COTI, a company that is revolutionizing the financial system with its blockchain technology and coins has had an amazing year. In 2021 they were able to expand into Asia as well as release new partnerships which will help them take on Visa or MasterCard in near future! With all these accomplishments, Shahaf Bar-Geffen, COTI’s CEO and Founder take time out from running one of the most successful crypto companies today to review all of COTI’s 2021 accomplishments and fill us in on what is on the agenda for 2022. Keep reading to get his insights.
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2021 was an outstanding year for COTI.
We want to thank our community for their constant support and engagement as we continued in our quest to build an ecosystem of payment products and services. From launching COTI bank accounts, finalizing the process with Cardano to issue their 1st algorithmic stablecoin, launching the Crypto Volatility Index (CVI), and introducing our popular staking 3.0 program, 2021 was the year COTI executed the ideas and plans we worked on for the past few years.
Receiving investment from cFund, an early-stage venture firm of Cardano, was a vote of confidence that we are on the right track with our goals and objectives. We also launched our popular NFT game competition, where we distributed more than 2M $COTI to our global community members.
The COTI team started the year with the view that ongoing transparency and communication with our loyal supporters was essential. With that, we released frequent updates with our CEO Shahaf, where he shared updates on current progress towards our roadmaps and any new partnership updates. We also released our growth plan, where we shared our objectives across multiple product streams that include Treasury, payment solutions built on the Trustchain, partnerships, and more.
As we start this new year, we will remain transparent and forthcoming with our community; we also encourage our supporters to follow us on Twitter, Telegram, and Discord to receive firsthand updates from our team as we sprint ahead in 2022.
We are honored by the positive feedback from all of you and look forward to an impactful 2022. Here are a few highlights for the 2021 year.
Continuing the momentum we built in 2020, our product and tech team worked hard to plan and build products and services covering a wide range of clients across the retail, institutional, and enterprise levels. In September, we introduced the concept of our Treasury; a decentralized pool that collects fees (directly and indirectly) from COTI ecosystem users. We were pleased to release the Treasury Technological Whitepaper, where we provided details about the COTI Treasury ecosystem, components, and the APY. We also outlined future growth and early adopter incentives, risks, fees, liquidation mechanisms, tokens, and lots more.
COTI’s vision is to build a Layer 1 payment infrastructure that will enable organizations to develop and launch their unique digital payment solutions. On the technical side, our team spent a significant amount of effort and time to improve and upgrade our technology for improved compatibility and scalability.
COTI Mainnet 2.0 was successfully launched in 2021. After more than a year of development work, we were pleased to transition from Mainnet 1.0 to Mainnet 2.0. This new development will ensure a better, faster, and more reliable experience for all COTI users across the ecosystem of products. Mainnet 2.0 includes upgrades to RocksDB, our storage engine, making it faster and improving backup capabilities. We also added functionality that will improvise the overall stability of COTI full-nodes. Our goal at COTI remains to develop and build the ultimate payment power grid, and this upgrade to Mainnet 2.0 takes us multiple steps closer to achieving this goal.
ADA Pay got launched on Cardano’s Shelley Mainnet. With this launch, we satisfied the needs of our customers by providing payment suites for donations, back-office processing, and more. We were pleased to work with Save The Children, a nonprofit organization with a mission to provide healthcare, education, and economic access to children in conflict areas, to use ADA Pay. We were even more delighted to see that close to $500 million has been delegated to charity-focused initiatives through Cardano’s driven stake pools. With the incorporation of ADA Pay to Cardano’s Shelley Mainnet, the COTI team is making remittances and payments much more accessible for profitable and non-profitable organizations. In October 2021, we released a new version of ADA Pay with added scaling, customization, and full integration functionality.
COTI Pay VIPER got released to the Apple iOS store — increasing our customer’s accessibility to the COTI product suite. Through this wallet app, iPhone and iOS users can easily log in and receive real-time transaction information, get an overview of portfolio holdings, send/receive tokens, and lots more with a few clicks. We also enforced the 2FA command to ensure increased security and protection while enabling a section where users can access their COTI bank accounts.
We released COTI’s Bank accounts and Debit Visa Cards in 2021. As we bridge the gap between on-chain transactions and those occurring in the real world, our COTI cards will equip users with the ability to transact instantly with traditional merchants using crypto as the underlying payment mechanism. Looking into 2022, the team is working to improve the overall product experience for all our users.
Earlier this year, we began working with the Cardano team to develop their algorithmic stablecoin, Djed. While our stablecoin factory is geared towards issuing stablecoins on the COTI Trustchain, we believe that working with Cardano to issue their stablecoin is also a step in the right direction with one of our leading Layer 1 partners. Fees issues and burned using Djed will be collected by COTI, and we predict the long-term accumulated fees will be substantial for COTI.
Through our partnership with Dafabet, we also released Ultra eWallet 2.0, a crypto gateway that enables Dafabet users to transact seamlessly using their USDT tokens. This 2.0 release included instant settlement, no minimum or KYC requirements, and more.
2021 was filled with lessons learned, and overall we are happy to say that we improved the technical depth of our product team and all of our releases this year. Looking ahead into this year, we expect more sprints, releases, and product updates with the community. We also encourage the community to follow our technical developments on our public Github. We almost doubled the size of both our technical and product teams, while hiring for multiple roles across the company.
On the business and partnership side, the team was focused on forming partnerships complementary to COTI products. We started the year with our partnership with Orion Protocol, a liquidity aggregator, where we helped further their fiat onramp process into the Orion Terminal. We struck another partnership with Wolfram Alpha, where they utilize Ada Pay for their NFT auctions, further expanding the scope and application of our payment services. Our collaboration with Occam.fi will enable ADA users to participate in initial decentralized offering through the Ada Pay and the OccamRazer launchpad.
Sundaeswap, Centaurify, AdaSwap, Ada Handle, ErgoDEX; just some of the other partnerships we launched in 2021. Our team is fast at work to identify and onboard potential partners to the COTI ecosystem. We are also keen to apply our extensive and growing list of COTI products to other on-chain protocols.
We also formed a new partnership with Cardano’s Catalyst Fund, $1 Billion fund that collects hundreds of thousands of votes for each proposal and thousands of developers engaged in innovation challenges. COTI was the first project to be chosen for the Catalyst Native, where we will fund the team that develops the plugin for ADA Pay. Through this partnership, COTI will scale development and marketing resources, enhancing our existing products and services in the process. This partnership will also broaden the scope of new ideas across both COTI and Cardano’s product ecosystem, leading to more use-cases for our enterprise and retail customer base.
Expect more announcements from us regarding new partnerships in 2022!
In 2021, we launched the Staking 3.0 initiative, where we further extended the amount of staking coins available on COTI’s full nodes. Over the past few months, we have increased staking capacity to 9M $COTI in community nodes, which increased total staking capacity to 160M $COTI! During the year we have added new community nodes bringing the total number of COTI full nodes to 27. We saw increased demand for staking, and the team tried as much as possible to ensure staking access was awarded on a first-come, first-served basis. COTI’s upcoming Treasury will replace the Staking 3.0 program, and will allow more users to stake $COTI.
Our partnership with Binance enables COTI stakers to earn up to 35.49% APY in returns and share 108,000 $COTI in rewards. We also partnered with Kucoin to launch the Pool-X program, whereby KuCoin users were able to stake through their wallets and earn COTI and POL rewards. With an APR of over 15%, the reception from this program was extremely positive, and we look forward to launching more of these in 2022.
In 2020, we answered the “When Binance” question to the delight of our community. In 2021, this momentum was increased further when COTI got listed on both Coinbase pro & Huobi on the same day (with Huobi listing our native COTI coin and Coinbase pro listing our ERC-20 token). Both of these exchanges account for billions of crypto transactions and we are pleased COTI is listed on their platform among other major crypto assets. A day after this double listing, we were listed on Coinbase and so far in 2021, COTI has been listed on Bithumb, Crypto.com, CEX.io, and more; we see these listings as a positive and encouraging step as we continue in our quest to build payment infrastructure. Trading in the COTI/ETH Uniswap pool has been also available, as global investors continue to support COTI through DEX pools. We were pleased to get listed to swap on the DEX Aggregator Protocol 1inch, another DEX aggregator while launching the $COTI-$BNB pair on PancakeSwap, the largest Binance network decentralized exchange.
Today, we are pleased to announce that we have been listed in 20+ CEX & DEX, including Binance, KuCoin, Huobi, Coinbase, Coinbase Pro, Bithumb, Crypto.com, and more; ensuring a steady liquidity supply for the COTI coin across multiple platforms.
The Crypto Volatility Index (CVI) is one of our flagship products in 2021. The CVI platform, developed in collaboration with the creator of the original VIX (The hugely popular “market fear index” of the regular stock market), allows users to go long and short on the market’s volatility expectations. From launching Mainnet in January to distributing over $1 million in platform fees to $GOVI stakers, the COTI team dedicated a significant amount of resources to develop, launch and market CVI to the DeFi community.
Aside from launching on Mainnet, we achieved two other significant milestones: releasing both the CVI Volatility tokens and ETHVI Index. With the CVOL and ETHVOL tokens, we provided additional tools for trading volatility and implementing short-term arbitrage strategies. Our recently launched ETHVI Index, which tracks the 30-day implied volatility of Ethereum, will equip traders with the market sentiment of Ethereum. We launched this index to provide risk management and profit-taking mechanisms for Ethereum volatility.
We encourage the community to follow the CVI Twitter page and check out the weekly Volatility Times newsletter for more information and opinions from our team. We will also publish a CVI 2021 in review shortly; check our medium for more updates.
We achieved a lot of the milestones we set for the 2021 year, and the COTI team will continue to engage the community with new updates throughout 2022. From growing our Twitter followers to 200,000+, our Telegram community to 30,000+, multiple AMA’s and interviews with some of our partners including Cardano, Ardana, Simplex, and lots more, 2021 was an impactful year for COTI.
We saw tremendous growth and unlocked new possibilities for our clients and customers across various sectors. In 2022, our vision at COTI remains to build the ultimate Layer 1 payment infrastructure; we will continue to release more product functionality across our MultiDAG 2.0, Coin as a Service, and COTI Pay Whitelabel solutions to our partners. We will also be releasing more insights into our algorithmic and decentralized Treasury Pool; and this will continue to be one of the major pillars of COTI in the coming years. Working with Cardano on the development of Djed and its reserve coin has been exciting, and we will also continue to drive this process forward into 2022. Finally, we will be launching Leverage Volatility Tokens and creating solutions on CVI that will protect investors from impermanent loss.
We have ambitious goals and objectives for the year, and we will continue to recruit like-minded, future-oriented technologists, business professionals and marketers to our team this year; we will be sharing more information on new hires in our COTI updates.
2021 was an amazing year for COTI, we set extremely high expectations and milestones and were happy to succeed in delivering top notch technology and partnerships. We really enjoyed the engagement from the community and keeping you all up to date with what’s happening at COTI. We hope you enjoyed it as well.
We are thrilled to start the new year as we have a lot of exciting things planned for 2022. We are confident that this year will be even better than the last. As always, Stay COTI!
