LTO Network - the road to adoption. Report Q1-Q2 of 2019.
Awesome 🔥 is how we would summarize LTO Network’s results in the first 2 quarters of 2019. It was possible thanks to you, our awesome community. It’s time to recap what has been achieved. This report is focused on summarizing our first half a year (Q1-Q2) performance. We will delve into new clients and integrators, on-chain metrics, token usage, and community involvement.
Together, we:
- Became top-20 most used blockchain with over 20,000 daily transactions
- Onboarded software providers with over 1M active users
- Grew the network to over 80 nodes and 1900 token holders
- Hosted training sessions for BCG, Axveco, and Novum
- Integrated with Binance Chain and DEX
- Spoke at events with CMS, IBM, TechData
- Became a Member of the ISO Committee (more on that later)
Grab a cup of tea and some cookies! You are in for a flight.
The journey from 2012 to 2019
Over 6 years ago, Rick Schmitz and Martijn Migchelsen launched their first start-up, now known as FIRM24. It became the Netherlands’ biggest incorporation company with over 10% market share, growing to this day. This was a huge achievement! The Netherlands, being one of the best jurisdictions for company incorporation, is a global player in this market.
This milestone led to creating another successful startup, Legal Things, focused on building centralized software solutions. For 2 years it has been providing solutions and building pilots for major corporations like Heineken, Dekra, AH, and so on. The industry scope ranged from real estate contract automation to insurance data handling. But in a centralized way.
Along the way, we were experimenting with PoCs on Bitcoin and Ethereum, back in 2014-2015. After winning the 2017 Blockathon, we gave a stronger push to LTO Network – a hybrid blockchain platform aimed at enterprise adoption of this promising new technology.
Blockchain wasn’t, therefore, a shift for the sake of marketing, we needed the blockchain to make our software solutions evolve: for the sake of GDPR compliance and automation, helping solve the issues of data silos. It is the same way clients and integrators do not need to fully replace their existing systems – LTO Network integration helps them evolve their existing systems. This is something companies and integrators like: simplicity of integration, yet a lot of added value at the same time. That’s what we breathe every day.
But product evolution wasn’t the only thing that changed along the way. There was one more unintended yet huge revelation that came along the blockchain product evolution: incentives. Incentives for companies, individuals and software providers – in a distributed way. This had a major impact on the product and the adoption speed of LTO Network.
Now, let’s see how it boosted LTO Network adoption in the first half a year of 2019.
Adoption Achievements
We follow a concrete formula: create value with LTO solutions and capture that value with the LTO token. Creating value refers to companies, integrators, and business partners using the product and getting it adopted. Capturing value in the economic sense is growing the utility of LTO token and the network value. Let’s walk through each one of them.
ISV: Capptions and SignRequest
We introduced Capptions and Sign Request as integrators, both of which bring with it significant, and growing transaction volumes. As integrators, they are already leveraging LTO’s blockchain to anchor various parts of their customer-facing offerings on-chain, and we are constantly exploring new ways to expand our relationships leveraging both of their combined technical expertise.
SignRequest, one of Europe’s leading digital signing providers, added a new blockchain solution to its digital signature application. By integrating our blockchain, they enable blockchain technology for more than 1 million users worldwide.
Capptions has integrated blockchain anchoring for their workflow applications. Every step in the workflow application is hashed and anchored to our blockchain utilizing Proof Engine (an immutable digital notary). This provides timestamping and ensures the integrity of digital data. An immutable audit trail can be shared with regulators, clients or value-chain partners in a secure way.
Blockchain Partners: V-ID and CertiK
The Dutch blockchain V-ID entered into a partnership by rolling out a GDPR-compliant blockchain solution for companies and governments. Whereas V-ID are providing a smooth interface for users to interact with, LTO Network is the backend of the solution securing the integrity of digital data on its blockchain.
CertiK will be using the LTO Network global public blockchain to anchor the Proof-of-Existence on their smart contract audit reports. Further, CertiK will be auditing plug-and-play and custom Live Contract templates for organizations to easily integrate into their existing systems, unlocking unprecedented standardization of secured collaboration between organizations.
Integrators
Another way of getting LTO Network adopted is working with companies who specialize in software integration for different clients, instead of having a system of their own. This means we need to educate those on what benefits (USPs) LTO network has, how to work with the toolkit, and so on. On that front, we had a great run already, hosting training sessions for:
- Boston Consulting Group
- Novum Innovatie Lab
- AXVECO – already onboarded as the first integrator!
We are working on open sourcing the workflow engine toolkit and more documentation on anchoring with different tools, coming up later in 2019. This and the explanatory videos from our tech team will greatly push forward this strategy.
Check two business pitches about LTO Network solutions:
- Proof of Existence presentation (public blockchain, in other words, Layer 1)
- System integrator presentation (permissionless private chains with GDPR compliance, in other words, Layer 2).
- For companies: fill in the form and get a glimpse of our solution on a call
On-Chain Performance
Transactions: top-20 most used blockchain
Our integrators are leveraging the LTO blockchain beyond our initial projections, and we still have a growing number of use cases in active development, not yet deployed into production. In just 5 months, LTO Network became the top-20 most used blockchain processing over 20,000 daily transactions! The transactions are being produced by companies, integrators, and their own clients – mostly utilizing anchoring as Proof of Existence for their digital data like workflow steps and digital signatures. Check the full list here.
Nodes: 84 and growing
The number of nodes providing transaction validation services to the network increased from around 13 community nodes in January to 84 nodes (having minted one or more blocks in the last 30 days). The estimated node ROI is 4.12% at this time, and this is achieved without any inflation. Node rewards are entirely by transaction fees on-chain and the ROI is therefore in direct relation to transactions and anchoring volumes, making this setup much more economically sustainable.
Want to spin up a node and participate in the network? Check this guide.
Token Holders: over 1900
More token holders mean a more distributed network! This is better for our Proof of Stake validation system, and better for the more healthy distribution.
- ERC20 wallets: 939 with a balance > 100 LTO
- Mainnet wallets: 995 with a balance > 100 LTO
In fact, LTO token transfers are now at a lower velocity rate, meaning more people actually hold LTO and engage in a substantial way and help out the community. More on that below in social mining.
A special thank you to our friends and partners BitMax.io. They have supported us since launch, helped with marketing, and keep working with us to this day!
Troll Bridge: full collection!
We were the first project to introduce something like this: a new model of distribution based on negative incentives. In short, the Bridge Troll penalized those private sales and seed participants who were to swap and sell early. This protected the early community and left everyone with the full freedom of choice when it came to unlocks. In January the fee started at 50% and has now dropped to less than 5%. Actually, very few early stage participants swapped. Most either remained inactive or decided to support the network – incredible participation! You can find more cool stats here.
You can check our updated telegram bot for the most recent stats on token swaps.
We also had a fun community streak with LTO Bridge Trolls being represented by different famous crypto personas: Jay Clayton of the SEC, John McAfee, Vitalik Buterin, and now – Brenna Sparks. Want to make some GIFs and memes? Here are the files.
Social Mining and the Future
How was this possible, this exploding performance? This was something we did not anticipate. The effects of distributed incentives.
Social Mining has empowered the community to take a greater role in defining our long term success of LTO, with rewards being tied to ongoing participation, and contingent on continuing to hold LTO tokens, either on mainnet or as ERC20. Due to changing how incentives work (from top to bottom -> to a distributed way with no shareholders), it allowed everyone to perform at the top of their abilities with the shared vision and goals.
We established focused working groups covering aspects of our successful operation – Marketing, Business Development, and Technical Support – so whilst the main telegram channel might be quiet at times, work continues behind the scenes. This has allowed community members to add significant value, introducing new prospects, spreading marketing materials, and supporting developers and node operators too.
We also spread the word about LTO Network with regular community meetups and the attendance of relevant blockchain events. We are very welcoming to community members dropping by for a beer on Friday afternoons, and the events we attend are always high quality and relevant, such as with CMS, IBM Watson, Docker. You won’t find us dropping huge amounts of capital on high ticket exhibitions and events!
This is just the beginning, let’s amplify these results!
It’s time to grow even further as a company and as a community. We are increasing the scope and presenting the new strategy at our event on June 20 in Amsterdam. If you see this article after the date, just update the main blog page and check it!