Thank you to everyone who joined our first community AMA of 2020 last Sunday, 5th January.
CAS SWAP results and next steps
Kumar started the AMA with notifying that we refunded anyone who had been charged a swap fee. Cashaa has not charged anything for the swap from ERC20 to BEP2 and never intended to make money from it, but wanted to motivate users to make the swap as soon as possible. As many people were slow, the fee had the impact to push people to swap, but we ended up not charging anyone.
SWAP Stats
To date, 92.70% of tokens have been swapped, and for 4.44% of tokens, users filed reports of hacks and losses.
A total of 87,167,992 CAS is unidentified including the lost and hacked reported.
https://explorer.binance.org/address/bnb1xkw2sagpx6t0cmwzapxpv94tupvqk7tpgy72ku
Cashaa will assign a support staff who will go through all reported cases (lost private key, hacked, exchange exit) and with the mutual consensus with Telegram admins (Cashaa Knights), victims will receive the token. A separate email with more details will be sent to users who have filled the report through Google form.
All the unclaimed tokens after the 25th of December 2019 will be frozen for 3 years under Cashaa’s custody. Users who own the tokens on an ERC20 address before the 30th of May 2019, can send the tokens to the SWAP address throughout the year and will get the BEP2 CAS on 13th Jan 2021 after deducting a fee of 5%.
The users who acquired tokens by any means after 30th May 2019 can also send the token to the SWAP address with an affidavit that they are the owner with a reason not to complete the SWAP on time and Proof of the purchase of the token.
Wednesday, 13 January 2021 (Completed all steps before 13 December 2020, 4:00 AM BST) — Fees:5 %
For complete list of SWAP dates please refer https://help.cashaa.com/knowledgebase/cas-bep2-token-release-trading-all-you-need-to-know-2/
No further support ticket inquiries will be entertained related to the SWAP. This announcement will work as a final notice to all users. If you are looking for support, instead of asking in the Telegram community chat, we encourage you to ask anything which you think will also help others at help.cashaa.com.
No further support ticket inquiries will be entertained related to the SWAP. This announcement will work as a final notice to all users. If you are looking for support, instead of asking in the Telegram community chat, we encourage you to ask anything which you think will also help others at help.cashaa.com.
2019 Review – Successes
Kumar continued by summarising our achievements in 2019.
Most notably, we launched our crypto-friendly banking services starting with UK current accounts and later added USD banking services in partnership with Metropolitan Bank.
We also enabled credit and debit card processing for crypto businesses, started Bitcoin trading operations in India, and most recently, in December, started to provide a crypto liquidity API with the lowest price in the market for GBP, EUR, and INR pairs.
Thanks to all our products getting high traction, we have started to generate revenue and CAS became one of the few tokens in the industry that have a real-world utility.
As our focus was a lot on businesses rather than individuals, we also wanted to introduce an initiative for personal users and therefore started a staking program for personal users, to which we distributed more than 5 Million CAS tokens as a bonus from our revenue.
2019 Challenges & Solutions in 2020
1. Operations
As a new startup, in one the most regulated markets where most of the banks have clearly said no to crypto companies, Cashaa has done well with its limited resources as a new financial institution. While it was a highly successful year from a product launch perspective, there are a few areas where we could do much better.
While we got a huge demand for our business accounts, with over 1000 applications, we were only able to onboard 34 companies so far due to changing compliance rules, strict reporting and imposing strict KYC for the companies and regulations in 2019. 10th Jan is the last date to abide by the Fifth AML Directive, which obliges member states to establish centralized national bank account registries or electronic data retrieval systems who do strict KYC procedures. Cashaa has worked with its customers and also made sure that it covers the requirement of it.
To improve our reach in 2020:
- We have onboarded an additional banking partner for GBP, due to which we are expecting to double the onboarding rate.
- It has been a compliance and operational challenge, with many founders of applying crypto startups not having the relevant compliance-related knowledge to get onboarded, and getting rejected right away. We need to use our experience and industry knowledge to help these cases and provide them a solution, which is why we are launching a crypto broker banking wallet. We are looking to start with 2-3 applications a day, and are expecting to increase the acceptance rate by 6-8 /day. If they opt for this account, Cashaa will also do the KYC/AML due diligence on their customers to make sure they abide by all the regulations, so that they can focus on their business. We are expecting the launch on 1st February.
| Application processing fee | 100,000 CAS |
| Monthly fees | 0 |
| Account approval time | 24 hrs |
| Currency | GBP, EUR |
| Account limit | 200 Million GBP/250 Million EUR |
| IBAN type | GB and LI with unique reference number |
| 3rd party payments | Allowed |
| Payment modes | FPS, SEPA, SWIFT |
- As being a pioneer in the crypto banking space with a proven product we have started the process of our license to increase our profitability and reduce dependability. We are expecting to get our own authorization from FCA by Q2 2020. More details will be given in Feb AMA.
2. Wallet and exchange issues
There have been some confusions with our decentralized wallet with an exchange. We identified 3 issues:
- When users are buying crypto and it gets released to them, there is a network fee that is getting lost, resulting in more support tickets as users compare it with a centralized system where they see the exact purchase amount. In the case of Cashaa, when the transactions are smaller, the network fee can be up to 1-2% of the purchased amount, causing confusion that Cashaa has charged the remaining fee while it’s paid to the network.
We have now launched in a mass-market like India where users are buying with smaller amounts worth like 10-20 dollars, which has caused unnecessary support tickets. Also based on support tickets we realized that users do not mind keeping their crypto at an exchange in these countries, as they feel they can lose their crypto more easily than the exchange.
- Second, when users are selling, we give the price, but it can happen that the transaction fails for various reasons, resulting in another source of tickets.
- Third, storage issues. If users are buying, especially small amounts and accumulate them over time, e.g. 1 BTC over 6 months, and then try to withdraw this amount, it costs a lot of network fee.
All issues can be solved if we build a centralized system like Coinbase or a similar wallet. It’s quite unfortunate and against the belief of decentralization, but we have to adjust to the market requirement, especially for the Indian market where we are expecting to onboard over 200,000 users in the next 18-24 months.
Learning from all the above issues, our team has already started working on a new platform which we anticipate to be ready in early April or before.
3. Support
Support was another challenge, mostly due to the tech issues, and our rising number of transactions in India and globally. The rise in number also started affecting our other support departments including those for business users.
We will have a dedicated Indian support center for our India operations, and a European support center for any issues outside India by March 2020.
Also with the experience earned we are automating many support processes in our new platform to smooth the process for our users as well as our support staff.
We request our community to help us with the transition from our existing platform and help our support centers by not raising multiple tickets for the same issue. Also please refer to help.cashaa.com to find the answers to the common questions and start a new discussion which can help others.
4. CAS demand
2019 was a great year for Cashaa to finally make CAS a utility token linked with a business model that got validated. In 2020, we have to implement all our learning and increase the utility of CAS tokens through various products that we have built.
- We are aiming for 200,000 – 300,000 new users in the next 18-24 months, which require a minimum of 2,500 CAS each to activate the wallet.
- Broker deal account: with 100,000 CAS to get banking services for crypto brokers in Europe within 24 hrs onboarding time. With the launch of our crypto broker account, we expect to drive quick demand of CAS tokens.
- CAS is a must to acquire the UK current account, EUR IBAN banking (April 2020), and credit and debit card processing services.
- Continuous staking program which will also run throughout 2020, rewarding personal CAS holders by sharing fees from the business growth.
- Up to 35% discount for personal users and a 75% discount on the exchange fee.
- Launch of personal UK banking services in 2020.
2020 Roadmap
To sum it up, these are our 5 most important things to do in 2020:
- Centralized exchange platform and wallet.
- Onboarding additional banking partners in the UK to increase the onboarding speed.
- Acquire our own license to reduce our fees and increase profitability.
- Launch of EUR IBAN banking for businesses
- Starting personal accounts with UK banking services.
Live Q&A
When are you starting your mobile app for small businesses to accept payments?
In Q2 2020.
When will UK personal accounts be live?
It is scheduled for Q2.
Why don’t we publish Cashaa like PayTM phone in India?
Let’s focus on crypto trading in India, and not create rival of successful applications. We first need to have enough crypto adoption and acceptance of that before creating such a solution.
Are you planning a token burning?
The tokens we are collecting are given to users who are staking, instead of burning. If the question was concerning the swapping fees, as mentioned earlier, any deductions initially made to encourage a faster swapping (383,000 CAS) were given back, so we did not collect any fee.
When will staked tokens be distributed?
Now after the holidays, the team will go through the tickets raised related to it, and after everything is fine, tokens will be distributed this week. (Announced for 10th Jan)
What about distributing 25% of recovered hacked tokens to users who voted for the swap?
Yes, it will be done. Please be patient for that as the tokens will be locked for 12 months.
Will we still run CMC ads in India and when?
While we have a good volume, around equal to the combined volume of Paxful and Local Bitcoins in India, we are skeptical to start CMC ads now, as more retail users will lead to more support tickets. Everything is prepared for CMC, but we would not know yet how we would be able to cope with the retail user influx. Once our support is smooth, we can start at any time.
Is there any development concerning Metropolitan Bank?
No, while every bank wants to be part of the crypto space for its benefits, when you actually start working with them, they have their own reservations and compliance issues. Speedy communication due to different time zones is also an issue we are working on.
When will the DEX integration happen?
We believe it will be achieved in the first quarter.
What will be covered by our future license?
It will cover the UK and Europe with currencies EUR and GBP.
