I recently took to the QASH subreddit to ask the community what their burning questions are about this project. There are always going to be some things that are not explicitly stated, or are buried deep in video interviews and hard to find. My aim here is to bring out those points. Thank you to everyone who asked some questions!

Let me start with a very quick summary on QUOINE, QASH, and LIQUID.

QUOINE is a fintech company that provides services in the cryptocurrency space. QUOINE owns both QRYPTOS and QUOINEX, which are two cryptocurrency exchanges. QASH is QUOINE’s token — which is going to be the utility token for the LIQUID Platform. The LIQUID Platform is going to offer a whole range of financial services for the cryptocurrency space, while also significantly increasing the liquidity of cryptocurrency trading. Thanks to the World Book — a brilliant development that will interlink exchanges to combine order books and match orders within this global network. For this article, we are going to look at the whole project and its aims.

Now let’s get to the questions.

What gives QASH value? What is the utility of QASH? Why would you buy and hold QASH?

This is a good question, and at the moment the answer really is not much. However, at the moment there are few places for QASH to have utility. The purpose of QASH is to be a utility token on the LIQUID platform — and as you are invested I assume you know this. As we know, the LIQUID Platform is going to provide an array of financial services for cryptocurrency. The QASH ICO helped to provide funding for the development of this project. Now, the testing is happening and the LIQUID Platform are World Book are on the way, QASH will have utility. So, what will the utility of QASH be in the future?

QASH will be able to be used to pay for any of the services on the LIQUID platform, with incentive provided to use QASH as the payment method. QASH will provide a 5% discount on all fees on LIQUID. QASH will be available to any industries that would like to leverage it. As the LIQUID platform grows, the utility of QASH will too. Additionally, when the QASH blockchain is launched, the utilities will grow even further. Here is a direct quote from a QUOINE blog about QASH utility, discussing what will happen when the QASH blockchain is released:

At this point, we envision the use cases for QASH to be exponentially disruptive.

So the utility is coming. For a more exhaustive list of what the QASH token will be for, read this very comprehensive blog by QUOINE that outlines exactly what QASH can be used for on LIQUID.

Comment from Vanalli/QUOINE: This Is another common and valid question that we will talk about a lot more as we get closer to LIQUID, the World Book and the other elements that make up the platform. In the short term, we are working on benefits for QASH holders on ICO Mission Control. There’s a lot of scope for what we can do there.

Why isn’t QASH more known? Where is all the marketing?

This is a very common question, and it is fair enough to ask when there are so many other projects bombarding people with their marketing tactics — some of which are extremely successful. What I personally love about QUOINE is the mantra of product first, marketing second. This is very uncommon in cryptocurrency, as most of the projects with the most marketing are yet to have a working product, or even a clear roadmap.

The marketing route for QASH has been to develop the platform it will be used on first, and then market it second. I prefer this personally, as when the marketing ramps up, the uses of the token will be clear as day. The marketing is beginning to ramp up now anyway, as the beta of the World Book has begun. You may have seen the adverts on CoinMarketCap and other websites. You may have heard about the QASH rewards programme. It is starting, and it will continue to grow along with the platform. You can read all about the marketing updates from the community manager here. To sum it up though, the marketing has been there, and it is beginning to increase now, and will continue to increase. The aim is to market the product, and the product had to be created first for this to be possible.

Comment from Vanalli/QUOINE: We get asked this a lot. Marketing is an on-going process. But the goal of marketing is not to hype the project or inflate the value of the token. The goal is to bring people into our community, engage them and then have them use our platform. QASH will figure more into the messaging when its use cases start to truly take shape. You will continue to see us popping up in more and more places in the coming weeks.

Why are withdrawals so slow? How will QUOINE scale up this process?

This is a pressing issue for a lot of users of QUOINE exchanges, and rightly so. It has very recently been addressed by the Head of Operations. The main reason the withdrawals are slower than other exchanges is QUOINE’s focus on security. 100% of funds are stored in a cold wallet, and I don’t know of another exchange that can say that. This means that when a withdrawal is requested, transactions must be signed on an offline computer that is never connected to the internet. This is a hugely important aspect of QUOINE’s services — they are offering the secure storage of your assets. I agree that the withdraw process can be a bit annoying, but in the future with the LIQUID Platform, withdrawing may be much less desired with the services and security being offered.

In terms of the scaling, the message from the Head of Operations outlined the plans perfectly. It started with recognition that recently the withdraw times have been unacceptable — which is great that this is recognised and acknowledged. Additional resources are being put on withdrawals now, as they have been made top priority. In the short term, there will be a new additional team for withdrawals so they can be processed every day of the week including holidays — a great step forward. Moving into the future, a tech team are working to speed up the withdraw process, with exploration into other options and technology to further improve this. For more detail, please read the official statement.

Comment from Vanalli/QUOINE: We have all wanted the withdrawal process to be more efficient, and we are putting the processes in place so we can make that happen. It’s unlikely, at least in the short term, that we will move away from our cold wallet approach, but we can increase the frequency with which we process batches, and we can of course refresh our policy to process on withdrawals and holidays.

If QASH’s goal is to bring in the “institutional money”, why are the big players not buying up tons of QASH when the price is very low? Why has QASH mostly been stagnating relative to the rest of the crypto market when their main product launch is only about a month away while other coins that have no imminent real world use have been appreciating in value?

Firstly, let’s discuss the price of QASH. I think the most important aspect to consider at this time is that the token does not have much use until LIQUID is released.

I wrote the part below about the price changes a little while ago, and since then the price has decreased and QASH has performed fairly poorly compared to the rest of the market. I will attribute this to marketing and liquidity. Currently, QASH is not widely available, the marketing is still ramping up, and the utility of QASH is not yet in action. These are the reasons for the QASH price performance.

As you can see, the QASH price rose sharply after the ICO, before falling again. After this, there was some volatility but it appears the price of QASH ‘stagnated’ slightly before a sharp rise over $2. Since then, the market has been extremely bearish, hence the decrease in the QASH price and the overall market cap. In the last month it appears a bull market has begun, and QASH has risen steadily over this time. But why are other coins experiencing massive pumps and QASH isn’t, when the release isn’t so far away? The fact is, this is not happening to many coins. Some coins have an incredible amount of marketing and hype behind them for no good reason, and this leads to some large pumps. Some coins have massive whales manipulating the price. Most importantly however, these pumps you see are only happening to a very low amount of the tradable cryptocurrencies.

It feels like QASH should be pumping with them, as it seems like you see every day a new coin up 30% or more. This is always going to happen; it’s just the natural feeling of FOMO. Don’t get frustrated when a coin is pumping that isn’t yours. It’s sort of a confirmation bias, as you see a different coin pumping every day it feels like every coin is pumping but QASH — this is not the case. QASH has followed a similar run up to many coins in the top 100.

At the moment, some of the community may be finding it frustrating that QASH isn’t rising more, but this is healthy for the long term of the project. Slow and steady growth will be better for the long term perception of QASH. Additionally, ultimately QUOINE are not responsible for the price of QASH, they are only responsible for its utility and the platform it runs on. As the platform is not released, the price of QASH being relatively low at the moment is justified.

In terms of institutional money, you are right, this is a big aim of QASH and LIQUID. However, it is an aim for when the platform launches. The institutional money will be interested in the high security, low counter party risk, and high liquidity. They will use the QASH token to gain the benefits of the utility (which will be touched on later). The platform is clearly coming, but it’s still a work in progress. The internal World Book Beta is live, and further larger scale tests are coming soon. Once the platform is released, the money will flow in. If you watch an interview with Mike, the CEO, you will see he is confident of this, so you should be too. The CEO knows much more about the behind the scenes workings that we do. Additionally, there is nothing to say that whales haven’t been accumulating QASH. QASH has millions of dollars of trade volume every single day. Anybody would have been able to gradually accumulate without raising the price, as this is their aim. They don’t want the price to raise until their have all the coins they want.

Comment from Vanalli/QUOINE: Big players can enter the market at any time. Their approach is not the same as that of you or I. We’re also not about hyping up the token and trying to artificially inflate the price of QASH. The value of the token will always be decided by the market. The LIQUID platform will bring increased utility of the QASH token and as we roll out our suite of products, the market will be able to make its own decisions.

These were the biggest questions which required long answers. Here are a couple of shorter questions that are also important.

When will the user interface improve?

It is happening currently, along with the rest of the development — it takes time. QUOINE have recently hired a new Chief Design Officer, and have already rolled out some UI changes for QRYPTOS and QUOINEX. These will continue to happen, and before long the LIQUID platform will be born.

Comment from Vanalli/QUOINE: You can read a little bit about our approach to design in this blog. Kaizen is a Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement. We will keep making improvements to our platforms to improve the user experience. We also have the LIQUID platform coming soon. UX/UI is a priority for us and I really look forward to being able to share with you what we’ve been working on.

Why should I trust a team that has no exchange in the top 50 volume wise?

This is a common misconception that was covered in the comments of the Reddit thread, but it is worth making this more known. QUOINE actually ranks in the top 20 for exchanges, with hundreds of millions in volume per day. During this testing period QUOINE has been within the top 3. CoinMarketCap is a very popular crypto tracker for volumes and prices, but by default the exchange volumes are tracked excluding exchanges without fees. When they are included, QUOINE sits within the top 20. A lot of trading on QUOINE’s exchanges is feeless. QUOINEX has 0 trading fees on base currency pairs with Bitcoin.

Comment from Vanalli/QUOINE: We have actually in the past been right at the top in terms of volume. When the World Book is fully operational, the volume will follow.

What is the progress on partnerships with other exchanges?

Annoyingly, this is a question that I cannot really answer. This is because the exchange partnerships have not/cannot be released at the moment, so only QUOINE know the answer to this. However, the CEO has said many times that the World Book is connected to 17 exchanges, 3 in the US, 2 in Europe and the others scattered around. It was said in one interview that one of the exchanges is the biggest in Korea. Bitfinex is already announced as a partner with QUOINE. The other exchanges will be released in due time.

Here are two videos where partnerships are discussed:

Video 1

Video2

Comment from Vanalli/QUOINE: We can’t talk much about the partnerships at the moment, which I know has been frustrating for many people, but that’s just how it is for now. We’ll be able to share more about who we’re working with and how in the near future

Thanks for reading!

This is not financial advice, and the writer of this piece may or may not hold some of the mentioned tokens in the article. This was written for the QASH rewards programme.