Announcement: Marketing Transformation & Token analysis

General
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Good afternoon xx.network, community, node runners, and anyone else involved within xx.

I’m excited to announce the initiation of the next steps we’re taking together with xx.network. Since last December, I’ve been involved with xx.network from a builder’s bounty perspective, and have had countless chats with @rick and @Robbie about xx.network and where we are headed.

We’ve been reading the community’s messages and feedback on multiple channels, and they seem to summarise a need for change on both branding and economic levels. As we became invested through our development efforts with xx, we also share this feeling.

We’re a collective of people who believe in proactive change rather than expecting the sky to give us what we need.

Thus, we initiated conversations with xx, the council, and the foundation over the past summer in Amsterdam, Berlin, and online about how we can contribute to a much-needed transformation.

From this week, we have begun a market and token analysis of xx.network

This will lead to a baseline of issues on an obvious and less obvious level. Some points might be obvious (design/branding/revenue avenue updates), some of them might not be so obvious(?).

Based on our conclusions, we aim to fix initial major pain points and get ourselves ready for a (small) campaign taking place during DevConnect in Buenos Aires.

We need your help, now and in the upcoming months.
We’re looking to speak and interview: node runners, developers, token holders, and potential partners.

We’re making time for this as we want to verify our assumptions, alongside finding root causes that our own perspectives might miss.

Feel free to email me at [email protected]

Updates will follow as they come. We appreciate not only your efforts but also your resilience in the support of quantum security.

-mf

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I’m interested.

Are you on X and if so, what’s your handle?

Edit: to make my position clear (if it’s not already) - it’s going to be hard to implement transformation with the validators we have. That has to be overhauled and bad players sidelined. Investing resources in “marketing” before that’s done would be like pouring resources down the drain.

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Marketing for me is not just about pushing advertisements and PR. I think there’s some root causes here that need to be addressed. Community & Validator trust, market placement (who are we useful for), design/branding update.

Id love to hear more about the validator issue, as it also seems relevant to marketing. I’ve reached out to you on TG.

My twitter is here: https://x.com/0x_m_f

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I can’t message you on X since I’m not fully validated. Doh.

The validator issue is the leeches make the network unusable and xx Network’s governance enables them/it. It’s almost symbiotic, in the saddest way. Most of my posts on this forum are about validators, let’s say this one: Dealing with centralized validator pools .

We have a strong foundation in OSS that runs well, but right above that there’s a bunch of “faithless servants” running that code just well enough to for the network to be able to produce rewards, re-elect them and move into the next era. That is, the ability to service cMixx applications isn’t among top 10 concerns of theirs, as one can tell in seconds by examining how many have voiced their concerns over the years.

And on the side there’s a rudderless Council that hasn’t done much of substance for quarters (or even years), apart from the rare instances when Rick or some matter woke them from their slumber. Amazingly, most get re-elected although save for 2-3 (excluding Technical Council members) not one has done anything consequential since the beginning of the network. No one even knows who most of them are, it’s incredible.

Recently I tried to see if I can create a simple Web app with xxDK and couldn’t even connect to network to develop (let alone use it in any sort of meaningful way).

Someone who knows top xx whales should get them to vote to throw the bums out, get a new Council in, do a full audit of validators, ban all faithless servants’ wallets from validation, trim validator set to 100, and fix how validators work and how their work is evaluated.

Then it might make sense to try to do something on top of that.

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I am an investor - mostly in time and resources, but I do have a wallet called 6ETH, you can guess what I funded it from and to see its value today has caused me a little distress. I’ve been here since betanet running 2 distributed nodes. I’ve written a discord bot for validators to use. I’ve been on Discord and telegram actively in the past, but not lately. There doesn’t seem to be any reasons to be excited about the project. It does come down to marketing, really. The utility in the network was pretty well demonstrated by things like Haven and the xx messenger. They made great efforts to be accessible, but who wants another messaging app in 2025? Trying to get American friends to download and use Whatsapp is hard enough. So will the user base always stay small? There have been rumors for years about xx involvement in cbdc trials that have kept people excited.

I’m willing to put my coins behind something radical, because the direction we’re going now isn’t it. @rothbardian has written a good list of things wrong. Lack of leadership behind the vision is killing it. Decentralization happened suddenly and seemingly without intention, and we’ve been limping along since.

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I’m just a coin holder since around 2022 timeframe. Kinda like what bradford mentioned about CBDC’s, that’s what initially got me interested in XX. I later learned more about privacy and basically how companies like Cambridge Analytica can “brainwash” people based off their metadata behaviors. I think CBDC’s and Project Tourbillion caught a lot of people’s attention (see the price action from 2024 where BIS said had positive results for Tourbillion), that and the combined news with the World Coin partnership. Seems like the team decided to stop talking about it for whatever reason. Rick said CBDC’s will take forever to be adapted, so it’s not a narrative they focus on. Which is foolish, because if you look at a lot of other coins that use that narrative, they seem to be doing a lot better not just price wise but also community wise. Coins like XDC HBAR XRP XLM and Metal etc. Those coins also got nuked during the bear market, but you know what I noticed? They still have an actual community. xx can’t say the same. It’s not even specifically CBDC, it’s more general banking, like stable coins and just being a legit service to bank in some fashion and ISO20022. People love this sort of narrative because it makes their investment feel legit, and a higher chance of succeeding.

The xx team never talks about post Project Tourbillion, I tried asking them for updates but they give me a straight answer. I know Currency Network Ltd was practically born out of Project Tourbillion and David Chaum is even an advisor over there. They have a product called vATM that perfectly describes the use of cmixx. But no one on the team will confirm this, no one wants to even talk about it. We can’t even get the advisor of Currency Network Ltd, aka David Chaum to tell us if cmixx is being used within Currency Network’s product(s)? It’s ridiculous, it’s been nearly 3 years since Tourbillion has concluded. If we could just get clarity on this that’d be great. Especially if they do happen to be using cmixx… I mean what else do I need to say, hype brings in community.

In 2019 I bought this coin called XDC at 1 million dollar market cap. It blew up to about 2 billion in 2021. It crashed as all things did. But did it crash to 1 million market cap again? No. When I look at their social media, they have a bigger community now compared to how it was pre covid. So anyone who want’s to say, “oh we’re not about pumping and dumping coins.” Please, give me a freaking break already (rick and anne). It’s about growing the community and having people discover xx, and I hate to tell you this but crazy news and hype tends to do that.

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CBDC: I think it’s very simple - in central banking there’s so much (free) money and power involved that there’s 0% chance that anyone who wants to improve it gets a chance to do so. Of course, I’ve nothing against xx coin being used in such networks, but I’ve never had the slightest expectation that may happen. I was also against amplifying these indirect engagements on social media because it was a waste of community’s attention and a distraction.

The OP has gone silent (as expected, given the difficulties associated with making meaningful changes).

Related to that, in the past I mentioned how the Foundation hasn’t done anything, but the FAQs on this forum tell us the Foundation is hands-off and can’t actually do anything. But - look it up who’s on the Board - those folks know the individuals who have enough coins to influence a council election so that people who would do actual work (e.g. the OP) can get elected. It takes 3 phone calls, but they seem happy with the way things are otherwise that clean-up would have happened years ago.

In my estimate we have 0 cMixx users, 0 working cMixx apps, 0 community dApp projects and the price of the coin is close to that round number, too. This isn’t the time to rock the boat! #winning

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Silence in my case often means we’re busy executing:) My silence doesn’t equal difficulties; I’m not much of a social media person in general.

We’re aware of the need for open governance and are also working on a way to facilitate that. Expect changes on that level to happen in November/December.

I don’t think the foundation should be building apps, as such, are our resources not fitting? Neither have I seen a wide success from a different organisation applying that logic (status.im ex.), where they do have the resources to do so. I am open to supporting 3rd parties in their goal to do this, as such we’re also in talks with an iOS app developer who’s keen to build the app in exchange for xx tokens.

Since my activation, we’ve concluded a new branding style (updated front-page), engaged with an event partner, and conducted multiple feedback interviews.

We have also been getting in touch with actors to facilitate a marketing campaign in Buenos Aires during DevConnect.

Additionally, we’re discussing with two partners to integrate the XX Network into their tech stack, utilising our nodes to streamline their login and registration flows, where we shred the metadata before it reaches their servers. I don’t like bringing these things up until they have actually been concluded, so as not to jinx the deal.

TL;DR: Changes are being made. It takes time to figure out the right things to change.
I’m also open for direct conversations, they can be set up by mailing me: [email protected]

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That they shouldn’t be doing, in fact they shouldn’t be doing much at all.

But someone needs to make a couple of calls to half a dozen people who just need to vote two-three times to bootstrap the process. If I was on the Foundation’s board of directors I would have done that years ago.

I want to see several “old school” xx whales (with >200 million in xx coin holdings, maybe) to commit to voting on key proposals put forward by a person or group endorsed by the likes of @rick and get such people voted in as council members or apply for grants and drive execution of the plan (short-term recovery + mid-term development).

Running “instant” messaging workloads on a network that works worse than Tor is not going to work. Why is this even happening? Because the voting community is nominated by two types:

  • One doesn’t give a crap about the technical stuff (all they care about is CEX listings and “marketing campaigns”)
  • Another doesn’t give a crap about the economics (“syndicalists”)

These have been an ideal combination to drive the network into the ground. Until both of them get marginalized, nothing will change.

@bradford and I used to build stuff for xx network. I don’t know if he’s built anything lately, but I’ve learned my lesson (summarized above) and won’t try again knowing all the “community” does is undermine and sabotage the network. It’s always easier to destroy, and you’re outnumbered. It absolutely won’t happen bottom-up unless you stumble across several xx whales on your own and win their commitment to support you in various voting processes (in which case you should simple share that, as that’s the main thing that matters).

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I’d like to make a suggestion. In the past, some things haven’t gone right. Parts of the community have pointed out errors and perhaps even made mistakes themselves. They were banned from Telegram as a result. I’m affected by this myself. MF, you want to tackle things in a new way, that’s good. To strengthen the community, you should consider re-enabling the banned part of the community in the Telegram channel on probation. Perhaps this will have a positive impact that will move the project forward. Negative people can be banned again; you really have nothing to lose.

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That’s a true a friend of mine (since beta) was banned of both Discord and Telegram so can’t discuss and can’t participate anymore to anything. I think we can clear all these ban and let people come back if still active and still running a node.

Bots and scammers will not take back their old account so not a huge issue.

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If someone has been banned from one of the xx network community platforms they can contact a moderator of the respective platform. If that’s not possible due to being banned then contactsupport at xx.network.

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