Dear Telcoin community,
This week has been exciting on so many levels. After a year-plus of remote work, roughly half of the team was able to get together safely this week in our new offices in Los Angeles. I’m really looking forward to when we’re completely past the pandemic and able to bring the whole team together. It was an extremely productive week, being able to press forward on a number of key areas, while all in the same place. Aside from getting to know each other better, the focus of the week has been finalizing V3 front end and back end designs. We are all very excited about that progress.
As a general update, we have a number of dueling priorities that we wrestle with internally, but they boil down to compliance, expanding markets, and rolling out V3. We completed the rollout of our compliance stack and are currently testing our next V2 iteration, which includes expanded destination markets. On the sending side, we are on to the integration phase with our additional sending markets (Singapore, Australia, and the United States) and will roll those out sequentially over the rest of Q2. On the V3 front, aside from finalizing design, we have set up a separate test environment and are on track for a beta release by the end of Q2. While we were behind in terms of Q1 targets, mainly as a result of ramping up our compliance stack, we expect to be generally back in line with our market targets by the end of Q2.
More importantly, what we are actually rolling out this year is much more than what we were initially targeting — particularly in terms of V3 and DeFi. The market for what we are doing is evolving rapidly and growing more exciting with each day. We are lucky to be in the right place at the right time and are all focused on capitalizing on this once in a lifetime opportunity.
The scale of the community of people who believe in Telcoin and our vision is amazing — humbling even. We all feel a deep responsibility to deliver on this vision and are all highly motivated to do so. As we finally roll out services, it’s exciting to see our community evolve into a powerful, positive force. Thank you all for your continued support.
Respectfully,
Paul Neuner
Telcoin Los Angeles office open for business
Telcoin’s newly-opened US headquarters in Los Angeles played host to the first onsite meeting of Telcoin staff from across the country and globe. Roughly half of the current team members converged on Century City for the week to plan out the year ahead, align around our core objectives, and solve all outstanding problems that required internal consensus as we look towards the next generation of the Telcoin decentralized financial platform.
We also re-opened our new physical offices in Singapore and Manila and are looking forward to meeting safely soon.
Telcoin V3 preview
Telcoin V3 is the culmination of three years of research and development, organization building, and business development.
The next generation of the Telcoin Platform stack is architected to fully harness the power of DeFi and the reach of telecoms to bring fast and affordable, user-owned financial products to every mobile network subscriber in the world.
V3 introduces two formative, compliant, user-owned financial products designed to operate at a fraction of the cost of traditional services, which execute automatically via smart contracts rather than intermediaries — and where active Telcoin users capture fees typically awarded exclusively to financial institutions.
Telcoin will release documentation detailing the layers of the platform stack, formalized issuance and incentives mechanics, various websites and interfaces representing each decentralized network, and explanations of how market participants can add value and earn incentives.
As always, this information will be released at launch, when code has been shipped and networks are live.
We are incredibly excited to be at this exact place and time in history, at the forefront of what we believe is a movement that will revolutionize financial services and empower billions of people.
Hola Mexico
Telcoin has signed a partnership with Unipagos that will allow us to open the largest remittance corridor in the world, as well as release our full stack end-to-end platform on both sides, from stablecoins, defi digital asset exchange, to payments cards.
More than 1.6 million Mexican households rely on inbound remittance from the United States as their most important source of income. According to the World Bank, the corridor was valued at US$36 billion in 2019.
… and other new frontiers
Telcoin has also signed remittance agreements with two of the largest mobile money platforms in Nepal and Tanzania. We’ll be sharing more specifics about those collaborations as integrations progress, but some data points in the meantime: The service we’ll be integrating with in Nepal has more than 2 million subscribers, 25,000 merchants, and 50 bank partners. With more than 40 percent of the nation’s mobile money subscribers (over 10 million), the service we’re connecting to in Tanzania is a big one indeed.
Cornhusker State update
Several members of the Telcoin team visited the great state of Nebraska in February of this year, where Paul testified before the Nebraska Legislature on the proposed digital asset banking charter. The proposed bill was well received — Senator Mike Flood has given the bill his priority designation and we remain optimistic that the bill will become law. Telcoin Strategic Advisor and General Counsel Mark Quandahl is working hard with members of the banking committee to keep us headed in the right direction toward a new financial product suite that benefits existing banks as well as new charters.
Our team keeps growing
Jeff Lutz, based in Los Angeles, received a bachelor’s degree in physics from UCLA and a master’s degree in computer science from California State Dominguez Hills. He previously worked on advanced radar technologies for the United States Navy and wrote automated trading algorithms powered by machine learning in his free time. Jeff joins Telcoin as a software engineer focused on core backend systems.
Nazrul Rahman joins Telcoin’s Singapore office as Compliance Counsel, tasked with ensuring the company’s legal and regulatory compliance. He was a commercial litigator prior to going in-house, where he dealt with matters pertaining to breaches of directors’ duties, white-collar crimes, and various other corporate disputes. As counsel, he was also leading the management of cryptocurrency-related disputes in the Singapore High Court. After leaving practice, he joined the Singapore branch of a cryptocurrency exchange as lead counsel advising on legal and business related matters. His unique insight into law and cryptocurrency has resulted in Nazrul being a legal pioneer versed in law and cryptocurrency, especially on how they intersect. Nazrul’s experiences therefore place him in a great position to advise Telcoin on law and cryptocurrency regulation both in Singapore and globally.
Judith Cachero, based in Manila, joins Telcoin as Compliance Officer in the Philippines. She has more than 14 years of compliance experience, having worked at a number of large financial and insurance institutions. She’s a subject matter expert on all aspects of AML, KYC, and risk management.
Mark Quandahl joins Telcoin as a Strategic Advisor and General Counsel for the US market. Mark is an Omaha attorney and former Director of Nebraska Department of Banking and Finance, a former member of the Nebraska State Board of Education, and the former Chairman of the Nebraska Republican Party. He was appointed to the Nebraska Legislature in 1999 by Governor Earl Benjamin Nelson and elected in 2000 to represent Nebraska’s 31st Legislative District. During his tenure in the Legislature he served as the Chairman of the Banking, Commerce, and Insurance Committee.
Respectfully yours,
The Telcoin Team
