2022 was a formative year for the entire startup industry, not just the cryptocurrency and Web 3.0 space. We’ve spent the past 11 months relentlessly shipping products while reacting to market conditions, the changing technological landscape, and the priorities dictated by our community of early adopters.
If you are new to Chains – this blog post will provide an honest and comprehensive overview of our first year.
Q1 2022 – The Onboarding:
In late February 2022, Chains.com was unveiled to the public. The first product wasn’t one that allowed real cryptocurrency interactions – our goal was to allow early adopters to set up their accounts and learn more about our roadmap and vision.
Setting up an account early also meant that users could accumulate special “frequent flyer” style points that we then converted into a permanent discount for early adopter accounts on our platform.
vCHA allocations have proven to be a success and were used by thousands of users to participate in the eventual CHA token sale.
https://blog.chains.com/understanding-the-value-of-vcha/
The launch was a tremendous success for us, from a marketing perspective, as well as technologically.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/175-000-users-flock-chains-063000780.html
The servers held firm, and we spent the next six weeks patching and upgrading the user experience to accommodate the influx of new users while building out the infrastructure needed to manage their needs.
Deep Space Society NFT Launch:
While projects around us were selling 0-utility NFTs, we decided to issue a large and unique NFT collection free of charge for our users.
https://blog.chains.com/deep-space-society-by-chains-1000000-unique-nfts-on-polygon/
Deep Space Society is designed to allow users to be issued a unique NFT that is initially associated with their Chains account and utilize it when connecting to partner services.
Image-based NFTs were a bigger deal a year ago. That’s the harsh reality of this market, which has seen NFT trade volume collapse well over 90%. Choosing to issue our NFTs for free, with utility in mind, has proven to be the right decision, and we are looking forward to injecting it with utility as more Polygon-powered Web3 projects materialize.
Building out the Launchpad stack:
We firmly believe that the Chains Launchpad is one of the top products in its class worldwide.
It natively combines multiple features that are absent from other platforms.
- Native multichain support – TRON, BNB Chain, Ethereum, and Polygon tokens can be issued or sold OTC via our platform.
- 13(!) payment methods, including Visa, Mastercard, and Coinbase integrations.
People have purchased CHA using SHIB, APE, Litecoin and DOGE. - KYC and bespoke SEC 506c compliant user flow.
- Any form of pricing structure imaginable. CHA was sold via 10,000 individually priced tranches, for instance.
- Whitelisting, pre-sale, public sale, vesting, and other restrictive mechanisms.
We now know we can satisfy the requirements of virtually any initial or secondary token offering on the market today. Moreover, Chains already has over 500,000 registered users, and tens of thousands of those users have already successfully passed KYC.
Putting together the entire stack of solutions needed to conduct a multi-chain token offering was a challenging task. It’s time we openly speak of not just what went right but also the things that we could and should have done better.
1) We could have focused on Binance and TRON chains and still have 90% of the results with 20% of the resources.
We’ve built our own payment gateway from scratch, which supports Bitcoin, Ethereum, TRON, and BNB Chains. We also support Visa and Mastercard payments and have integrated Coinbase’s commerce solution.
2) We genuinely invested everything we could into building an AAA-level multichain Launchpad. It’s an overkill of a product at this point, with the capacity to serve x100 the transactions and users Chains currently has.
Pre-sale and the Launch:
Over 50,000 users have signed up to participate in the CHA presale and requested to have their accounts whitelisted. We are grateful for the enthusiasm and support from our community; it definitely put a lot of pressure on us as the launch approached, and we hope that we didn’t disappoint too many of you with our offering.
https://blog.chains.com/nearly-50000-cha-whitelist-applications-processed/
CHA – Public Sale
Chains Launchpad went live in July. At its peak, we approached 10,000 users per hour – the only time that we saw the need to pause and upgrade our setup. From a product and technology perspective the introduction of the Launchpad has been a success for Chains. However, it could not have been launched at a worse time.
2022 became turbulent (and cold!) with the collapse of LUNA, 3AC, and Celsius. A cascade of bankruptcies, liquidations, and the inevitable effect it had on Ethereum, Bitcoin, and every other cryptocurrency in the space, meant that we needed to execute the sale in a climate very different from what we initially envisioned.
Executing the CHA token sale on the chains Launchpad constituted a bet on ourselves. The Chains team has built the platform, the community, and the marketing apparatus and executed the sale, from A to Z.
We are proud to have followed through and completed this milestone in 2022, one of the most brutal years on record in the cryptocurrency industry.
Chains Staking
Towards the end of 2022, we have decided to shift our focus from Prism, our much-anticipated analytics product to Chains Staking, a platform designed to let users generate APY from dedicated token pools. We see Staking as a complementary product to the Launchpad – allowing projects to issue tokens on the Launchpad and immediately offer a staking program that generates APY on vested and unvested tokens.
We introduced the Staking platform by launchpad “Alpha Staking”, a special program specifically aimed at long-term holders of CHA. Users that have purchased CHA on the Launchpad and have never withdrawn their tokens, can benefit from 10% APY, over the course of up to 3 years.
2023 – Commercialising and Scaling Chains
The Launchpad and Staking products are complementary.
Combining the two provides a solid offering for projects that wish to offer tokens to the public or want to provide additional utility to users that already have their tokens. Chains is now officially open for business, and we invite projects to apply and enjoy early-adopter rates by reaching out to us at hello@chains.com or filling out the following form: https://chains.com/apply.
Stay Tuned
2023 is bound to be an exciting and formative year for Chains. Follow our social media and subscribe to our newsletter for future announcements.
