Proposal “DACH_BUSINESS_DEVELOPMENT_Q1_20_REVISED“ (Completed)Back

Title:DACH: Business Development Q1/2020 (revised budget)
Owner:DASH_Embassy_DACH
Monthly amount: 259 DASH (7684 USD)
Completed payments: 2 totaling in 518 DASH (0 month remaining)
Payment start/end: 2020-02-14 / 2020-04-13 (added on 2020-02-04)
Votes: 671 Yes / 125 No / 18 Abstain

Proposal description

DACH: Business Development Q1/20 (revised budget)

Dash Embassy D-A-CH (www.dash-embassy.org) was founded on the 23rd of Feb 2018. Our main goal is to increase the adoption of Dash by convincing FIAT-Gateways such as ATM Companies and Exchanges and companies from the payment industry, such as payment service providers (PSPs), cashier systems and payment terminals to integrate Dash. 

We are part of the Mobile Commerce Community of GS1 Germany (https://www.gs1-germany.de/gs1-solutions/mobile-commerce/). GS1 is owned by leading retail companies such as supermarkets, grocery stores and drugstores. By creating standards for payment and logistics for their stakeholders, GS1 has significant influence on the payment industry. The most known standard GS1 ever created was the EAN/GTIN Barcode that you can find on every product in the world.

In addition we are playing an active role in https://www.bitkom.org/EN. Bitkom is Germany’s digital association and represents 2,600+ companies of the digital economy (https://www.bitkom.org/EN/Bitkom/Mitgliedschaft/Mitgliederliste). Jan Heinrich Meyer (essra) was elected to be a board member of the blockchain working group of Bitkom (https://www.bitkom.org/Bitkom/Organisation/Gremien/Blockchain.html) along with IBM, DATEV and Comdirect. Because of this Dash Embassy D-A-CH is involved in creating the strategic mission of the blockchain working group of Bitkom and has access to industry leaders and research institutes of the digital economy in Germany.

For some of our future activities it will become mandatory to have an official regulatory classification for Dash. This is why we are in contact with the German regulator - BaFin (https://www.bafin.de/EN/Homepage/homepage_node.html) on a regular basis.

In the beginning of 2019 we initiated Dash Co-Working (DCW) to share our experience in business development with other DFOs, work on common goals, share our resources and thus mitigate inefficiencies resulting from the DAOs decentralization. As part of the DCW cooperation, Sinay Demirel (@sidem), our IT- and Integrations Manager, is supporting other DFOs with the technical integrations of their acquired partners. We invite every long term DFO with a business development background to join the existing group (DACH, DCG, Next/Thailand, Nigeria). For more details regarding DCW please have a look at: https://t1p.de/ttb7

Our current strategy is the result of our past years experience and research. For further information on the evolution of our strategy please see our previous proposal: https://www.dashcentral.org/p/DACH_BUSINESS_DEVELOPMENT_Q4_19

We believe that the decrease of the Dash price is becoming a serious problem. That’s why we consider adding investment related topics to our strategy. To learn more about the potential of this market we started researching and are now in conversations with financial institutions such as https://www.comdirect.de/ and https://iconicholding.com/ and professional investors.


Highlights 2019

3 Exchanges:  https://www.bitcoin.de/enhttps://getchange.comhttps://btc-alpha.com/en/

250+ ATMs: https://www.iqcashnow.com/

5 Crypto-PSPs (https://coinify.com/https://utrust.com/https://www.salamantex.comhttps://www.iqcashnow.com/https://pumapay.io/

60+ traditional PSPs (due to the mentioned Crypto-PSPs)

20,000+ Merchants all over Europe due to the mentioned Crypto-PSPs (incl. leading European online casino https://www.jackpot.de/, leading swiss online shop https://www.galaxus.ch/, leading Portuguese football club https://www.slbenfica.pt/, leading Portuguese smartphone reseller https://www.phonehouse.pt/)

1 Giftcard: https://www.cgift.io/dash/

For further details on our integration projects please take a look at https://trello.com/b/cmCxf1JZ/dach-integrations

We have been a Co-Organizer of www.dashconvention.com 

For further track record see our Dash Watch Reports: https://www.dashwatch.org/

You are more than welcome to join our channels on Discord:

Dash Nation: #dash-embassy-dach
Dash Talk: #dash-embassy


What will Dash get from our proposal for Q1/20?
1. Business Development


We will be following our previous business development strategy from Q3/19 (https://www.dashcentral.org/p/DACH_Business_Development_Q3_19). This means that we are focusing our activities on FIAT Gateways such as ATMs, Exchanges and Wallets and companies from the payment industry such as Crypto-PSPs (payment service provider), traditional PSPs, cashier systems and payment terminals.

To enable the full potential of the Crypto-PSPs we are working with, we will host an event called “Cryptocurrency Day” together with GS1 Germany in their knowledge center in Cologne on the 21st of January 2020. The overall goal of this event is to connect Crypto-PSPs and the traditional payment industry to increase the number of Dash accepting merchants significantly, like it is already happening due to the partnership between Salamantex and ingenico for Austria and Germany (https://www.ingenico.de/smart-terminals/medien-ressourcen/pressemitteilungen/local/2019/201906---a1-entwickelt-payment-service-der-zukunft.html) or Switzerland due to the partnership between Bitcoin Suisse and Worldline (https://www.six-payment-services.com/en/shared/news/2019/Bitcoin.html#country=ch). We are expecting up to 150 decision makers from the traditional payment, retail and banking industry to attend the event. We created the agenda of “Cryptocurrency Day”, invited speakers and convinced sponsors. GS1 Germany is inviting their members as attendees. The event is accessible on invitation only. For further details on the agenda please take a look at:

https://www.gs1-germany.de/fileadmin/gs1/veranstaltungen/2020/agenda/Agenda_Save_The_Date_-_Crypto_Currency_Day_21_01_2020.pdf


2. Integrations

To keep you updated in a transparent way we do live reporting for all our integration projects by using the kanban software trello. So please have a look at our integration pipeline to get detailed information. 

Integration Pipeline: https://trello.com/b/cmCxf1JZ/dach-integrations

In addition to our own integration projects Sinay Demirel (@sidem) is supporting other DFOs (Co-Working members) with the technical integration and assistance of their acquired partners.


3. Events

On the 15th of January 2020 Jan Heinrich Meyer (@essra) will speak about Dash and it’s adoption at the “DLT in payments” event of the Digital Banking & Financial Services working group of Bitkom at Frankfurt School of Finance (attendance on invitation only for Bitkom members).

On the 21st of January 2020 Dash Embassy D-A-CH will host the “Cryptocurrency Day” together with GS1 Germany to connect Crypto-PSPs with traditional payment companies and the retail industry. For further information please take a look at 1. Business Development. (attendance on invitation for GS1 Germany members only)

On the 11th of February Jan Heinrich Meyer (@essra) will attend “Finanzmarktklausur” of Wirtschaftsrat (economic council) as a regular attendee to generate leads from the banking industry (attendance on invitation only for Wirtschaftsrat members).

On the 13th of February Jan Heinrich Meyer (@essra) will attend https://ecommerceberlin.com/ as a regular attendee to generate leads from the traditional payment industry and major e-commerce companies (attendance is free of charge and open for everyone).

On the 16th of February Jan Heinrich Meyer (@essra) will attend https://www.eurocis.com/ (leading trade fair for retail technology in Europe) as a regular attendee to generate leads from the traditional payment industry (attendance is open for everyone).

On the 26th of February Jan Heinrich Meyer (@essra) will attend the “Decentralized & Self Sovereign Identity” event of Blockchain working group of Bitkom as a member of the board (attendance on invitation only for Bitkom members).

The list above is not complete yet. We will try our best to acquire as many events of this kind as possible for Q1/2020.


4. Lobbying

Suitable to our Business Development Strategy we are part of working groups about digital transformation, digital payments, Fintechs and digital Banking in the following associations:


Together with Bitkom we have been working on positioning paper in regards to the blockchain strategy of the German government in 2019. In 2020 we will do the same with the EU consultation for the regulatory framework of Crypto-Assets.

Right now we only have been able to utilize Bitkom and GS1 Germany for our business development activities. We hope that we are able to do the same with Wirtschaftsrat in future.


5. Website

We will keep our website and all included services up-to-date and constantly create regular news updates consisting of german translations of blog.dash.org articles and updates of our own achievements. New possibilities of accepting Dash by our partner businesses will be prominently featured to promote stronger business development also via our website.


6. Social Media

We are using our social media channels for community updates, event announcements and merchant posts and for sharing German dashnews.org articles. 

If you want to subscribe to our channels, we will be happy to welcome you as a subscriber.

https://www.facebook.com/dashembassydach/
https://twitter.com/dashembassydach 
https://www.instagram.com/dash_embassy_dach/
https://t.me/dashembassydach
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuLSfeIMuQ_npjjBY3J_FPA
https://www.linkedin.com/company/dash-embassy-d-a-ch/ 
https://www.xing.com/companies/dashembassyd-a-chug 


7. PR

We are sending out German press releases whenever we have news to share. In addition we will keep up the work with DCG and DashNews in DCW (Dash Co-Working) to bring international news into crypto related media platforms in DACH region and DACH news in international media.


8. Legal

While talking to regulated exchanges and Crypto-PSPs we experienced the recurring need for an official statement about the regulatory classification and AML compliance of Dash by the regulatory entities of the corresponding jurisdiction.

Our lawyers from Germany created a legal opinion that we shared with BaFin (German regulator) to get a regulatory classification of Dash as a unit of account and a certificate of compliance for PrivateSend. As BaFin is the most restrictive regulator in EU we believe that other regulators in our region will follow their opinion.


9. Team

Jan Heinrich Meyer (@essra) - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jan-heinrich-meyer-a5a6bb108/ 
Sinay Demirel (@sidem) - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sinaydemirel/
Klaus Hipfinger (@simontheravager) - https://www.linkedin.com/in/klaus-hipfinger-510390150/


10. Financials

Budget requested for Q4/2019:

238 Dash/month (estimated avg. Dash Price of $ 81,83) = $ 58.47k or € 53.19k (total in Q4)
Due to the decreased Dash price we only received € 41.9k (total in Q4). 


Budget request February-March 2020:

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/0ZiCmHpqGDpTCr5ULA6Ucy2VVuDobFDPTCiSYjBXvEyxh31gEQ0RxodujC_dHwOvDNKyAXEzZnlqWuJMvbODQJwKwOR0uwS5wqZkxXherBDZqoxpFov4WkS-LgUyUXi26xeH4YAw

We use the 30 days SMA with an average Dash Price of $87,21 for the 1st quarter of 2020 on the 31st of January: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/price-dash-sma30.html#6m. We request the total amount with a volatility buffer of 10% for the quarter because of the risk of possible price declines.

Here you can find the revised budget for February and March 2020:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xr6VOUPes0kFc3oywGvDvotlVOHBzj8jMSk6vjNRD0E/edit#gid=1144595453


Links to our Liquidity and Capital Resources: 

DACH Business Development - Public Budget Planning and Accounting 2020:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vzp2_9f1Hm9UNvqSahstl_6RXkwk1gNthDChhsqeWy8/edit#gid=1772385164

Corporate Wallet Address:
https://insight.dash.org/insight/address/XuMeunJDZrAusw45B4oreuH8RcKUY2fkMN


Thanks for your support! In Dash we trust! 

We are eager to read your comments and are thankful for your advice. 

The Dash Embassy D-A-CH Team

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Discussion: Should we fund this proposal?

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1 point,4 years ago
UPDATE: the third part auf our market analysis is available as video now. It's about cryptocurrencies. We are looking forward to your feedback: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn_p4XEBmwk
Reply
1 point,4 years ago
UPDATE: the second part auf our market analysis is available as video now. It's about remittance. We are looking forward to your feedback: https://youtu.be/I7s78HHtSBw
Reply
0 points,4 years ago
UPDATE: we have been working on our marketing strategy paper during the past weeks. The section for market analysis is done and we are ready to report the first chapter, which is about payments. This video is one of many in a series. We are looking forward to your feedback and suggestions. https://youtu.be/VEWU7I7DV3k
Reply
0 points,4 years ago
I share the same view as Andreas M. Antonopoulos in the video below where he addresses mass adoption strategy. Our target market are countries that need DASH i.e. currency distressed countries, countries with dictatorships, countries that have large numbers of unbanked people and the informal economies i.e.people that are outside of the normal tax systems paying in cash.

https://youtu.be/MfNzjkFb58s?t=110


Speculative investors as Jan is presenting in the video is, in my opinion a very poor marketing strategy. For the following reasons

1. Speculative investors will move at the slightest change in sentiment. It is not a solid investment. It is a house built on sand.

2. We have limited funds. We need to focus and spend those funds on building a Dash payment solution that addresses our target market. Then, and only then, we need to MARKET TO OUR TARGET MARKET.

3. DACH region is NOT the target market for DASH. It is therefore a poor strategy to be marketing to speculative investors in this region unless the investors are complete fools and are OK with seeing their investments go up and down in a volatile market.

People will buy DASH when they see it is solving a real world problem. This is both the people and companies that need the solution. Speculative investors are bain to DASH. They are what makes the DASH price massively fluctuate - which puts of the very people we are trying to attract. Therefore making DASH even more unattractive to our target markets.

Our target markets want and need a DASH solution that has a stable currency price. They cannot tolerate volatility. By trying to attract speculative investment the DACH would be massively increasing DASH volatility because they are not real users. They are speculative investors.

Since there appears to be no reasonable rational to this so called "marketing strategy" I am voting NO to the following proposals because they are all taking the same strategy.

DIF decision proposal - Voting NO
DIF fundraising proposal - Voting NO
DACH business development - Voting NO

Valuable money and resources are being diverted from the areas we need to be working in. Speculative funds come and go as we see from the hugely varying DASH price.

We need to focus on real utility for DASH. In real applications where DASH can solve a real world problem and then later market to those markets.
Reply
1 point,4 years ago
Hello DeepBlue,

the strategy update you are referring to is a market analysis about payments.

After several conversations here on dashcentral I have the feeling that we misunderstand each other most of the time. Maybe having a call could be a way forward. Would this be of interest for you?

Kind regards,

Jan
Reply
1 point,4 years ago
UPDATE: A call for a potential integration of Dash into the payment solution of Worldline (Europes leading payment company) was held on March 10th. To make an integration happen Worldline demands a collaboration in marketing. We discussed several options such as marketing materials for the point-of-sale, online campaigns, advertising posters, backlit billboard campaigns and many more.

We agreed to follow up on the conversation as soon as we finished our marketing strategy document.

To learn more about Worldline please take a look at: https://trello.com/c/Gi4NnDnK/74-worldline
Reply
1 point,4 years ago
Idea: it is time for voters to cease funding the strategy of making it easy to pay with Dash in Germany (since Germany is NOT an economy that is experiencing demand for an alternative currency)
Reply
2 points,4 years ago
"That’s why we consider adding investment related topics to our strategy." - Good. Without investment Dash fades. We can virtue signal 'digital cash' all day long (it feels like virtue signalling sometimes), but ongoing investment in Dash is just as important, if not MUCH more important.
Reply
2 points,4 years ago
view: if the proposal was specifically for investment it would bring much greater ROI to the network.
The current proposal is based heavily on trying to achieve Dash as digital cash in Germany, which could be a pipedream since Germany is NOT an economy that is experiencing demand for a new currency
Reply
2 points,4 years ago
FYI: it looks like that due to the new regulations the DACH region is becoming more and more attractive for the crypto industry https://www.bitgo.com/company/press/switzerland-and-germany
Reply
3 points,4 years ago
Voted YES on this revised budget proposal with a lower funding request amount (good job).
This means voting NO on their original budget proposal !! Original budget proposal can be found here : https://www.dashcentral.org/p/DACH_BUSINESS_DEVELOPMENT_Q1_20
Reply
4 points,4 years ago
UPDATE: Cryptocurrency Day @ GS1 Germany incl. a very interesting follow up

On January 21st our long awaited Cryptocurrency Day took place at the knowledge center of GS1 Germany. The event was created to connect Crypto-PSPs with the traditional retail (supermarket) and payment industrie to increase Dash adoption on a large scale. Over 50 decission makers from the traditional industries attended. A lot of promising connections have been made. BTC-Echo will follow up on this with an article.

We already scheduled follow up meetings with a leading cashier system software company in Europe serving over 90,000 cashier systems of leading European retail companies and one of the biggest traditional payment service providers in Europe: https://worldline.com/

For pictures please take a look at: https://app.dashnexus.org/proposals/dach_business_development_q1_20/updates

Media coverage e.g.:

https://www.btc-echo.de/auslaufmodell-bargeld-kryptowaehrungen-im-einzelhandel-gs1-dash-cryptocurrency-day/

https://cryptoticker.io/de/dash-und-die-zukunft-der-kryptowahrungen-als-zahlungsmittel/
Reply
1 point,4 years ago
Wrong Nexus URL. Please use: https://app.dashnexus.org/proposals/dach_business_development_q1_20_revised/updates
Reply
4 points,4 years ago
UPDATE: Thanks to Jan Heinrich Meyer being a member of the board of Bitkom working group for blockchain along with IBM, comdirect and Datev , we recently received a consultation document on an EU framework for markets in crypto assets from the European Commission. We will work on this together with DCG and hope for a positive outcome for Dash in regards to the final European regulation.

https://www.bitkom.org/Bitkom/Organisation/Gremien/Blockchain.html
Reply
3 points,4 years ago
UPDATE: Our blog post for the Bitkom "Digital Payments" working group is live. The topic of the event was "Payments via DLT & Blockchain" - exciting lectures from the Bundesbank, BaFin, Leondra and of course from us Dash Embassy.

https://www.dash-embassy.org/en/2020/01/23/bitkom-digital-payments-on-dlt-blockchain/

Because of this event we got invited to a workshop with one of the biggest retail (supermarket) companies in Europe. The topic of this workshop is to discuss how an integration could be done. Unfortunately we are not allowed to share any additional information due to a signed NDA.
Reply