Welcome to the January 2020 Spectrecoin newsletter. As you all know, 2019 was a really challenging year in many ways for the crypto industry as a whole and in particular smaller projects. Spectrecoin however achieved some great things and made some real progress towards our goals. The primary ambition for 2020 in Q1 and Q2 is to hire a marketing manager, find a branding / marketing partner, craft a marketing strategy and then get that up and running. We aim to release the Android mobile wallet and integrate with further exchanges, but we cannot set a fixed deadline for this.

This newsletter is a bit shorter than normal. The reason for this is that we are in the process of creating a streamlined ‘corporate‘ image and philosophy that will inform how we approach the branding and the subsequent marketing. This in turn will have an effect on how and where we will communicate in the future.

Marketing Update

We are entering into a crucial period for our planned branding and marketing. We have had an ad placed in Angel.co for a ‘marketing manager‘ and we have had a lot of respondents. We are working through the candidates and we are compiling a shortlist. The final outcome of all this is not yet determined, but below we have outlined the process we have embarked on to achieve our marketing goals.

Spectrecoin needs a clearer unified philosophical focus and we need the whole team to get behind some core values and ideas that will inform future decision making. We are in the process of creating a Spectrecoin manifesto this week and next. The timeline for marketing is currently as follows:

Develop a Spectrecoin ‘manifesto’ and mission statement 1-2 weeks

Aim to hire a marketing manager within 2-4 weeks

Aim to decide and to develop branding 8-12 weeks

Aim to develop a marketing strategy 8-12 weeks

Start the implementation of the marketing strategy before the end of April 2020

We will have a ‘marketing‘ section in the newsletters with updates. It is important to remember that this is a somewhat fluid process but the team is minded to make this work.

Marketing Funding

A new marketing manager will get paid in XSPEC but further branding and marketing needs fiat money funds and so @Mandica is offering for sale: up to 250,000 XSPEC @ 0.00001400 BTC/XSPEC (or near offer) for The Spectrecoin Foundation. The slightly increased price reflects the fact that it is impossible to buy this amount on exchanges. This is a one off chance to obtain a large amount of XSPEC. This will be an initial marketing budget to get us started and 100% of the BTC raised will be converted into GBP and will fund the upcoming marketing effort. DM @Mandica on Discord or e-mail xspec@pm.me to discuss this. We are also accepting BTC donations on 31xGDqBbmkjwGHfkgCBH5mPrY5sDDaKSVQ

Android Update

The work on the Android wallet continues and our developers have successfully ran full Spectrecoin clients on their Android phone for a while now. The new mobile platform is planned to spearhead our new marketing strategy and we will have further updates in the next newsletter about the progress.

Crypto Regulations

We engaged a London law firm to consider Spectrecoin in relation to current laws and regulation. Over the last few weeks we had a discussion and we received the final legal advice just before the new year. Although we will not publish the legal advice in full we will provide some extracts below and give our reaction to this. The Spectrecoin Foundation is UK company so this legal advice is based in UK law. There are some uncertainties however as the UK is in the process of leaving the EU.

I would like to remind everyone who thinks that privacy projects shouldn’t care about laws and regulation that there are real people with real families behind this. It is only proper and sensible to be well informed and have knowledge about the world in which we operate to minimise any real personal risk to the developers and the team. Below are a few extracts from the legal report that encapsulate what the advice was and the potential risks.

Spectrecoin, as a crypto currency is properly defined as an ‘exchange token’ and as such does not fall within the FCA’s regulatory perimeter under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (‘FSMA’). The FCA considers ‘exchange tokens’ to be highly speculative commodities – held in the future hope of a gain, which is not enough to draw them into the FCA’s regulatory control. The anonymity promised by the Foundation to Spectrecoin’s users makes it potentially vulnerable to money laundering risks under the POCA and TACT: specifically money laundering (s.327 POCA), becoming concerned in an arrangement in relation to criminal property (s.328 POCA), and laundering of terrorist property (s.18 TACT).

This suggests that the Spectrecoin Foundation itself does not need to adhere to any kind of regulation and we do not need to submit to any kind of scrutiny as such. The report further suggest that there could be some liability for the foundation and its members if serious crime was committed and facilitated by the Spectrecoin software. We will keep an eye on this and we believe that this applies to any cryptocurrency and in particular Monero (XMR) that is already being openly being used for crime on for example ‘White House Market‘ which is a so called ‘dark web‘ market place that only accepts Monero. We do not feel that Spectrecoin is at risk at this time and we will proceed as planned. If there is any change in laws or regulations, we will communicate this and we will adapt.