With a new year upon us, Nauticus has revised and updated our roadmap for the year ahead.

The launch of live trading on Christmas Day was a milestone for the company, and enabled us to proceed full steam ahead towards the public launch. The mobile app is undergoing quality testing as we speak and is expected to be released at, or just after launch, enabling users to deposit and trade on the go from pretty much anywhere.

We’ll also be releasing a new ‘light’ theme for our website and making it the default option. This will help increase the readability and usability of the site. The current dark theme will become the trader’s preferred “night time” option.

We are already looking forward to opening our foreign exchange markets and utilising the full potential of our mobile app as a payments platform. Nauticus already has a huge number of supporters in the developing world and we see digital payments as a massive growth area in the next few years.

BITCOIN MINING

The decline in the value of the cryptocurrency market across 2018 has obviously taken some of the enthusiasm out of the crypto space, but as has frequently been noted, exchanges can make money from turnover in good times or bad, and of course, the next bull run could be just around the corner.

It has however resulted in a change of emphasis in our plans.

Bitcoin mining has become increasingly uneconomic, with the cost of mining either at or below the cost of production. Therefore we are putting our plans for a mining centre on hold.

SECURITY TOKENS

However, our world tour during the ICO drew our attention to the massive investor interest in security tokens — which we believe will be the next big growth area in digital tokens — matching or possibly surpassing the enormous growth in cryptocurrencies seen in 2017.

Nauticus is extremely well place to profit from this burgeoning field.

The CEO of Securitize Carolos Domingo recently predicted the ‘security token market will increase 10x in 2019’ and here in Melbourne, the CEO of Malta Digital Exchange, Rick Klink told The Blockchain Centre that if just one percent of the expected $900 trillion asset market is tokenized, then STOs will account for $9 trillion of value by 2020.

Unlike most competing exchanges, Nauticus has already met the regulatory requirements to enter the security token field. We are already a registered representative of an Australian Financial Services Licensee which enables us to tokenize assets.

But what does it mean to ‘tokenize’ an asset?

One good example is property. Instead of a developer preselling 12 units to 12 buyers ‘off the plan’ to fund an apartment block, the developer may instead choose to create 1200 tokens, each of which represents 1/100th of an apartment and sell them instead. The immutable and unfalsifiable nature of blockchain means investors can have 100% faith in their token’s value.

And it’s not just apartment blocks, everything can be tokenized including shares in a company or commodities like gold and lithium.

DISRUPTION OPPORTUNITY

Security tokens provide an existential threat to traditional stock markets like the ASX or the Nikkei. Originally set up as a way to enable companies raise funds from the public to expand, their monopolies have seen the costs of setting up an Initial Public Offering become prohibitive. We believe that smaller and medium sized businesses will seek out platforms offering to tokenize and trade in security tokens such as Nauticus as a way to raise funds.

We are eagerly awaiting a license to trade in securities. In the meantime we are able to tokenize assets in expectation of listing them on the Nauticus securities market.

The Nauticus Coin (NTS) will play an important role in this new market, providing users with a reduced fee. STOs will also attract a wealth of users to the platform.

FUNDRAISING

Nauticus too, is in the process of raising funds from institutional investors and this month will release a detailed prospectus to capitalise on the interest from investors in security tokens.

This funding will also help Nauticus to realise our planned global solutions, including a low cost eCommerce marketplace, merchant payments platform, ‘one and done’ KYC verification and the creation of an ICO gateway.

Justin Hanka, our corporate advisor, is leading the team raising capital to enable Nauticus to truly grasp its place on the world stage.

The former CEO of HelpMeChoose.com.au, Hanka has been instrumental in helping shape our vision and laying out the plan for the coming year.

We believe that 2019 is shaping up as the most exciting and important in the history of the Nauticus project and we hope the share the journey with you.