1. HGT Price

For both HGF’s supporters and HelloGold, the value of HGT is important. We don’t believe the current price reflects the longer term potential of the HelloGold project. We believe that the current price is largely due to the very thin volumes of tokens that are being traded on both COSS and EtherDelta. HGF is actively looking at ways to improve liquidity. We are confident that over the next few months, we will create greater market and community awareness of the HelloGold project.

2. Exchanges

One of the most common questions is which exchanges and when the tokens will be listed. The team have heard this and is working on securing HGT listing on a number of exchanges. We expect to announce a big exchange later this week. If supporters can suggest the listing of HGT with exchanges that they use, please feel free to do so.

3. GBT reward allocation

HGF made the decision to provide the first discretionary reward allocation of GBT to HGT holders on 17 October. Each HGT received 0.000000001288010441 GBT, based on the management for AUM held from April to September 2017.

We recognise that the GBT rewarded at this point is small and more of a ‘token’ amount. As the rewards grow larger, we will provide methods to monetise them include listing on exchanges and selling the GBT directly to HelloGold Foundation.

GBT reward allocations can be checked using MyEtherWallet or Etherscan. For more details, please check the Slack channel or see this article.

We think this allocation makes GBT the first auto-updating token in the crypto space (where the amount of the token changes up or down based on code), and makes it possible to have tokens with real world costs associated with storage of physical assets.

4. Token marketing activities

CEO Robin Lee has been undertaking a number of roadshows, talking to the crypto community in countries across Asia and Europe about HelloGold, the Foundation and Tokens. This is to help the market understand the nature of the product and build exposure in the crypto community. Further events are in the pipeline. If you know of a group of people who would be interested to hear Robin speak, please contact the team and we can try and arrange a meet up/forum discussion in the future.

5. Technical update

a) Refund to Chinese nationals who participated in the token sale.

Following the PBOC rulings that caused us to refund ICOage, we extended a voluntary refund to those Chinese nationals who wanted a refund as long as they returned the HGT first.

To save the team having to make transactions one by one, Dave (lead blockchain dev) did the typical programmer thing and built a program that reads from a spreadsheet to bulk send the transactions. This also reduces the risk of errors in sending such transactions and makes them more checkable by the business (non-tech) part of the team. We will be open sourcing this as a utility for anybody who wants to use it.

b) Community Initiatives

We listed eight community members to whom we would be donating HGT. We created a separate utility to send tokens reading the address and amount from a spreadsheet. This will also be open sourced.

These are the initiatives (plus Etherscam DB and the White Hat Group) that we donated to (you should too!)

c) Migrating HelloGold’s traditional business to the blockchain

We have been working on a blockchain backend from the moment that we were founded. However, this effort has been put on hold since April so that the team could focus on working on the HelloGold Token Sale. One of the benefits of the Token Sale is that we have deepened our community involvement. Now, about six months later, we re-started the engine for the blockchain development.

The first step was for us to re-examine the existing code — it has been a long time since anyone has looked at it! More seriously, we realised that there have been significant changes not just in the HelloGold applications but also in Ethereum coding standards. As a result, we have some re-design work to do. This is already in progress and we expect to report a lot more next time.

d) First New Concept — the Trustee wallet

One thing that has troubled us is that our traditional users are not familiar with blockchain technology — they expect customer support (which we have) and; if they lose their mobile device, they expect us to be able to sort things out for them. As all blockchain users know, if you lose your private key, you lose everything. We thought through the usual solutions — recovery phrases, trusted friends with shared secrets but none of them really fit our requirement. We are working on the trustee wallet — which we believe will solve the problem. More details soon.

6. App product development

The HelloGold core product has continued to develop whilst the token sale has been underway:

The buy screen has been adjusted to display the buy prices and fees in a more transparent manner

A new tooltip has been installed to make language changes simpler

The Loan product is being developed working with AEON Credit Services

The KYC process is being streamlined to enable users to sign up and explore the app functionality in a more seamless manner

App analytics are being fine tuned to provide better quality data

These changes are designed to increase both app usage and the amount of gold being purchased by customers. We should see the amount of gold being purchased increasing as these changes take effect.

7. Recruitment to the team

One of the largest challenges the team faces is expanding the team with appropriately qualified people. We are tapping into the Malaysian/regional recruitment networks and searching hard to expand the team so we can develop as per our roadmap — both technically and geographically. High on our list of priorities are blockchain devs and a Chinese speaking community/social media manager. We are also looking for external ambassadors to support expansion of HGT awareness in the crypto community.

Ever since we started we were looking for good smart contract developers. As you can imagine, demand far outstrips supply. As a result we decided that we would hire new staff to support our traditional application mentored by the existing team, while the team that know our process flows inside out will undergo intensive training on blockchain technology by our lead blockchain developer, Dave Appleton.

If you are or know of anybody who may be interested in working with either HelloGold (hello@hellogold.com) or HelloGold Foundation (foundation@hellogold.org), please do contact the team.

8. Next steps

Community Communications Channel — Given the number of scams and spam that the community are getting on Slack, the HGF team are looking to migrate to a new platform. Several options are being reviewed for security, functionality, accessibility and cost. Once a final decision has been made, HGF will notify the community and proceed with migrating people across. If anybody in the community has a recommendation please do get in touch with the team via any of the channels we currently operate on — Slack, WeChat, Telegram, email.