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KuCoin x GoMining
Recorded: July 4, 2024 Duration: 1:09:51Space Recording
Full Transcription
Hello.
Hi, everyone.
We are waiting a bit to see everybody coming through.
Okay.
Mark, I see you have joined the speakers.
Can you hear me well?
Yes.
Yes, yes, I can.
Hello.
Great.
Thanks and welcome to this space on KuCoin.
Today, we'll be exploring a bit about mining, especially tokenized digitized mining.
And actually, I'll be on the curious side, meaning I have no personal deep experience of mining, how it actually works when it's digitized. So regarding tokenized mining, cloud mining, all this, you will probably be able to explain us more about these differences.
First, well, I see we already have quite some listeners, it would be nice to have a small introduction about yourself, Mark.
Yes.
And tell us more about, well, on the go, we'll be delving much deeper into go mining.
But tell us a bit more about yourself and how you came to Bitcoin and crypto in general.
Yes, great.
Thank you for the introduction.
And thank you very much for having us.
I'm very pleased to be here.
Welcome to everybody that's joining.
So thank you for taking the time to listen to us talk about our project and hopefully, you know, join the conversation.
Hoping we'll have some time for Q&A at the end.
So just briefly about my own background.
I've been in banking for a big part of my career, banking IT, so financial technologies.
I've managed large infrastructures for commercial banks.
I was the chief information officer for a multibillion dollar banking institution earlier in my career.
And then I like to say it took me, I wasn't very smart.
It took me about a third time around to finally figure out that Bitcoin was something that was worth sort of, A, taking a longer look at and B, switching my career.
But I basically came around late in about 2021 once I figured out, and like I said, it took me a while.
Once I figured out that Bitcoin was here to stay once we've gone through a couple of bull markets and, you know, the ebb and flow of value creation was, you know, difficult to ignore.
And right around 21 is when we had a fortuitous meeting with the team that founded the GoMining project.
And it initially started in 2017 as a mining, pure mining play and around sometime around the lockdowns in 2020, we came upon this idea that, you know, mining is a great way to participate in the future of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin, if you think about it sort of strategically, right, if you think that Bitcoin has a future, if you think that Bitcoin will continue appreciating, continue creating value for the entire ecosystem, and you want to participate in that future, there's really two avenues that you can take to join in.
Right, you can buy Bitcoin, right, you can buy Bitcoin and, and hold it, which is called the, you know, which is called the buy and hold strategy, obviously, self evidently, the second, the second way avenue that's open to you is, is to invest in mining.
And, and whereas mining has been a traditionally a much higher return type of investment.
It has been since about 2015, maybe 2016, it's been essentially closed to retail investors for participation because it required so much technical expertise and so much capital.
And, you know, for right now, for us, that side of the businesses is a couple 100 people that that run data centers across the world, in different geographic locations, and for somebody that's not a that doesn't want to do this full time for a living, and learn the intricacies of how hardware miners will function and how mining pools function,
and how to build and manage a data center that avenues been closed essentially.
So in 2020, late 20, early 21.
Our idea sort of that percolated through the team was basically how can we make this?
How can we unlock this this this avenue of participation for everyday retail investors that want to take part in, in that avenue of getting to the Bitcoin future, but don't want to do the the don't have the the aptitude or the interest to
to do the technical part and obviously the capital part.
So that is how the current iteration of go mining and tokens and digital miners has been created.
But I'll talk about that in detail.
I think a little bit down the road, but let me finish with my introduction here.
No worries.
Actually, yeah, it was at this time when we saw the like a couple of famous cloud mining solutions that came to light and lots and lots, lots of people were interested in cloud mining, as you said, because they just don't have the access either to electricity price that makes it interesting, or the capital required to invest in miners is too too heavy.
So I guess you were part of this wave in terms of projects, but I guess go mining has something different about its economics and like why, why you chose to take this side.
Well, maybe we can delve into this a bit later.
First, I would like to have some of your insight about something that's related to the current trends as the Bitcoin mining industry struggling right now.
We've seen a couple of miners actually are not happy with the price action of Bitcoin and they need to sell and they are not making as much money as they used to after last halvings, for example.
So as an insider in the Bitcoin mining industry, what are the trends that you can see right now as a miner and how has the halving affected the landscape for your business in particular?
That's that's a very extensive question. We could probably spend an hour talking about it.
So let me try to let me try to to be concise.
The way that we look at it and, you know, every every company and every team out there is one of the things that they have to do very early on is come up with a thesis and basically build their project and their future and their investment strategy and so on around that thesis.
And, you know, ideally, as as things develop, your thesis either gets confirmed or gets rejected and you have to come up with with a new one.
But ours has been pretty constant for the past eight years, I guess, or seven and a half years in that we we see the the Bitcoin ecosystem continuing to grow by leaps and bounds.
And, you know, I'm not going to spend time talking about the fact that there is no better investment that one could have made 15 years ago than investing investing in Bitcoin.
Bitcoin and it has been consistently overperforming any while any prediction that seemed wild at the at the point that it was made.
And, you know, just if we think back 12 to 18 months ago and somebody said, hey, you know, January 24, there's going to be a half dozen or I think dozen at this point ETFs from the likes of BlackRock and Fidelity and whatnot that are going to attract tens of billions and hundreds of billions of dollars of inflows from institutional investors.
I don't think anybody would have would have bet serious money on it.
And yet, you know, here we are.
So we think our thesis is that Bitcoin is going to continue to be the Bitcoin ecosystem is going to continue to grow both in terms of value, both in terms of utility.
And part of that is inherent in the way Bitcoin is structured.
Part of that is inherent in not part of that is due to the fact that other asset classes, other financial instruments are changing in terms of their reliability and in terms of their ability to store value and in terms of their utility in everyday transactions and so on.
So our long term thesis is this is going to continue to grow.
And again, in 15 years, it went from, you know, a couple of hundred people writing code and, you know, paying ten thousand bitcoins for pizza to, you know, to where we are today.
So we think it's going to grow quickly.
The halving effects that we've been observing for the, you know, consistently every three to four years, four years is what they are.
And they're part of that growth story.
And obviously, you know, Bitcoin is volatile.
We've seen, we've seen value go up.
We've seen value go down, pricing action go up, pricing action go down by, you know, multiples.
So that's just part of the story and part of the ride.
And but consistently, you know, after the Bitcoin halving event happens, you see profitability drops.
You see some people unplugging, unplugging and selling mining equipment.
For instance, you see the hash rate drop.
You see difficulty drop, et cetera.
Eventually, as we've seen previously, all of that recovers on the 12 to 18 month sort of time horizon.
All of those reductions are made back and Bitcoin continues to appreciate and the economics sort of recovers to where it was pre-halving.
So from our perspective, we see this halving developing along generally the same lines, right?
We we're not going to say that it's going to happen exactly in the same way that it happened in four years ago or eight years ago or 12 years ago.
But generally, the outlines are still are still holding.
So, yes, it's likely that people some people are experiencing a more difficult time from an economics perspective of the business, because obviously, when when you take your revenue and take away half of it, hence the halving name, obviously, it becomes it's a challenge from a business perspective.
But it's something that everybody knew about people.
You know, we started planning for the next halving basically as soon as the previous one happened.
So twenty one, twenty two, we were very deeply into figuring out how we wanted to to to to make it to April twenty four.
What position we wanted to be in what we expected to happen and broadly, you know, those expectations came out true.
And, you know, that that that is the same sort of type of type of planning and approach that we saw most of our peers in the industry take as well.
So, you know, optimizing operational expenses, continuing to invest in equipment upgrades, making capital investments, making sure that your equipment is as energy efficient as possible.
But those are, you know, those are not unique to the way that Bitcoin business is run.
Those are the fundamentals of the way that you run any business, whether you've got a coffee shop on on the corner or whether you're running, I don't know, GM.
Everybody is always General Motors or, you know, one of the Apple, Microsoft, whatever.
The way that you basically run a company is is you type you're always looking to tighten up operational expenses.
You're always looking to be smart with your CapEx investments, et cetera.
So we think, you know, we we we think that disruptions are going to work, work themselves through in the next couple of months.
We we see that people that have been strategic in the way that they've they've run their businesses are, you know, taking advantage of the opportunities.
I know we certainly are and we see that there's a fair bit of interest out in the marketplace in terms of picking up the slack.
If somebody is looking to unplug, so to speak, and, you know, because because they weren't they weren't making investments, then there's always people willing to step in and pick up equipment and pick up infrastructure capacity.
And the hash rate hasn't really hasn't really hasn't really declined in a noticeable amount.
So we prepare for that.
Actually, all the strategic players, serious players.
Yeah, the serious.
In fact, to be honest, I expected there to be sort of more of a more of a disruption and more of more people disconnecting and more opportunities available for us.
To come in and pick up sort of pick up the slack cheaper than than there have been.
So, OK, not an investment advice here, but if that's what you're expecting from the past experience means that we may not we may not be out of the woods yet.
That's why that's what I understand.
Well, I think it hasn't been as dramatic, I would say.
So we expected we expected more declines and we expected maybe more difficulties for people out there.
Some of the some of the smaller players and more consolidation opportunities.
So more more opportunity to to buy by maybe some some companies out some infrastructures out.
But there there really hasn't been.
So the the the the the the conclusion I draw from that is people have generally been fairly well prepared.
The price of Bitcoin is stayed up.
It hasn't declined, you know, in a not in a noticeable amount.
And again, people say, you know, it's going up 10 to 20 percent.
Yes.
But, you know, after you've gone through a couple of cycles of, you know, 20 declining to three or 60 declining to 15, you know, 70 declining to 62 or to 60 is not such a big deal.
Everything is relative. Absolutely.
Absolutely.
So I offer that we start speaking about go mining's specifics, especially why you're different from, for example, cloud mining as it used to be back in the days.
And what what makes it different in terms of technology, tokenomics on your end?
So can you explain this first? I saw that you are branding it as a liquid Bitcoin hash rate, not like owning the the how would you say the minor, the physical minor per se, but owning the hash rate.
So can you tell us more about this and can you share your thoughts on the idea, the whole idea of hash rate tokenization?
How like how did it come up and why did you chose to do it through NFTs?
Right. So there's there's a lot there. Let me try to get to every part of the question.
First of all, you mentioned that, yes, there's back in 2020, 2021, there was a lot of there was interest, let's say, and maybe a little bit of a trend towards cloud mining.
And we we obviously saw it and we saw, you know, a lot of problems with the way that it was set up.
So whereas we generally agreed on the idea of making it available, figuring out a way to make it to make mining participation available to retail investors, the cloud, the whole cloud mining sort of trend came and went.
And probably with, you know, went with very good reason because there was a lot of how should I say this properly?
A lot of people were not were not transparent and were not honest and were not truthful.
Yeah, it was it was very centralized.
I remember I used a couple of these solutions and each time you it was just about trusting the cloud mining platform.
If things were actually happening in the back end, but there was no way to actually own.
Exactly, exactly, exactly.
And and people sort of obviously took advantage of that.
And there were, you know, companies that were advertising that they were cloud mining providers that didn't have any equipment behind it that were running Ponzi schemes, basically.
And and, you know, even if somebody was trying to do business in the right way, you you had no way of verifying that your equipment was actually producing the cash rate that the provider was claiming it was producing.
You had no way to verify that somebody wasn't skimming off the top or that whenever it was got taken down for maintenance that actually, you know, that's how long it took to to to maintain and repair it as opposed to somebody just switching over the hash rate to themselves.
So there's as with many things, many version one things around.
There was a lot of issues and generally it sort of went away, but we we really liked the idea and we spent a lot of time.
The idea of again, democratizing access to the economics of mining.
And we spent a lot of time figuring out, you know, how can we maintain that that core kernel of value?
But address all of the all of the challenges.
So we had sort of version one of our product, which which came out in 2021, which was the go mining token, which essentially said, you know, by by the token, the token is a representation of the hash rate that we have sitting in our data center.
And the way we build the transparency is is it's basically it's a smart contract and there's full transparency on the blockchain.
You can see exactly how much we're mining because we make all of all of that transparent on our website.
You can see how much how many tokens are out there.
You can calculate, you know, how much a token represents in terms of hash value.
And this is how much you should be getting in terms of mining rewards.
And then every day this mining rewards drop into your Bitcoin wallet.
You it's an easy, easy trust and trust, but verify sort of exercise to make sure that we're fully transparent in terms of how the setup is working.
Now, that was version one. And as you know, as within your startup, you go through a lot of trial and error cycles.
We went through we put out the first version of the product in in 21 took us about 12 to 18 months to get a good idea of what version two should be.
And then it took us another six to nine months to build it.
So in August of last year, we came out with version two, which is the the digital miner as represented by the NFT.
And we were looking to address a couple of things that.
Well, not a couple of things, actually, a very long list of things in terms of feedback from the community, in terms of the way the economics we saw economics working and not working the way we wanted them to with with version one of the product.
So today we have version two, we have the digital miners and basically there's there's a couple of things that we wanted to address.
So first of all, we wanted the core idea of you buy some you buy a virtual asset that represents real world asset linkage.
So that that's a digital claim to a real world asset in our case Bitcoin hash rate, but that has all of the conveniences and utility of being a digital asset.
So it's very easy to store obviously on on your digital wallet.
It's very easy to transfer, etc, etc.
So that was why we sort of went the NFT route, because the NFT was has many of those attributes that we were looking for.
So it's very easy to to do a real world asset tokenization.
You have to sort of build the linkage.
And that's the that's the LDH, the liquid Bitcoin hash rate protocol that I'll talk about more in a minute.
But basically, the idea is that you buy an NFT that as its attributes has a claim to a piece of the Bitcoin hash rate.
And then the way that we built the NFT is is we said, okay, well, we actually taught this.
This was one of the one of the bits of the input from the community is we wanted to the digital asset to be sort of a representation of the way that miners actually physical miners actually mine Bitcoin hash rate in the real world.
So we said, okay, well, let's add some element of gamification to it.
And that and let's say, you know, when you buy a miner, it has all of these attributes and it's a subset of what what the real world miners have.
So you have obviously the throughput, the energy efficiency, etc, etc.
And as more equipment as as newer next versions of equipment become available from equipment manufacturers such as Bitmain or WhatsApp miner, we quickly make those same types of digital miners available that represent those advances.
So you're able to go through upgrade cycles in the same way, for instance, that hardware manufacturers make available to you when you're actually managing hardware, hardware assets in a data center.
But in this case, you don't have to go to a data center that's setting somewhere out in a very typically inhospitable environment where electricity is available.
You simply go on your website and you click a couple of buttons and immediately you gain the benefits of those upgrades.
So that's that's the digital miner piece.
NFC is very NFC just as a as a as a as a type of digital asset is fits very neatly into what we wanted to do.
Again, it's transferable.
It's easy to store on your digital wallet in the same way that you store the rest of your digital assets.
We've actually invested quite significantly in creating some art value around it.
We've we've it's very easy with NFC to make special collections that can have special unique features.
So for instance, our first collection that that was made available that that was called the greedy machines has some unique features that will have will be available in perpetuity.
So it has some multipliers to the hash rate that it has.
It has it there's there's a few benefits that are very unique.
So for instance, when you see miners on on the resale market, the greedy machine miners have actually additional value and people are specifically looking to buy those because in terms of the the the the rewards that get generated, there's there's certain features that that provided that that
provide additional benefit there.
So that's the NFC piece, the the NFT route the way if we can have a bit of the technicals about these NFTs like on which blockchain are they emitted, minted and it.
Yeah, it's Ethereum and and BSC 20.
Okay, if you're both Ethereum and BSC 20 and about the they're not fractionalized, right?
Like you don't do fractionalized NFTs for now.
Well, we don't need to because the NFT when you when you buy an NFT, it's basically its value is the amount of terahash that's tied to it.
And the cost of the terahash starts at $25.
So it's there's there's really no need.
You can buy the first one and then you can upgrade it to up to 5000 terahash for the NFT.
Okay, yes, no need for people to come together to try to break down the physical miner because that's actually not how it works.
Yeah, it's liquid the hashrate as you mentioned.
Yeah, yeah.
So so the liquid the liquid hashrate pieces, the way that we wanted to build it strategically is to say, look, the the the way to participate in make participation easy.
And this this this actually ties back to I think where your question came from is to make hashrate available in very small slices to retail investors.
And that was the the the problem that we wanted to solve.
And that's why we we built the NFC the way that we built them.
But the way that what ties them to actual hardware equipment is the is the LBH protocol.
So we said, Okay, well, let's figure out the way to do that.
And and and, you know, the we're obviously utilizing the the blockchain transparency and and on the back end, what we have is our own equipment.
That is that is tied to the our own equipment that's tied to a particular NFC and and there's a direct link.
of the hash rate that gets produced by that particular piece of equipment to that particular digital miner that's represented by the NFC.
But the the liquid Bitcoin hash rate protocol is designed not not to function solely with our equipment.
So we're actually at the stage now where we've we've we've ran it for about a year and we've gone through some of the growing pains that we expect to go through.
But now we're at the point where we want to expand that we want to expand that to other providers.
So it's not just our equipment that is on the back end.
It is it is actually available.
We're now starting conversations with our peers in industry where any service provider that wants to make their equipment make the hash rate that's produced by their equipment available via the digital miners is able to do that.
So the the protocol is designed to be agnostic service provider agnostic and allow scalability and and flexibility in making that hash rate available from any any service provider to retail investors globally.
Okay, that's the next part that's the next part sort of the next growth iteration is as I mentioned, you know, we started those conversations just essentially two weeks ago.
And that's obviously it's going to take a while to get people to sort of go through the the mental shift of, you know, giving of renting making a significant make it making a significant change.
Yeah, making a significant change because obviously there's two sides to that equation.
The service provider, our peers in the industry will have to sort of start to think about it in different way.
Firstly, and yes, we don't we don't think renting is a good term.
And I'll explain in a second why why that is, but but there is an element of that.
So they're basically going to have to give up not not give up, but but allow somebody into into the castle walls, so to speak.
But on the other hand, we also have to make sure that if we are.
If we're making those those those NFTs, those digital miners that have the stake to the hash rate available through our marketplace and our branding and sort of our the relationship is established with us while it's somebody else's hash rate on the back end.
And there is a lot of due diligence that has to happen for us to get comfortable about around doing that, obviously, and not just due diligence up front, but but continuous due diligence as well.
So there is a lot of a lot of trust that has to happen, has to get set up, established and operational procedures to do that.
And, you know, we're cognizant of the fact that it's it's not going to be an easy process and it's not going to be a fast process.
But we certainly believe that going forward, that is a big contribution that we think we can make to the to the ecosystem and, you know, hopefully create a lot of value for everybody involved.
Both the people, the retail investors that would be able to add that additional hash rate to their NFTs as well as service service providers who would be able to to access a brand new channel in that way.
Okay, I understand actually that these service providers are probably not used at all to disclose any kind of such information to third parties, even to partners, etc.
etc. So, yeah, very interesting to see what is going to happen there.
If you're how many you'll manage to get on board and how much hash rate will be soon available.
Actually, I wanted to delve also into the specifics of the go mining token since we have a bit of time for that.
So you mentioned on your website, I saw deflationary ecosystem.
So tokenomics are supposed to make it deflationary.
Could you explain us a bit about that, how it works?
Right, right. Actually, before I do that, let me backtrack a little bit.
We talked about we talked about which blockchains are the NFTs are available on.
We just added recently last week the TAN blockchain as well.
And there's a special collection there's a special collection there as well.
TAN investors out there.
Cheers to you guys.
So TAN blockchain is also part of the project now.
Yeah.
So we're fully integrating into the TAN blockchain.
So we have the miners available.
We're able to take payment in TAN.
There's a special TAN related collection to that as well.
So I have to, I have to, for a long time I've been talking about two blockchains.
I have to start, start to talk about three now.
So getting back to the tokenomics issue, tokenomics topic.
That's a handful or mouthful.
The way that it's, it's, we wanted, we thought for a lot, it took us about a year to figure out.
The exact way that we wanted our tokenomics model to work.
And we're, we had a couple of long-term goals that we were looking to solve for when we were doing that.
One of the sort of issues that we encountered with version one of our product that I mentioned briefly in the beginning,
where it was basically buy the token and get, get the hash rate rewards is it created incentives that we weren't happy about.
So there was no incentive to, to become part of the ecosystem for the long-term.
And, and we saw some people, you know, basically starting to trade it, they traded and, and, and that wasn't a way that we wanted our token, our token to be used.
And, and that, that was basically contrary to the goals of the project.
So with version two, as we're looking to build the tokenomics model, one of the things we wanted to do was incentivize long-term participation.
So incentivize long-term ownership of the token.
And obviously, you know, one of the best ways to do that is using economic means, economic leverage, firstly, but secondly, also value creation.
So the way the, the, the way our model is built is a, first of all, is deflationary.
So there's a constant cycle flow of, of, of tokens, because when you buy a digital miner,
in addition to it mimicking all of the throughput and the energy efficiencies, it also mimics the, the energy costs, the energy expenses that go in, the maintenance expenses that go in, et cetera.
And we collect those either through, you know, through various payment means.
So through go mining tokens, which come with the 10% discount through ton tokens, through USDTs, whatever.
And on a, on a constant basis, there's that flow of, of electricity and maintenance expenses that go back to the service provider to cover the, the costs that go into, into managing the, the hash rate that gets produced.
So right now around 3 million a month, um, in, uh, in those expenses get cycled through the ecosystem.
When they get paid, uh, we go through a burn and mint cycle.
So we burn the tokens that get paid and we mint, uh, a smaller amount of tokens.
Uh, we started off a year ago with, with a 80% ratio.
We're at around 86, 87 now.
Uh, but that is, that is a constant sort of deflationary pressure on the amount of tokens out there.
And, and that is by design.
The second, uh, second way that is deflationary that probably deflationary specifically is not the right word, but contributes to, to, to deflationary pressure is we have a staking program.
And the staking program, first of all, obviously pays staking rewards.
Uh, but it's, it incentivizes people to stake for a longer period of time because the other benefit.
So the, the, the, the staking rewards are a derivative of the, uh, staking period that, uh, somebody stakes their tokens for.
So if you stake for, uh, six months or 12 months, you get, uh, basically 25%.
Uh, if you stay for two years, you get 50 and so on up to four years.
So there's a strong economic incentive to stake for a longer period of time.
Uh, a, you get higher, uh, staking rewards, but B you also get as part of your staking mechanism, uh, governance votes and the ability to participate in project governance.
That happens on, on a, essentially a weekly cycle.
And there's, uh, uh, a, a, a number of governance proposals that get put up for a vote that you can, you can vote on.
And some of those actually impact the, the economic profitability, um, of, of, uh, the way your equipment might function.
So for instance, I mentioned that greedy machines have some unique features on the weekly basis.
There's an additional multiplier that gets set for the greedy machines that you can vote on, uh, to, to basically get a higher, uh, number of rewards.
Um, there's additionally, there's obviously, you know, project development proposals, there's roadmap items that get put up, um, et cetera, et cetera.
So it basically gives people that have a long-term stake in the ecosystem, the ability to participate in selecting the way the ecosystem is going to develop, uh, selecting or voting in, um, sort of hopefully in line with their own economic interests, the rewards that get paid out, um, and so on.
So again, that's, that's, uh, it's, it's, it's, it's a bit difficult to talk about, um, just by voice without being able to sort of, you know, take you, take you along a slide or a chart of the ecosystem and, and, and talk about every, uh, uh, visual representation of, of the way it functions.
But those are the key features of, of the way the, the, the, the, the tokenomics for our ecosystems is, uh, our ecosystem is built and, uh, and, and why it's deflationary.
So there's, there's, there's, we've, we've, we've consciously designed it to, uh, constant, to constantly decrease the amount of tokens.
And there's always a demand pressure, uh, uh, for tokens to, uh, to a, earn stake in rewards.
B continue paying, uh, energy and maintenance fees with a discount that is only available through, uh, using the go mining tokens to do that, uh, and C participate in the governance of the project.
Well, I, I guess you have an illustration of, uh, this relationship somewhere.
So where could people go to check it out?
It's yeah.
It's, it's, it's on our website on, on GMT.io.
Okay.
So guys, GMT.io, if you want to see how tokenomics of go mining token is actually, um, putting pressure on the, um, on the buying, uh, side.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, and, and again, it's everything we do because the nature of our project, I mean, we, we build data centers, we manage them that that's a long-term CapEx heavy CapEx project.
So it, it takes, you know, 12 to 18 months to, to bring up a new site, to, to fill it up with a very expensive equipment, bring it online, et cetera, et cetera.
We, we, we built for the long-term.
Uh, and so the, the, the, the, the, the tokenomics is also designed to build long-term value.
That's why we're thinking, you know, we're talking years and we understand that it, it takes time to, to, to, to create that value and build that value within the ecosystem.
So we're not, we're definitely not looking for, you know, to become a meme coin and, and, uh, you know, rock it up and then rock it down.
We want, we, we, ours, our approach is very different because we were thinking about Bitcoin long-term.
We're thinking about our project as part of the Bitcoin ecosystem long-term.
And we're thinking about value creation and, and value appreciation long-term and, and everything that, that we do is, is, is built around that long-term vision of creating value for everybody that's involved in, in the project and in our ecosystem.
So I guess what you mean by, uh, everyone is also that you have a strong community around you.
So, uh, at KuCoin, we brand ourselves as the people's exchange.
We really value our community and we try to listen to them.
So I would want to see how you also manage this aspect, uh, at GoMining.
Before we delve into this, could we, could you give us like a, uh, a practical view of how the, how GoMining gives real value for, uh,
real value, for example, to, to its users?
Like, would you have, uh, an example of this in action?
How, uh, GoMining gives real value to its ecosystem?
Yeah.
So the, the simple, the simplest thing is, is, uh, you know, if you have, uh, if you have capital that you're willing to, to put to work, or actually, let me, let me take this, uh, take a step back.
We have, uh, a free 14 day trial that's, that's available.
So the best way that I would encourage somebody, and this is, this is the way I talk about it to, to, to my friends, to, to anybody that, you know, I'm, uh, uh, I'm trying to explain it to in, in, in real life is just log in, set up an account.
We have, uh, uh, you don't have to invest any money.
You basically get a, uh, free to use, um, a digital miner.
A digital miner, and it's a very, you know, it takes five to 10 minutes to set up.
And, uh, you select the, the, the amount of hash rate that you want to associate with the digital miner.
And you see, uh, you see how it functions and the ease of use, uh, very, very quickly.
So the next day you'll get in your virtual wallet, you'll get rewards associated with the hash rate.
And, and you'll see the, the ROI of, you know, if you were to make an investment, how much, uh, money you would be making back in, in, uh, not making back, but how much money you would be making in terms of the mining rewards that would be available to you.
And I find that that's the best way to, to, uh, not just to explain, but to, to make it tangible for people.
So right now, even post halving with, um, you know, all of the discounts utilized, you're probably looking at, you know, 40 to 45, uh, percent annual ROI.
Which is, uh, given, given two things, I think that, that, that are important to keep in mind.
First of all, the current, the current price of Bitcoin and secondly, the current network difficulty.
Obviously those two things impact profitability very significantly.
And as that, as they change, it's likely that the, the, the ROI is going to change.
But, uh, you know, again, if you're a long-term, uh, participant in, in the Bitcoin ecosystem and you think that Bitcoin will continue to appreciate as the price of Bitcoin goes up, the ROI of the rewards that are getting generated will go up as well.
So the easy, the, the, the, the way the value is created is a, if you want to participate in, in mining, you, you know, spend 10 minutes, make, uh, make an investment.
That's comfortable to you and start earning rewards around the, you know, 40, 40% ROI.
And that's something that is available to everybody.
Again, takes about, you know, 10, 15, 20 minutes to, to set up and, uh, you get your first reward tomorrow.
Uh, the second, second way you can do that is if you don't want to do the digital minor piece, but you want to participate in the long-term future of, of the go mining ecosystem is hit.
Hit one of the exchanges, um, where go mining tokens are available for, uh, to trade.
And there's a list obviously on our website on GMT.io as well.
Uh, so hit one of the websites, buy some tokens, stake those, uh, through, through our website, through our app, uh, for a length of time that, that is comfortable to you and, uh, start getting staking rewards and start getting the governance, governance, uh, votes as well.
And participate in the governance ecosystem.
See the, the way the proposals come up, you know, participate in voting on those, get some comfort around the way that our ecosystem functions while making, obviously earning staking rewards on the, on the token as well.
So that's two ways that you could, you could, you know, spend a little bit of time today and start earning, uh, additional income starting tomorrow.
So hopefully that was, uh, that was pretty straightforward.
Yep.
Absolutely.
And get involved in the mining industry in a new way.
That was actually not possible before the last cycle, I would say.
Um, so I suggest we move on to community and the way you manage it at GoMining.
Uh, as I mentioned for us at KuCoin is, is quite important, central.
So how important is your community involvement to you?
You mentioned the governance aspect.
There might be more to it.
Uh, what initiatives do you have to maintain this strong and active community?
Uh, extremely important would probably be an understatement.
The way that the project exists today is, is very much based on community feedback.
And again, there's, there's, uh, different types of businesses, different types of projects out there.
Some are retail focused, some are B2B focused, some are infrastructure focused.
For us, we are 100% retail focused.
So we, we input from the community, community participation is at the core of everything that we do.
And as when, when I talked about sort of the changes that were made from version one to version two of the product,
probably 75 to 80% of, of what went into the requirements and, and was, uh, created for version two is based on community feedback.
So for us, it's a core part of, of everything that we do.
Um, the, the voting aspect, obviously governance aspect is part of, is, is the result of the feedback that we received.
So how do you collect feedback by the way?
Uh, how, sorry, let me, uh, how do you collect feedback from your community?
Hold on, hold on.
Let me just turn out, turn, turn off my, my messenger here.
Somebody is, uh, somebody, sorry, I got distracted for a second.
There was a stream of messages coming through.
Um, say that again.
I'm sorry.
Sorry.
How, how do you collect this feedback?
And how, how do you, yeah.
Discord, uh, telegram channels, uh, surveys.
Um, we have, uh, a hundred plus thousand, I think.
Hold on.
Let me just check.
I just turned off my telegram so I wouldn't get distracted.
Sorry.
Um, we, uh, I, I, I was going to pop in and, and see the, uh, the main go mining channel.
Uh, there's tens of thousands of people.
I wanted to, to use a particular, uh, an exact number, but I, I can't see it right now.
Um, we have regular AMAs.
So, I mean, basically all of the tools that are available to, um, to interact with the,
with the user community, um, in every platform that is available from, you know, Twitter and
Twitter spaces, to Reddit, to, to telegram, to, um, uh, feedback features in our app, uh,
through suggestions.
We do constantly, uh, uh, raffles for, um, that are incentivized, but by go mining tokens
for feature suggestions, et cetera, et cetera.
And then obviously the, the, the, the, the, the, the governance function, the voting function.
So they can do feature suggestions straight from the app, right?
Feature suggestions straight from the app as a user.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Absolutely.
And, and, and on a weekly basis, we basically build the, the voting, the voting and governance,
uh, that happens on a weekly basis is informed in large part by the feature suggestions that
get sent in through all of those various, uh, communication channels that I mentioned.
Um, obviously there is a part of, uh, we have our own development roadmap where we have
an idea of where we want to take the product to, but at least 25% of the features that, that
that make it into, um, the, uh, the development, uh, the development, uh, backlog is, is the
result of ideas, contributions that come in, uh, through the various means and then get
voted on and get added to the backlog to, uh, to make those happen.
So we, uh, for people that are part of our ecosystem, you know, things like automatic
reinvestments of, uh, of mining rewards, uh, automatic upgrades of mining rewards, et cetera.
All of those were, were suggestions that came in from our user community and became part
of our product.
So if I, if I said that it's extremely important, I, I, I I'd be understating it.
It's, it's, it's the way that we, it's the way that we figure out what we want to do
and the way that we figure out what makes sense to do, because one of the, uh, you know,
one of the benefits of being around for a long time is, is, uh, you know, I've learned
probably 20 years ago, 25 years ago, very early in my career that, you know, it, it, it makes
zero sense to build products for people the way that you want to see them.
Um, you have to go and ask and, and, uh, and, and, and be very deliberate about asking
for that input in order to build something that people actually want to use.
Um, so we've, we've, uh, uh, we're extremely focused on putting that to use.
Um, like I said, there's, there's a, a, a large, uh, plethora of, uh, tools that we utilize
to do that. And, uh, and, and it's, it's actually been, uh, uh, we, we credit a lot
of the success that we've been having and, and we've been having, you know, pretty good
years since, since we put out, uh, a version two of the product back in August that every,
uh, every month to month has been that double digit growth. So, so we're quite happy with,
uh, the way the project is developing, but we credit a lot of that to, um, the efforts that
we put into, to, to, to gather the feedback and actually, you know, spend time and, and
resources, building features that our community is asking for, uh, versus, you know, trying
to, to do it, uh, to do it on our own.
Hmm. Okay. So actually a quiet, uh, community driven, uh, project from, uh, very much
very much, very much a community driven. Yeah. That's, that's actually quite nice. Uh, so
we are coming to the end, uh, of this AMA. Actually, I hope you guys had, uh, have a better
idea, uh, about go mining. And, uh, once again, if you want to look around and, uh, don't hesitate
to check it out. It's GMT, uh, GMT.io. Yes. Yes. There's go mining.com as well, but GMT.io is,
is the, is the shorter sort of address. Oh, no worries. So now I offer that we switch to
Q and A's, uh, from the audience. If we have, uh, anyone who wants to ask something to Mark,
since Mark is with us, if you have something directly related to go mining that you have
in mind, uh, now is the time.
Actually. Hmm. We're supposed to have somebody with us as speaker, but this person is not there.
Okay. Let me check. Uh, yeah, we have, uh, some questions, uh, that community sent to us
before the AMA. Okay. Ah, before the AMA. Yeah. Correct. Okay. So please, uh, let's have,
let's have one. Uh, yeah, for sure. Uh, I can, I can ask. Uh, so the first question is,
are you planning to collab like a KuCoin wallet or KuCoin inspired miner collection?
Um, definitely if, uh, you know, if, if that's something that, uh, that KuCoin is, is, uh,
interested in doing for sure. We, uh, we're very happy to, to do collabs and, and, and participation.
And, you know, we've, we've been doing that with, uh, various communities over the, uh, the past, uh,
six to nine months. So we mentioned the, the Tom collaboration. Um, so yeah, hopefully.
And again, our, our, we're, we're, we're very much a long-term view, um, type of project. So, um, we,
we like to take time and, and, and, and talk about, uh, make people comfortable, uh, joining our community.
Uh, and, you know, sometimes that takes time. So if, if, uh, hopefully there was interest in,
in what we do and, and the opportunities that we offer and, and, uh, I'd encourage people to,
um, you know, join the community, um, sign up to, to our Twitter, sign up to our discord,
sign up to our, uh, telegram channels and so on and become part of the community.
And, and, you know, if, uh, there's interest to, uh, to do collaborations, if there's interest to do,
um, uh, to do special collections, we're more than happy to, uh, to oblige.
Okay. I think we have time for one last question to wrap it up.
Uh, yeah, let's move on to the next question. Uh, I think many offline mining components,
uh, looking at you will soon decide to move, uh, in the same direction.
Are you ready for competition? And what do you think, uh, gold mining has, uh,
that a potential competitor will never have?
Um, well, competition is, is, is actually great, um, for us.
Uh, first of all, there's, there's a lot in that project, in, in that question.
So let me take it, uh, bit by bit.
Um, the way that liquid liquid Bitcoin hash rate has been built is, is actually exactly
designed to make other, uh, peers in the industry, uh, make it possible for them
and easy for them to, uh, to join us in, uh, in taking advantage of the infrastructure
that's been built. So, uh, we, if there's interest and we expect there to be interest,
uh, we've made it very easy and, and, uh, and are open to, uh, partnerships to actually
cooperate with us and, uh, uh, not spend time reinventing the wheel.
Um, in terms of competition, we're definitely ready for competition because there's a lot of,
a lot of, uh, healthy interaction that comes from competition.
Uh, there's, uh, you know, a lot of truisms around, you know, Coke and Pepsi, uh, making each other better.
There's a lot of truisms around, you know, uh, Ford and Ferrari and, and, and whatever the big,
the big competitor is driving each other to be, to be better.
So we're obviously, you know, we like what we do.
We enjoy, uh, we enjoy our project and, and, and, and the way that it's developing and collaborating,
um, on a daily basis.
So, Hey, there's a competition is, is always great.
And, uh, uh, it, it makes it fun and then makes it interesting.
And, and we definitely don't want to be bored.
Um, so, and thirdly, uh, there's the, the, the way the ecosystem is developing.
The Bitcoin ecosystem is developing.
There's a lot of, uh, uh, opportunities for everybody, everybody involved.
And again, I always like to use comparisons and, you know, think back 10, 15 years ago
in terms of how small the ecosystem was, how small the amount of people getting involved in it was
and how small the infrastructure was.
And in, you know, 10, 15 years later, this is such a massive change.
And we think that, you know, in the next 10 to 15 years is going to go through a significant growth cycle,
continue growing through significant, continue going through significant growth cycles.
I'm sorry, my mouth is getting a little bit tired, um, after, uh, talking for almost an hour.
So, um, there's plenty of, uh, plenty of opportunity, um, in the, in the ecosystem,
in the Bitcoin ecosystem, there is, uh, uh, plenty of ways to create value.
Um, we are certainly not, uh, interested in, uh, in, in, in stopping our pace of development
in our pace of innovation and, uh, you know, very excited about what the opportunity,
what the future holds and the future opportunities that are going to be available
to everybody participating in the ecosystem.
So, um, yeah, uh, the more people join the, the, the better and the, and, and the sooner we'll get to,
you know, even, even more, um, more adoption, more utility and more value.
So, uh, actually, thanks a lot, Mark, for coming.
We have to wrap it up.
It's already an hour, but I, I checked the questions you guys, uh, just sent us before,
during the preparation of this AMA.
There are lots of interesting questions.
What I suggest is that we do kind of, uh, uh, written answer to the most, um, to the questions we select, Mark.
What do you think about that?
So that we desire, we also have the winners, uh, this way, uh, for the AMA.
Absolutely.
That's, uh, that, that, uh, perfect.
I'm always, I'm always, uh, always sad leaving questions, uh, questions unanswered on the table.
Uh, but that happens quite often just by time constraints.
Yep.
Absolutely.
So, so let's do it this way.
We will prepare, uh, a document with, uh, all the most relevant questions we will select together, uh, with the answers from Mark.
And, uh, the winners can, uh, follow up this way and see if there are questions, uh, were selected.
That's, uh, I think the, the best way to, to go through.
And we'll also include, of course, the two questions that we selected, uh, during the AMA.
So this AMA is coming to an end.
Do you have a last word Mark that you would like to give our audience?
Yeah, thank you.
Thank you so much for joining us.
And, and hopefully this, this was interesting.
I, you know, I, I, I, I'm, I'm, I'm quite happy to talk about, you know, any part of the project that, uh, that people have an interest in.
Transparency is, is one of our core sort of values that, that we build everything around.
Um, so community and transparency are, are basically the way that we think that we are able to be different from,
from, from people that, that, uh, you know, probably haven't, haven't built success before.
So, uh, we're happy to do additional follow up questions.
We're happy to, to participate and, and have conversations in any forums that, uh, in any forums, any social media channels, et cetera, communication channels that, that, that are comfortable for people.
Uh, thank you very much, uh, for hosting us.
Thank you for, uh, uh, to everybody that joined for, for being part of the conversation.
And, uh, you know, again, I encourage you to, uh, to, to hit us up on, uh, on GMT.io and, and, uh, learn more about the project and the ecosystem.
And on a side note, uh, last word from, uh, KuCoin.
We hope to see you again soon with, uh, even, uh, more impressive results and maybe for even, uh, larger collapse.
Who knows?
Great. Thank you.
That depends on you.
Okay.
So thanks guys.
Thanks for joining us.
I hope you all learned something, especially from the new ways of, uh, mining from digital, digitized, uh, assets, uh, at the moment, BTC mining through digitized assets.
Uh, thanks a lot for joining us again.
And, uh, for all those who are in Asia, have a good evening for all those in Europe.
Have a nice afternoon.
Ciao guys.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Thanks.
Bye.
