through the newly staffed trading desk.
During phase three, we will continue to release the remaining wallets including earn wallets, staking wallets and the savings vault. The full exchange functionality will also be rolled out across the site, including the ability to fund wallets with fiat and withdraw cash. During this phase, users will also be able to rebalance their membership tiers and credit card collateral to account for shifts in the markets. Finally, we will also be releasing new ways to take out a loan, as well as new collateral options for cards and loans.
It’s important to note that good roadmaps are flexible and naturally change as the product evolves, challenges are discovered and efficiencies are identified. Due to the financial nature of the program and the stringent requirements of our partners, testing will continue to be a cornerstone approach to everything we do. We test everything we do. And then test again. And then we test a few more times before finishing with some more testing. While this can make us feel impatient at times, we will never sacrifice quality to push out a platform that isn’t ready. With this in mind, we are refraining from putting dates against this roadmap until we are certain of exact delivery dates.
Membership tiers
When designing a membership program for an entire ecosystem of financial products, there are a seemingly unlimited number of variables to consider. How do we encourage users to join the program and feel confident to stake CNFI tokens? How do we incentivize users to become higher tier members, while still keeping Platinum and Black programs exclusive? How will the different membership tiers use Connect Financial products, and how can we balance profitability with incredible value for our users? After several conversations within the leadership team and the community, we have made the decision to remove the more recently announced ability to upgrade to a higher tier card for an additional fee. What this means is that users will be limited to the same card tier (or lower) as their membership tier. If you have a gold tier membership, you will be able to apply for a Basic, Silver or Gold tier card. To get a Platinum or Black level card, you will need to upgrade your membership. We feel that this approach is the most equitable way of encouraging higher tier memberships within the user base and keeping an air of exclusivity around the higher card tiers while still maintaining an affordable product for all users. As always, business rules will continue to evolve along with the evolution of the program. The feedback of our community (and the DAO, in due course) will continue to be critical in creating the best possible product.
Connect DAO
Once the Connect Financial ecosystem goes live, we will formalize the transition towards the DAO governance model where proposals can be submitted and voted upon to influence the future direction of the Connect Financial company. DAO members will also be able to benefit from quarterly pCNFI distributions. The Connect Dao has been restructured to become a ‘holding DAO’ to allow additional companies and projects to fall under the over-arching Connect DAO governance model. This ‘DAO of DAOs’ model is being designed to significantly increase the rewards that accrue to CNFD holders and ensure synergy between Connect Financial and its sister companies. While we can’t say too much right now, the team is currently working with partners on a related business that will drive value to the Connect DAO, give users additional investment and collateral options within the Connect Financial ecosystem while also standing alone as a first-to-market investment product. Watch this space for more details shortly.
Platform UIUX
We continue to expand our UIUX developments as we build out our products features and enhancements. Ensuring the smoothest and most intuitive flow on membership, staking CNFI, applying for credit card, setting up your general wallets, collateral wallets, account profile and more.
We are preparing for the next round of user testing as we finish up the new card sign up process integration and refinement of other processes from the last round.
Staking update
As you can see from the road map, our intention is to have staking on L2 Arbitrum completed prior to the product launch. I met with the blockchain devs earlier today and they have completed our integration as of today. They are deploying this final build to the Public Testnet in the morning for a final round of testing, including our deployment scripts.
This includes several steps for full deployment. We must upgrade our Ethereum L1 token contract and our staking contract. Then we must temporarily pause the staking contract while we migrate all data in the L1 contract memory into the deployment script for L2. During this time the token portal will be unaccessible.
Then we must deploy the Arbitrum ERC-20 CNFI token followed by the multiple staking contracts on Arbitrum.
Finally the L1 Staking Contract and ERC-20 will require one final upgrade to turn off the L1 staking functions and route effectively to the Arbitrum bridge.
Each of these steps we will be reproducing multiple times on the testnet to ensure proper deployment flow and that everything works.
We will then open liquidity on the Arbitrum Uniswap side for users who want to trade on Arbitrum. If all goes according to plan this will be completed over the next 72 hours.
Website / Marketing
As we enter into the new year our marketing team is gearing up for an exciting 2022.
Our 2022 marketing strategy will continue to bring you news on our product developments, incentives and offers, through to cryptocurrency and fintech news across the industries global landscape. We will begin reaching out to be showcased in your well-loved and known crypto-centric media publications, as well expanding our reach with crypto influencers and presence in our digital marketing. We want to thank you all for your ongoing support and engagement with us. We have seen tremendous growth in our new website visits since its launch attracting nearly 30,000 new users — an increase of 3,025% spanning nearly the entire globe.
In case you have missed some of our most recent publishing’s please check out the following:
Whitepaper — The Connect Financial Ecosystem
Unbanked by Choice — 4 Reasons Why People Are Moving From Traditional Banks https://cnfi.me/30Tg1Be
3 Innovations Making Crypto More Tangible in Life.
https://cnfi.me/3nLa1Dx
Our team is working at establishing our core marketing messaging and voice. Stay tuned; follow us @connect_fintech and become a subscriber https://cnfi.me/3GiZIgH to be the first to read our fintech and crypto articles, whitepapers, incentives and promotions as they launch.
Thank you again everybody for being a part of our community and here’s to a FANTASTIC 2022.
