Nimiq, the first browser-based Blockchain, and its NIM currency, now come with a running and stable mainnet, an array of applications ranging from a native wallet to a checkout flow for online shops and the most amazing community a tech project could ever wish for.

We now have something to show.

It’s about time we get people to look at it.

Retrospective

Nimiq was and always will be a tech-focused project. We believe that quality is the decisive factor and that substance will beat hype in the long game.

However, we heard the concerns voiced by the community about a lack of focus on marketing and the implications of this on Nimiq’s project potential.

Over the last months, we have made wide and profound efforts to improve, and are excited to present an advanced growth strategy, which goes beyond simple marketing.

A New Approach

There is always this discrepancy between who you want to be and who you really are. Sure, we want more attention, but Nimiq will not participate in any of the at times downright fraudulent marketing practices that have become more and more common in the crypto space: Journalists selling out their professional integrity, influencers taking payoffs for non-transparently hyping ‘investments’ and conferences where the speakers are basically shilling their projects.

Instead, we will focus on a different type of marketing that intends to deliver substance and provide value for our community, our stakeholders, and the broader public.

Creating Value

To do this right, we started from scratch with a full brand re-think all the way from our logo to our shared vision. The brand guide will be published soon. To give you an idea of what’s at the core of the freshly overhauled Nimiq brand, here are our vision and mission:

Vision

Barrier-free value exchange for everyone

Our vision is a global society empowered by a decentralized, self-sustaining and censorship-resistant infrastructure that is equally accessible to everyone.

Mission

Enable the most accessible, censorship-resistant payment solutions

Our mission is to contribute to this vision with an open source payment system. Three factors are at the core of this mission:

Nimiq strives to be…

the easiest and most accessible payment system,

the best performing and most scalable payment system,

uncompromising on decentralization and censorship resistance.

The reworking of the brand included a process that has forced us to take a long, hard look at ourselves. While team Nimiq believes it excels on cryptography, adaptation of blockchain research, user experience and interfaces, it can not lay claim to being expert on matters of business development, marketing and overall corporate skills common in many start-ups.

We realize excellent tech and high ideals alone are not enough to unleash the full potential of Nimiq.

Besides deploying a wide range of marketing basics — that we are going to talk about in a minute — we have identified two key target groups that we initially focus on:

1. Developers and Product Teams

To be useful and accessible to as many as possible on a global scale we need empowered and enthusiastic developers and entrepreneurs to build on Nimiq. For most projects, this is incredibly hard to achieve. For Nimiq, we are truly blessed to already have an amazing community of very talented developers who have proven their skill and commitment with several awesome applications and projects already.

Our focus will be the growth, empowerment and support of the contributing community of Nimiq.

Here are some of the actions that are either already in progress or will be kicked off soon:

An overhaul of our documentation

A rewrite and update of the Whitepaper

Learning material, from basics to advanced applications

Guides on UI, UX and brand implementation

A complete asset library

Github Wiki

Developer meetups and events all around the world

Nimiq hackathons

Research grants

Community project funding

Marketing support

More frequent and direct contact with core devs.

We aim for nothing less than the best developer experience in crypto. We hope and expect the Nimiq community to hold us up to these standards and welcome your feedback.

2. Communities with challenged currency or banking system access

Source: MarketWatch, BIS, IMF, World Bank, Bloomberg, CEIC

The current mass adoption strategies used by most projects (Nimiq included) are: ‘If we build it then the people will eventually come’.

However, they have not been effective, particularly in developed countries that have well-functioning fiat currencies (where cryptos are mostly used for speculation). We asked ourselves: How can Nimiq help drive mass adoption in a meaningful way? By looking towards countries where existing payment infrastructure and currency are faltering that have:

Poor payment infrastructure,

Low levels of desktop/laptop ownership but high levels of mobile smartphone ownership,

Expensive mobile data.

NIM has advantages over other cryptocurrencies in these types of settings:

Fast & convenient — Being browser-based makes onboarding quicker and more convenient, even in areas of low connectivity. Combined with Nimiq’s focus on simplicity, this gives NIM a strong value proposition over other peer-to-peer cryptocurrencies.

Low transaction fees — With Nimiq, transaction costs are far less than one cent.

Browser-based — This means large wallet downloads are not necessary to use Nimiq, helping solve the common barrier to adoption problem of high mobile data costs in developing countries. According to The World Bank, 413 million Africans are living on less than $1.90 per day and mobile data costs can be as high as $35 per GB. Most other cryptocurrency mobile app downloads are around 25MB, creating a barrier to access given that the initial download could represent half a days salary.

We are investing in developing, peer-reviewing and further evaluating a detailed plan for adoption of NIM in such communities by:

Creating a sustainable development model that upskills locals to compete in the global, digital economy,

Collaborating and sharing data with academics to increase the understanding and study of cryptocurrency and economics,

Creating a final adoption blueprint that can potentially be replicated and scaled across the world.

The initial outlines of this ambitious plan — that would represent a ground-breaking first step towards mass adoption — are:

Identifying communities with the highest chances for NIM adoption,

Scientific collaboration with the academic community,

Getting support from charities operating in the local area,

Establishing a local fiat to NIM exchange in the case-study location,

Creating a local tech incubator and onboarding contributors from both the cryptocurrency community and entrepreneurs,

Sharing updates and progress reports with journalists,

The potential to replicate this strategy globally.

Again, this is a big picture task and we plan on approaching it step by step, involving the Nimiq community as much as possible in assessing along the way how far to proceed.