Dear readers and fellow Qredonians,
It has been a while since I put pen to paper and shared my thoughts with you all. As you would hope, we have been tremendously busy.
To be candid, up until last year, we were focused on our power users – institutions. These users certainly do seem to love Qredo. In the first quarter of 2023 - despite the market pain - our power users generated over $6.6bn in transactions. This means over $6.6bn of assets were secured by Qredo and deployed from Qredo Wallets.
Still, truth be told, one of the things we have failed to do as yet is to give all of our users a product they can love. I mean truly love. Something you enjoy using daily.
This changes with the upcoming launch of the New Qredo, which will give retail users a brand-new experience. We will be ready to take Qredo to a new audience. More on this later.
There are two ways to look at fees. You could just view them as an operating cost, and imagine they exit the system. That couldn't be further from the truth. Fees are more like the lifeblood of Qredo, allowing the QRDO token itself to accrue meaning, and long-term value, something good for the whole Qredo community and ecosystem.
As you know, there are many types of fees that we never charge at Qredo, including AUM fees, minimum activity fees, initial setup fees and deposit fees. What we do have in operation are two very singular and specific types of fees.
We have the Qredo Service Fee, a variable fee that all users pay to use the Qredo web application. In current usage, over the last 3 months, it has been fantastic to see that the great majority of funds were paid in QRDO, benefiting from the 15% discount in fees that is redeemable when settling fees with our native token.
The second type of fee is the Qredo Protocol Fee. At the current time, this fee only accrues on certain transactions, but in future, it will be applied to all transactions, once and only once third-party validators are up and running. As you saw in our January update, our validator consensus was upgraded from Proof of Authority to Proof of Stake, so we are now ready to make this happen.
As our CPO Gabriele outlined in the 2023 Roadmap Update, not only is the New Qredo a huge milestone for us, but it is also a highly complex undertaking.
Under the hood, we've changed the way we deliver software, and migrated the Qredo Network nodes and our dMPC nodes to trusted execution environments. All of this provides scalability, speed and security.
From the user's perspective, the entire UI/UX will change, but the New Qredo goes beyond a simple design update. We will be able to offer a tailored experience for retail and institutional users, alongside powerful tooling such as our Portfolio view, which will give users a rich window into their holdings, the protocols their wallets are connected to and who is marked as an Approver. For institutional users, a slew of much-anticipated features, including Whitelists, Admin Policies and direct, efficient API access.
From a product delivery perspective, once the New Qredo is released, we will be able to ship and deliver new products and features far faster and more efficiently. The new modular design of New Qredo will allow a much more constant evolution of both the platform and protocol, which means that users of New Qredo will benefit from the very latest technological and security advances as they are made in the blockchain space.
The QRDO tokenomics update is coming this quarter and is already under review. We are now in the process of sitting down with some leading third party advisors on tokenomics and being tested, challenged and refining our tokenomics strategy. You will have a voice in this, too, as we will be taking this to a community vote. We intend to publish our proposal and take it directly to the community – what better way to kick-start community governance?
Additionally, as our team never sleeps, we have a bunch of core and Qredo Labs workstreams underway, some of which may even have gone unnoticed in our extensive 2023 H1 Roadmap Update.
This may be a mouthful, but it's hugely important. With Qredo, you can already:
(1) Open a dMPC-secured wallet
(2) connect that wallet to smart contract or protocol with
(3) multi-factor authentication (usually via the Qredo Mobile App).
This is by far the most secure way to interact with Web3 today, but we wanted to give users more. Alongside our work to make all activity human-readable (think: translating the numbers and letters into clear descriptions), Smart Contract Transaction Simulation will let you map out an interaction and understand it before you approve it. This is huge, and very neat.
Moving this into a developer preview is a very exciting next step. MPC is such a powerful technology, but to date, it has only been made readily available to corporate custody users or large organizations with the ability to run the infrastructure themselves. There are exceptions to this, like ZenGo’s neat mobile app, for which we heartily salute them.
qSign changes all this, making a distributed MPC protocol available to anyone on demand via API and, soon, at a language level. Any user can open wallets on 99% of the available blockchains out there invoke and sign transactions - all without having to set up complex infrastructure.
Who would use this? Think about an organization that wants to enable their users to open secure MPC wallets on demand. Or consider a protocol that wishes to go crosschain, and interact with a wide range of other protocols. Perhaps a dApp builder wants to enable users to open self-custody wallets that can be connected to their product. In principle you can literally control activities across any other chain, from any one single chain. The use cases are truly endless.
We intend to put this control in the users' hands by creating an open platform where the builders can pick what they need and build without paperwork or SaaS fees. We think that's a winning combination.
All new initiatives, like the ones I'm describing, will be designed to utilize QRDO and/or accrue increasing transaction value for the Qredo Protocol. The launch of Ankex, the world's first Hybrid Derivatives Exchange, will also bring incredible utility and activity to the QRDO token. QRDO remains at the heart of our product-building efforts, and that's how it will always be.
As always, thanks to you, our users and the community. Thanks for being part of this journey to secure the future of digital assets, we couldn't do it without you.
All the best,
Josh