First and foremost, we would like to thank all of our community members for not only supporting us from the very beginning, but more importantly, for helping us reach several milestones. We could not have gotten this far without you. 100,902 people from all over the world have contributed to Bankera, putting us among the biggest ICOs by the number of contributors. During the pre-ICO and ICO, 7,728,796,160 BNK (2,500,000,000 pre-ICO + 5,228,796,160 ICO) tokens were sold in total. The completion of this phase gets us another step closer to becoming the bank for the blockchain era but, at the same time, it means there is still a lot of work and development that has to be done.
First Things First
One of the first steps will be the pro-rata distribution of unsold tokens to pre-ICO and ICO token holders, which will happen within a week. Please note that extra tokens are only distributed to actual buyers of the pre-ICO and ICO. Tokens allocated as bonuses or bounties (e.g. for advisors, community managers, translators, etc.) will not be included in the distribution, since they are part of the tokens allocated for the team (25% of the total supply) and Advisors (5% of the total supply). And, in order to prevent the dilution of the Banker token price for pre-ICO and ICO participants, the remaining percentage attributed to advisors and the team will be distributed over the lifetime of the Bankera project.
Since BNKs will be distributed on two blockchains, Ethereum and NEM, and revenue share will be paid in ETH or XEM, they will have ERC20 source code and NEM Mosaic, which makes Bankers a very unique type of token. Due to the technical differences, process length, and complexity – the ERC20 source code will be developed and tested first. In addition to our testing phase, we will also share the token code with all of our contributors, so everyone will have an opportunity to check it. We will offer a bug bounty, so stay tuned to our communication channels for upcoming information about it! After the ERC20 source code is finalized, our IT department will start working on the NEM Mosaic.
Exchanges: Where, What, When
The first partnership we announced was with the HitBTC exchange, on which our contributors will be able to begin trading BNK tokens in the second quarter. On HitBTC, BNK will be issued on the Ethereum blockchain as ERC20 tokens and will be paired with ETH and BTC. While our team does not rule out listing on other trading platforms, Bankera’s own exchange platform is currently in development and is being improved according to our community’s feedback. While building up Bankera’s exchange, we will focus on three main goals: additional value, security, and flexibility.
The key utility of Banker tokens on Bankera’s exchange platform is that all BNK pairs will have no exchange fees. For example, it will be more cost-efficient to exchange BTC to BNK and then BNK to ETH rather than exchanging BTC to ETH directly. At first, Bankera’s exchange will support cryptocurrency pairs; however, later, fiat currencies will be offered for our community’s convenience. These advantages will ensure the liquidity of BNK tokens.
Security will always be our main concern. Having an MVP, SpectroCoin, allows us to apply our expertise to assure the safety of customers’ funds on Bankera’s Exchange. The five years of knowledge gained from SpectroCoin will help us to provide the utmost security.
Our own exchange platform also gives us flexibility in multiple spheres, from product development to community involvement in our product. The bugs reported by our contributors during the Exchange competition and newly discovered bugs/issues should be fixed by the middle of March. Even though our official plan set on the roadmap is to develop an Exchange in the first half of 2018, we hope to develop the working product before the set deadline.
Strong Product – Strong Token
Since August 2017, there have been significant changes in our MVP, SpectroCoin, as well. We believe that our focus on product development ensures a strong token in the long term. Therefore, ETH transactions to and from contract addresses are now fully supported and the limits will also be increased for deposits with linked cards, which will facilitate the process of purchasing, sending, and receiving cryptocurrencies at SpectroCoin. Since February 20th, a partnership with IDnow was established to speed up the verification process for our clients. Additionally, new virtual cards will be launched this first quarter through SpectroCoin and, a bit later, plastic cards will be issued to previous cardholders. On our blog post about the new cards you can find the list of countries in which they will be available and the issuance sequence.
Also, our team is constantly working on and updating the existing SpectroCoin platform. This includes upgrading and improving the current servers, negotiating with providers and possible partners, working on the user interface to improve the overall user experience and, last but not least, searching for new networks and new possibilities to expand SpectroCoin’ services and products to even more countries.
We have delivered a great deal, but there is still more to come! Bankera’s website is being updated to reflect this new phase and it will soon be available in more languages, in addition to English. The upgrades are done step by step according to UI/UX design to make it user-friendly and pleasant to navigate. Stay tuned to our communication channels for more news and updates on Bankera.