“Patience is not about waiting, but how we act when things take longer than we expect.” — Paulo Coelho

This is my first address to the joint COSS community. I intend to try and deliver my thoughts to you every month.

I have been around in the blockchain industry since 2013, but more actively since 2015. By industry standards, one could call my team and me, crypto veterans. I was lucky to have left banking at JP Morgan and Deutsche just before that; pure luck, nothing genius here. Most of those early crypto enthusiasts were dreamers, hoping to change the world. Hoping that the entire world would quickly get on the decentralised bandwagon and we would see decline in Fiat usage soon. As things turned out, yes, they were dreamers, but not entirely wrong.

Greed reared its ugly head in the cryptoverse during 2016–18 which resulted in the crypto winter of 2018. Kudos to all of you who stayed (which includes most of you reading this), fought the winter, survived, and are now looking to better crypto days ahead. However, this period of uncertainty taught us some very valuable lessons.. Here are my brief, short takeaways, especially since 2015. The arrival of winter was certainly unexpected but we are glad we survived it and came out stronger. Like Rumi said, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.” So here I list our lessons learned from our wounds:

Buy and HODL works fine most of the time. As COSS exchange operates for traders, and COSS Wallet operates for HODLers, I believe in personally holding a larger portion of my holding in top currencies. Of course, this is no recommendation or advice and do read the disclaimer at the end.

Take profits when you need to make urgent expenses and prioritise your health and family first. Nothing beats that in the bigger scheme of things called LIFE. Life is a single player game and happiness is a personal choice as someone said it.

Altcoins and tokens with real usage and utility had a good ride during this winter. They would do well in the summer and next winter as well. Many come to mind but you are smart enough to judge which ones those are if you DYOR.

Stable coins are here to stay although they are just another form of Fiat currency and a temporary on/off ramp for fiat to crypto. From survival, we have reached existence, next is mass adoption. A crypto to crypto world would be amazing but then again, don’t be a dreamer. It’s still a distant reality. Be prepared but don’t lose sight of reality (aka health & family).

Mass adoption is coming and the biggest companies in the next 20 years could be some public or even some private Blockchain operators.

Homo Sapiens is a greedy species. JPM, GS, Facebook and other FAANGS of the corporate world would not be left behind. I am yet to decipher the nature of that beast and its impact. Our entire focus is COSS — along with how and where we place COSS to work alongside the big boys. And this time, Asian corporates with global clienteles, are equally ready, able and willing to fight back. We are preparing ourselves for the inevitable, but the future is filled with many unknowns.

Crypto wars will turn ugly when politics and nations get involved along with these corporations. China, Russia, the US, everyone would try to control BTC and the Libras of the world. These new crypto wars would be fascinating. COSS intends to be ready to take advantage as things turn.

There are many more smaller observations, but in light of these brief experiences, we are implementing our beliefs and experiences to create a new COSS — the new Crypto One Stop Solution ecosystem.

The world’s first token merger between LALA & COSS went live on 25th June. A new token contract was deployed after carefully reviewing the tokenomics for the COSS and LALA token, going through a lot of internal and external feedback, making sure our holders’ were listened to — and building with our mantra — Simple things first.

We took a step back, analysed what went wrong, what our strengths are, what our community wants, and we made a priority task list. Humbly, we started prioritising and delivering, about a month ago. While this list might look easy to the by-stander, there’s a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes.

A carefully planned and the most painless and seamless token swap process was delivered leading to a unified rebranding to Crypto One Stop Solution. The logo itself and the decision to come together to one name was not easy, Bois.

token swap process was delivered leading to a unified rebranding to Crypto One Stop Solution. The logo itself and the decision to come together to one name was not easy, Bois. 0% maker fees was implemented and now we are working swiftly on introducing negative maker fees.

Simplifying the entire base and quote pair fee collecting structure in line while making things simple — both for the community, as well as ourselves

A lot of work in the backend in updating the FSA structure so users now receive only COS and ETH instead of collecting token dust

Review of our listing and delisting process, and putting together a new team in place for this. You will hear a lot more plans in the coming weeks regarding that

Completing the new IEO platform that would be launched soon, along with the world’s first IEO platform on the wallet — your own COSS Wallet synched for IEO participation

A continuous process of bug fixes and improvements for the stability of the exchange, code fixes, technical security and many other behind the scenes improvements.

Improved marketing efforts which also involves designing and implementing a referral program, PR activities, aligning marketing teams together, SEO/SMM improvements for better presence, etc.

Hiring and building an experienced team to fuel the ecosystem we are building. This is no small task and requires a lot of screening, interviewing, resources, traveling, etc. Looks simple, but isn’t.

We are all about a great product in the hands of a great community and a continuous process of taking feedback to incorporate where we can. The month of July is here! We are certain it is going to be a really good one! Allow me to give you highlights of what our focus is for July — in line with my mantra ‘community first and simple first’.