Dear XYO Founding HODL’ers and Community Members!

It’s hard to believe that it was only a month ago that the XYO Main Sale concluded, kicking off the GAMMA Sale! It feels like it’s been years since that time!

Our office looks night-and-day different today than it did a month ago.

For starters, we have Jelena, our HR/Admin Goddess who has upgraded the layout of our office. It’s no longer a computer geek lab with pizza crust on the floor. She’s turned it into a computer geek lab with pizza crust that actually makes it to the trashcan!

There’s other things that are different in our office today, compared to a month ago.

For starters, we’ve hired 11 new people in the past six weeks! That may not sound like a lot, but we interview AT LEAST 5 people per hire.

What this means is this…

Arie, Markus, myself and others have spent time with 50+ people to whittle it down to the “Elite 11” that are on the XYO Train.

This includes talented data scientists, developers, designers, media buyers, copywriters and more. A month ago, our marketing department was a one-man-wolfpack (meaning yours truly).

Looking back now, I’m not sure how we pulled off such a successful token sale despite the bear market.

Actually, I know how.

It was because even though our team was small, we had a talented team that worked 7-days/week.

For the past month we’ve been growing the Team XYO by hiring specialists. Meaning, we’ve been hiring PEOPLE BETTER THAN WE ARE at certain critical things.

Towards the end of the XYO Network Main Sale, I had to fill in as one of the primary web designers and web developers. I also had to fill the position of Digital Media Ad Buyer, Copywriter, A/B Optimization Tester, Analytics, Biz Dev, Product Planning and more.

Let’s put it this way, I’m a marketer by trade, and definitely a designer or developer by necessity.

Our entire team was doing the exact same thing as me. Everyone was wearing about 5–6 hats at a time.

For the past month, our team has shifted its focus from 100% on the NOW, to 50% on the NOW and 50% on the FUTURE.

And the FUTURE all starts and ends with the most important thing: HIRING GREAT PEOPLE!

For my Marketing Team this means hiring the following positions:

Digital Media Buyer (for Facebook, Native and other)

Content Manager

Head of Design (UI/UX + Everything)

Market Analyst

Head of Partnerships

Social Media Manager

Head of PR

Data Analyst

Email Marketing Manager

Plus more!

For our Developer Team, this has meant building out our team with the following positions:

Blockchain Engineer

Backend Engineer

Consumer-Facing Product Manager

Frontend Developer

Data Scientist

Senior DevOps Engineer

iOS Engineer

Android Engineer

Hardware/IoT Product Manager

Firmware Engineer

Plus more!

For all these positions, it means at least 3–4 hours a day interviewing to find the “best of the best people, sir!”

This means interviewing MANY people for each position (which are ALREADY pre-qualified for us by our Head of Talent Acquisition, Mr. Jon Broederick himself). Side note: Jon is the guy that wears a t-shirt around the office with his last name on it.

Anyways, we are well on our way to building out the best blockchain team on the planet.

Also, if you’re a software engineer and you eat code and don’t sleep, please contact jobs@xyo.network — our careers page is going up soon!)

So why am I telling you all this?

I’m doing so because behind the scenes, there are a whirlwind of things going on at XYO.

So sit tight!

Be patient with us for the next few weeks because we’ll be spending time on-boarding our new team members.

When they’re on-boarded and when we’re firing on all cylinders, you will be seeing us and hearing from us… Everywhere!

OK, so with that background context out of the way, I’d like to announce something.

If you’re already a member of our community and already hold XYO, then you’re going to be excited about this.

I’d like to introduce…

The XYO Founding Holder Registry (FHR)!

The Founding Holder Registry (FHR) is the historical ledger of those who have purchased XYO from our website (either in the Main Token Sale or the current ongoing GAMMA Sale, and NOT through a decentralized exchange).

If you’ve purchased XYO directly from our website already you already know that you’re asked to whitelist your Ethereum ERC-20 Wallet Addresses.

That address will be added to the XYO Founding Holder Registry. And I’ll explain why this is such a big deal in a moment.

But first, one of the things we aim to do in our XYO Token Sale is to give you your XYO when you purchased it! Some Token Sales partake in “lock-ups”. This means they don’t give you access to your tokens until some future date. Being that the idea behind XYO is that it’s a utility and yours to use, our goal has been to ACTUALLY GIVE YOU your XYO!

The downside of this, is that decentralized exchanges can sell it for a price lower than what it’s worth.

As I’ve stated before, there are extra benefits to purchasing XYO from our website.

I’m going to tell you one extra benefit right now that will make you VERY happy.

But to understand it, you need to understand EOS and how their dApps are launching on the EOS platform.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the success of EOS is very important for the blockchain space. It is good for the blockchain industry as a whole if EOS becomes a dominant dApp platform.

From the very beginning, we at XYO have committed to supporting ANY blockchain platform with smart contract capabilities. Being that the native function of XYO is an oracle (that’s what the “O” stands for), it only makes sense to support multiple blockchain platforms! This means that we’re not only committed to supporting Ethereum, but also committed to supporting blockchain platforms like NEO, Cardano, IOTA, Stellar and EOS + others!

Thus, we have been closely observing the EOS Mainnet launch over the past month.

In observing the EOS Mainnet launch, I’ve admired a lot of things that they’ve done. It was very much a community-driven launch. It required 15% of EOS Tokens to vote for the Founding 21 EOS Block Producers required to launch. Because they left it to a community vote, they were the subject of some Fear Uncertainty and Doubt news (FUD). But after people realized the FUD was merely fluff to get more pageviews, the EOS Mainnet launched and took off.

Yet the most intriguing part of the EOS launch is how EOS dApps are beginning to launch on the EOS platform.

You see, unlike the Ethereum platform, dApps on the EOS platform are launching by Airdropping their tokens to the Founding EOS Holders.

They do this on a basis that varies by the EOS dApp.

For instance, KARMA (https://www.karmaapp.io/) is Airdropping their token to the EOS Founding Holders on a 6:1 basis.

For instance, if one has 100 EOS they will receive 600 KARMA.

This has created a lot of excitement around the upcoming EOS dApp launches. It has also brought the EOS community even closer together.

XYO Geo dApp Airdrops

We’ve launched the XYO Founding Holder Registry for this reason. EOS’s approach and dApp Airdrop model inspired us to do the same for XYO Founding Holders. Thus we’ve decided to publish and curate the registry for our XYO Geo dApps. This enables Geo dApps to Airdrop their native tokens to the addresses on the XYO Founding Holder Registry!

This means that if you’re a XYO Founding Holder (meaning you’ve purchased directly from XYO either during the XYO Pre-sale, Main Sale or GAMMA Sale, NOT through a decentralized exchange), you can look forward to Airdrops from XYO Geo dApps in your XYO Wallet Address!

Part of our upcoming special announcement (coming soon!) will outline more detail behind XYO Geo dApps.

And if you’re a XYO Founding Holder, you can look forward to XYO Geo dApp Airdrops!

XYO Geo dApp Airdrops, like the EOS dApp Airdrops, will be done on a different basis per each dApp.

Bottom line: If you’re a TRUE XYO Founding HODL’er and community member, you can look forward to this, as well as many other things we’ll be doing for our XYO Founding HODL’ers in the future.

XYO Founding Holder Registry Portal

We will be launching a portal to look up the XYO FHR to see if you’re a Founding Holder of XYO, and where you stack up on the list.

You will be able to see where you rank on the XYO Founding Holder Registry in terms of how EARLY you purchased.

Additionally, you’ll be able to also look up the amount of XYO you have in comparison with everyone else.

We will also be creating various membership clubs and badges for our early XYO Founding Holders — including the XYO 2-Comma Club and other badges.

Bottom line: If you purchase XYO directly from us, we intend to do our best in making you very, very happy with your decision.

We look forward to spoiling you, especially with Airdrops from the first generation of XYO Killer Geo dApps!

But that’s not all! We have more updates for you below!

Keep on reading…

XYO Yellow Paper is Looking… AMAZING

Our highly technical yellow paper is currently being written. The goal is to take the concepts in the white paper and justify each component with the math that supports it. It will be very transparent and show in great detail how the XYO Network is being built. As you can imagine this is no small task. Luckily we have the absolute smartest minds behind it. Hearing these guys talk is truly mind blowing, which is to be expected if you want to change the world in a big way.

The Dream Team

Big Head and Brendon (his brother) have been hard at work making big things happen. They are part of the brains behind the upcoming XYO Yellow Paper. The Yellow Paper is critical to creating a blockchain platform that is built for long-term success. Big Head has been working on creating an app that enables Android devices to serve as Sentinels and Bridges. While Brendon is working on building out the backend infrastructure for the Bridges and Archivist.

AWS Partner Network + XYO Network

We have officially joined the with Amazon Web Services Partner Network to share and benefit from each others technology. We now have have our technology closely on their radar. As we continue to develop our technology we will be much closer to them adopting it. We also had Kevin attend a private event they put on for their blockchain partner network members in San Fransisco yesterday!

The Bitcoin Podcast

Once again our fearless German speaking leader did a great job on another podcast. We are consistently getting great feedback from the host raving about his performance the engagement their getting from the following. This is all great news as we build on our marketing efforts and get ready for more big announcements in months to come. Here’s a link to the episode: http://bit.ly/2KqalBc

New Team Members

Naim Abdullah

We’re honored to have Naim Abdullah join Team XYO as our Head of Finance. Naim comes from the world of corporate finance. Prior to joining XYO Naim headed up financial planning and analysis for one of the nation’s largest independent broker-dealer and investment adviser firms generating ~$2 billion in annual revenue. Naim’s modest (!) educational background includes an Undergraduate degree at Princeton University in Economics. He followed this up by getting his MBA at University of Pennsylvania — The Wharton School of Business. After meeting with Arie, Marus and Scott, Naim decided to join the future of finance: cryptocurrency. XYO is fortunate and excited to have Naim!

Ramy Touchan

Ramy heads up Digital Media Buying at XYO. Ramy brings years of experience in the direct response marketing world. If you’re on Facebook or Instagram, you’ve already started to see Ramy’s work. Meaning, you’ve started to see XYO ads on Facebook and Instagram! Prior to joining XYO, Ramy worked with one of the most dominant digital marketing companies in the world called The Control Group (based in San Diego, CA). A company I (Scott speaking) respects and admires for their insanely ambitious focus on constant testing. Ramy was the one driving significant revenue through direct partnerships and media buys. And now, he’ll be bringing this skillset to the world of XYO!

When Ramy isn’t starting at his computer refreshing Facebook analytics, you can find him on TV refereeing soccer matches for various top professional leagues across the US. His ultimate goal is to officiate in The World Cup one day. Ramy brings a fun work hard, play hard culture to the team. He’s almost as excited as we are to be at XYO!

Website Redesign — The Final Touches

The website is nearing completion and will be live soon. Pao has been working diligently to finalize the design. Once that’s completed the team will do a thorough audit and then it will be ready to go live. We are beyond excited to get it launched!

Jared (real name, Tobyn) Has Become an XYO Alumn… He also has a legendary Dad!

Jared (real name, Tobyn) has officially become an XYO alumni! Jared was a young High School Prodigy student that interned at XYO for the past few months. We greatly appreciate all the work he did with the various blockchain research activities he was responsible for. He provided a ton of key insights that will be used as we build out our MainNet. What’s also cool is his dad wrote the original script for Grease. His dad stopped by the XYO office and dropped off a signed copy!

Two Comma Club

We are proud to announce our official Two Comma Club! Those who own and hold 1,000,000 or more XYO tokens — purchased directly from us — become eligible for membership in our exclusive club. We will be releasing graphics for people to post and share with pride!

Last, But Not Least… Top Secret News

We see and hear all the activity in Telegram asking for updates about the news. There are some final touches being put in place.

This shouldn’t be much longer and we do appreciate your patience!

Thanks for stickin’ with us and remember… JUST HODL!

Warm regards,

Scott Scheper

Co-founder & XYO HODL’er