Cool Cousin launches it's presale on April 10th, during a volatile month in the cryptocurrency market. Itay Nagler, Cool Cousin's CEO, fleshes out the decision to push forward as planned.

Moments before Cool Cousin’s first ever public token sale begins, and in light of the extreme ups and downs in the crypto market, I want to share with everyone how we view everything that’s going on and what we plan to do about it.

As most of you know, Cool Cousin was not born of a whimsical decision to hold an ICO and ride a trend. Founded more than two years ago, Cool Cousin is a VC-backed company that already serves hundreds of thousands of users, has thousands of locals waiting in line to become Cousins, and is built by a young and thriving team that can’t wait to fulfil the vision to transform the way people travel. Cool Cousin was created out of the desire to share knowledge, to empower local communities at the expense of multinational conglomerates, and to enable millions of travellers around the world to really pump up the magic of travel and enjoy authentic, boutique experiences at an affordable price.

We entered the blockchain world after many months of research. We looked for a technological solution that allows us to transfer power to the community, scale up and solve the problems of authenticity and reliability of information, without the enormous operation costs that would certainly increase the price of the service and undercut the things we set out to change.

We don’t view this technological transition as either incidental or opportunistic; we studied it, we analyzed it, we surrounded ourselves with professionals and experts who examined the best way to bring our vision to fruition. After many months of talking and researching, we announced that Cool Cousin was entering the crypto market. From the very beginning, it was clear to us that we don’t exist in a vacuum - that for Cool Cousin to grow, the whole market must grow: regulators need to learn how to deal with it, more blockchain companies need to provide complementary services, and competitors need to enter the arena so that we can operate in a healthy market. Most of all, we would need many people to believe in this market in order to help it prosper. Only a mature and established market can grow Unicorn companies that disrupt the world.

For this reason, we decided to operate on the Ethereum blockchain and create an ERC-20 compatible token. As an established and popular network, this is the best starting point for us. Our hardcap is in Ether, even though a decent portion of our expenses is still in Fiat. We believed and still believe that we should publicly and openly demonstrate our faith in this market, for which we see a bright future. This is also why the last quarter's market drops have not led us to change our hardcap or our token allocation. Don’t get me wrong, this is not an ideal moment, and we would love to see positive growth in the market, but we are not deterred by its fickle nature. We truly believe in the market and in our ability to become one of the more significant players within it, and we’re closer than ever to making it a reality.

I won’t be giving you any forecasts about when or if or how high it will rise. I can’t speak of things of which I have no control. What I can say is that our team, consultants, partners, investors and I are all confident that this is the right way to go and that we can overcome any obstacle thrown our way. The whole team works day and night to build a product that will have a real impact. We know that it’s not enough to have a good idea—you have to know how to execute it, and this is what will help us win. We are listening to our users and our community and we are dynamic and light on our feet, making sure that we can quickly deal with unexpected twists and turns and lead the company to the place it deserves.

We’ve designed the company in a way that supports our faith in the market and in Cool Cousin’s future. Founders and team members will receive compensation in tokens that are locked up for a period of 24 months; the tokens that remain at the company's disposal have a 4-year vesting period; and the community pool will serve as a solid foundation for the transition period and will be distributed over the span of four years. This gives us enough time to expand the existing product into a large company with a healthy token economy and a functioning ecosystem.

Having said that, in response to the current slump, we have decided to reallocate 4% of the tokens in order to support our efforts during the first year, when we will heavily rely on Fiat. After much thought and deliberation, we have come to the conclusion that this is the minimum adjustment we need to make.

Yes, the cryptocurrency market is turbulent, but we have a strong team and a solid community and we feel as confident as possible to set sail in these troubled waters. In the last few months, we’ve nurtured exciting new business partnerships, met with users and locals, and expanded Cool Cousin’s network immensely. We’re super excited about our public sale, we can’t wait to share with the world what we have in store, and, as the song goes - we’ve only just begun.

Itay Nagler is co-founder and CEO of Cool Cousin