Charlie Shrem. One of the most legendary, mythical figures of cryptocurrency. Without getting too poetic, some might even call him a martyr for the cause of decentralized currency.

I was in New York City this past May for business meetings. During this time, I was a panelist at the City Blockchain Summit where I discussed the effect that blockchain technology would have on social networks, and how gamification combined with tokens could change the entire social media scene. You can see the summary here.

At that event, I had the pleasure of meeting Mike Kimelman and Bob Quintana. I told them more about our vision and the changes that we wanted to accomplish in the social media space, but most importantly the impact we wanted in people’s lives. Few days later, magic happened - they have created a Telegram group with all 3 of us plus, guess a third surprise person. 25 Kuende Point to anyone who is able to guess!

If you guessed Charlie Shrem, you’re right! Needless to say, I was excited. We started talking and had several Zoom calls to go into a lot of details regarding different areas of the project: blockchain integration, scaling, tokenomics, revenue streams and Kuende’s roadmap.

After around 2 months of online interactions, I planned another trip to New York City to meet with Charlie and discuss how we could join forces. It was successful far beyond what I could have imagined. A perfect chemistry formed between his vision of how the blockchain is changing the world and our vision. It was clear how it will help us make our micro-economy transparent and secure, to reward our user and help and support the mass blockchain adoption.

Our first meeting in New York

Charlie expressed to me that he loved Kuende for a variety of reasons. The first was that he felt confident with how big our team was and the experience they already had. For example, two of our developers are Google veterans. Secondly, he liked that Kuende was already a product with a lot of users and that we were upgrading the app and our gamification system with the ICO, while at the same time involving the community in the content generation process. He told me that not a lot of projects have that going for them!

In particular, Charlie liked the business plan for the next 2 years, with realistic and achievable checkpoints every quarter. He also thought our tokenomics were unique, and he will work with us further on developing them. The partners and also the advisory board were something that he felt gave the project strength - Aurel Iancu, for instance, who has worked with Charlie before on other big projects, who is a Cosmos and Polkadot Validator.

Finally, of course, it’s hard to get interested in a project unless it has vision. And Kuende has a powerful vision: creating meaningful and valuable interactions between people. This is something that could completely change how people use social media, just like how the blockchain completely altered our perception of many current technologies.

Charlie is bringing a lot to the table: his analytical thinking is something out of this world. I am impressed with how he likes to build and design systems and infrastructures. He will help us a lot with the tokenomics, in order to find the perfect balance between our two tokens in our testing phase after the ICO is over. Together, we will also look for other partnership opportunities, with some of his projects in which he invested or funded that are complementary and synergize with Kuende.

The fact that we have his blessing means a lot and is the final boost my team and I need to make this last year ICO journey a complete success. I’m extremely excited to see what happens next, and I hope you will join us on this journey to help make the blockchain more accessible to everyone.