Foreword
Dear POP! Town, as you may be aware, in an industry as young and disruptive as the blockchain industry, for a project to succeed it requires a unique ability to adapt to constant market updates and trends, whilst building true fundamental value for its community and the market as a whole. This takes a great deal of strategic planning combined with an incredible work rate and execution excellence, in order to propel a project to success. At the heart of every truly transformative endeavor, there is an idea and clarity of intent, which drives and ultimately fulfills this transformation.
Since you, our dear and valued community, are an essential companion that will help us drive POP! to its full potential, we would like to use this opportunity to explain our vision of things to come, in greater depth. We have decided to split this adventure into two separate articles:
- Vision — a long term look at what POP is, its goals, and the transformative potential we foresee
- Roadmap an actionable plan set out to convert our vision into a reality
Therefore, on that note, we are pleased to announce the release of our extensive and much-anticipated Roadmap!
Abstract
The objective of this article is to provide the reader with the necessary context to understand the purpose behind each carefully selected milestone, and how they all interact with each other in a synergistic manner to significantly benefit the POP! ecosystem. Therefore, throughout this article, we will elaborate on the various challenges we foresaw, how we are tackling these challenges, and finally our solutions to overcome them! This will give our readers a front-row view into our busy, yet calculated, minds. This document may have a more “formal” style than usual, but since this is an important moment for our project, we do believe it requires a bit of gravitas.
Envisioned Challenges
POP! is a unique project that aims to provide a beneficial and engaging product for all market participants, in an attempt to improve the dynamics involved in the Team-Community relationship and empower the token holders of individual partnered projects. This is done by creating strong socio-economic ties, between individual projects and their respective communities, and providing the necessary tools and platform to bring them together.
To ensure the greatest impact, we strive to listen to all the incredibly useful feedback and input that our faithful community provides. Combining this feedback with our own internally established goals, vision and market analysis, we’ve been able to determine a series of challenges that are vital to overcome in order to accomplish our mission of becoming an innovative powerhouse in this global market.
These challenges encompass a vast number of intertwined and intricate topics from economic, technical, psychological, and business fields. For simplicity sake, we have categorized these into four basic groups, characterized by a specific keyword:
- Defining, implementing, and spreading POP!’s vision — (Vision)
- Ensuring intrinsic POP! (token) value — (Utility)
- Stimulating ecosystem growth — (Growth)
- Expanding technical excellence and utility of platform — (Tech)
Moving forward in this article, we will use the specific keywords defined in the list above, to identify distinct challenges and how they are tackled.
1. Defining, implementing, and spreading POP!’s vision
(Keyword — Vision) At the heart of each successful project, there needs to be a powerful vision, defined as a set of long-term immutable objectives aiming to bring real change, and direct, objective, and ideally quantifiable benefits to all relevant stakeholders in the ecosystem. In the case of POP!, our vision is simple yet powerful — “To become a go-to golden standard for partnerships and providing powerful incentives to associated projects, communities, investors and the market as a whole”. As history shows, powerful visions are often not enough, as an old adage goes: “Ideas are worthless without the execution; execution is pointless without the ideas”. Therefore, in order to make our vision a reality, we need excellent execution.
2. Ensuring intrinsic POP! (token) value
(Keyword — Utility) It can be strongly argued that in order to create a healthy and sustainable product, one needs to have a strong and faithful community working in tandem with a driven team. However, in order to acquire, maintain and satisfy the said community, the project should provide its community with the same devotion in return. In POP!’s case, it’s designing a strong token utility that rewards all our token holders and ecosystem participants at large. This poses an interesting challenge however, that demands the crucial assessment of various fundamental aspects surrounding a token, such as token velocity, overall function, and economics. Nevertheless, we strive to make POP!’s utility general (applicable in multiple distinct utility cases, not relying just on one), long-term sustainable, measurable, deflationary, and innovative.
3. Stimulating ecosystem growth
(Keyword — Growth) Our core vision and many of our key utility cases depend on the size, commitment, and strength of our community — in other words, the network effect of our POPstars. You, our dear community, are our biggest strength and you are the best resource to spread our shared ideas and help us bring the transformation to this market. Everything in life can be visualized as consisting of various phases. Initial phases include fundamental development, while the later phases consist of varying levels of ecosystem growth. In the context of crypto projects, it’s well understood that in order to create a prosperous project, successful integration within the market is necessary. This includes developing constructive partnerships that consequently drive user acquisition and retention, while simultaneously creating the path for innovation and promotional activities. For POP! to succeed it needs to grow its community and user base, and reach as wide as possible through the crypto market. For this, three basic approaches can be used to achieve community growth:
- Soft — Knowledge is power and marketing helps to spread the knowledge. POP! shall create extensive and detailed documentation, articles, and content to provide the best possible source of information about our vision, technological solutions, and initiatives to help people form objective and fully informed decisions. Together with our community, influencers, partners, and other significant shareholders, we shall actively work on promoting these.
- Hard — Quality speaks for itself. Hard growth represents the continuous development and implementation of new features, tools, and products, thereby enhancing the offering of POP!’s ecosystem. We shall strive to provide a continuous stream of innovative products for POP!’s users to enjoy.
- Organic — Best way to grow a following is to lead by example and through “word of mouth”. As seen multiple times in traditional markets and products, not even the best marketers in the most prestigious companies in the world can dream to achieve the same level of awareness as a dedicated community of users and members sharing their genuine satisfaction with their peers. POP! shall strive to satisfy its community with excellent products and incentivized community activities, combined with the necessary tools to help spread the word.
4. Expanding technical excellence and utility of the platform
(Keyword — Tech) In order to develop a long-term and sustainable product, it’s vital to continually capture the user’s hearts. Many approaches can be utilized to accomplish this, however, it’s likely irrefutable that developing a secure, attractive, and unique product is the best method. To achieve these characteristics can be far more challenging than it seems. In essence, it requires frequent security testing, sophisticated engineering, and most importantly, continuously improving the user experience to new standards. This naturally demands a healthy relationship with a highly engaging and helpful community, to ensure mutual content.
5. Developing chain-agnostic functionality
(Keyword — Tech) Since the beginning of the issues encountered with the Bitcoin network, the market has heavily focused on finding the “perfect” solution/alternative that would provide for a highly scalable, decentralized, and secure network. As expected, this goal has proven itself to be extremely difficult and competitive, which has led to a vast number of networks springing up all across the market. As such, a highly successful product would likely need to be able to integrate smoothly and function properly on various networks, in order to maintain relevance in the market. This poses numerous challenges, both technically and strategically, given the highly complex tasks involved in cross-chain integration, as well as the need to carefully study which networks pose the highest chance of adoption and benefits.
POP!’s Solution
When carefully analyzing all the above-mentioned challenges, it becomes apparent that it will be an extremely demanding and elaborate task to overcome them in a meaningful and harmonious manner.
Thankfully though, through the guidance and practical experience of our brilliant colleagues at Faculty Group, combined with the countless days and nights devising sophisticated, yet achievable, plans, we’ve managed to develop an extensive and strategically calculated roadmap, that will revolutionize the way the market interprets and interacts with partnerships. In essence, this roadmap will set POP! on a course of excellence and will foster our vision of creating the golden standard for partnerships!
For each milestone from our roadmap, we have conducted significant research, prepared early developments, and entered into valuable negotiations with partners. In addition, these milestones were designed in a calculated manner, in order to tackle all challenges previously described, in a synergistic and effective manner. We believe that these steps were vital in order to ensure that the desired outcome maximizes the benefits for our community while complementing the overall vision for POP!
Therefore, without further ado, we are proud to present our exciting and new POP! Roadmap!
In order to provide the reader with more context regarding the roadmap graphic displayed above, each deliverable features keywords of challenges it aims to resolve. As individual features are implemented and rolled out onto the market, many of them will feature standalone articles explaining them in-depth. In the meantime let’s take a deeper look into each milestone:
- POP! Foundation (Vision, Growth) — In order to ensure POP!’s vision of “becoming a Golden Standard for partnerships and providing socio-economic incentives for meaningful, honest, and productive collaboration between projects” is heard and seen, we have decided to found a not-for-profit organization — the POP! Foundation. The goal of this organization is to define, evangelize and certify a set of voluntary industry standards for partnering projects, and thereby creating a concise framework of requirements to guarantee the highest level of standards in partnerships. Members of this foundation (which are themselves successful crypto projects and companies) shall lead by example our mission to adhere to these high professional standards and build a fairer and brighter future for crypto markets as a whole. After rigorous vetting, compliant projects may apply for certification and POP!’s official “stamp of approval”
- Candy Farms (Utility, Growth) — As previously described, in order to flourish a supportive and dynamic community, token utility mechanisms that drive demand are vital. Therefore, POP! will implement an exciting new staking mechanism that drives organic token demand through clear and valuable token utility, and limits the circulating supply of POP! tokens by having them staked and “working” for our token holders. Therefore, with Candy Farms, POP! token holders will be able to stake their POP! tokens and earn sweet rewards in the form of 3rd-party tokens provided by our partners.
- Multi-chain POP! (Utility, Tech, Growth) — To ensure that POP! remains relevant, we will take advantage of the highly beneficial characteristics that the various exciting networks (both available and still under development) pose. These integrations will include strategic partnerships that will provide for technical support, as well as other exciting activities! Our aim is to support a range of popular chains that will empower our community and POP! products, by providing drastic gas saving capabilities and will allow us to roll out a series of sophisticated new tools that are economically unfeasible on the Ethereum mainnet. On top of the technological and economical benefits that chain agnosticism brings, this move will allow us to onboard more projects and new communities to bolster the ranks of POP! members and MLPs.
- POP Multi-chain Bridge (Tech, Utility) — There is only one true POP!, but it comes in many forms. To ensure that the POP! tokens retain their value, whilst maintaining multi-chain presence, its supply needs to be consistent amongst all chains. To ensure this, we will be rolling out a POP! Multi-chain Bridge, providing our users easy cross-chain migration capabilities whilst ensuring a 1:1 backing for each bridged POP! Token. When the POP! token is moved from chain A to chain B, the bridge will lock tokens on chain A and emit an equal number of tokens on chain B. This means that the total supply of POP! tokens will never change and POP!’s value is consistent, regardless of which chain it’s on.
- New Marketplaces (Utility, Growth) — In order to guarantee sufficient liquidity and a healthy and efficient trading ecosystem for the POP! token, we have decided to pursue additional marketplaces for our native token — CEXs and DEXs alike. Given the nature of DeFi’s novelty and (initially) tricky learning curve, we’ve decided to pursue a listing on a strong centralized exchange to open the door for more users. This will expand POP!’s liquidity depth while providing for more unique purchasing avenues, and provide an alternative marketplace to (sometimes) relatively gas-costly DEXs.
- POP! Partnerships (Vision, Growth) — To sustainably expand our ecosystem, we are actively working on several partnerships between POP! and other key market players. These will open the doors for numerous opportunities that will drive long-term adoption and allow for effective technological and utilitarian expansion of our ecosystem, whilst promoting the growth of POP!’s user base.
- MLP listings (Utility, Growth) — MLPs are at the core of the POP! ecosystem and technology stack, therefore, to drastically escalate our ecosystem growth, we will be announcing numerous new MLP listings, while also making significant alterations to the MLP characteristics that will establish a more attractive model. As an essential feature, MLPs will accompany POP! during its whole life cycle, and therefore we plan to also feature new and unique “cross-chain” MLPs allowing projects even on distinct chains to enter meaningful MLPs and utilize our revolutionary technology for the good of their (and our) communities. As one of our core utility cases, we do believe that consistent expansion of our portfolio of MLPs will be one of the key factors driving the demand and adoption of our ecosystem.
- MLPs As a Service — MaaS (Tech, Utility) — Mutual Liquidity Pools and Single-Sided Liquidity Provisioning developed by the POP! team represents a unique and innovative platform that revolutionizes the concept of liquidity provisioning and mining. After spending more than a year of stealth development, security audits, and significant self-funded development costs, we believe that we have created a novel solution that has no equivalent in the rest of the market. We have decided to open our technical solution to be utilized by third parties in their technology stacks under the Software as a Service model. Interested integrators will be required to pay for the utilization of our ecosystem in our native POP! token and proceeds will be used within our ecosystem.
- Compounding MLP standard (Utility, Growth) — Everyone loves rewards, but do you know what is even better? More rewards! With the compounding MLP standard, we will release an open-source library of smart contracts allowing our partners to integrate POP!’s unique MLP technology into their existing Liquidity Mining schemes providing Single-Sided Liquidity provisioning to their communities via the POP! platform and allowing people to earn additional LM rewards provided by our integrators, from the comfort of their platform and ours alike.
- Green Initiative (Vision) — POP! was designed to benefit all ecosystem participants, and there is one ecosystem we all share — planet Earth. As suggested by numerous famous activists and futurists as well as the (in)famous Elon Musk Tweet, we should all strive to make crypto “green”. As such, we believe that pursuing a rare, yet meaningful, initiative that can physically benefit our world, while providing a spotlight on POP!, is a no-brainer. This will come in the form of a powerful partnership that will get us 1 step closer to a cleaner and greener world, by fully offsetting POP!’s carbon debt.
- Platform Enhancements (Tech) — One of our key goals is to make an attractive, secure, and dynamic platform. As such, we will be releasing major updates to the UX/UI, in order to increase functionality, simplicity and overall “feel”. This will be accompanied by deep security audits and continuous quality control checks.
- Project X (Utility, Growth) — At last, let’s add a bit of a mystery. For the last few months, our team has been working closely with an important group of partners to create a new and unique initiative. At the request of our partners, we will not reveal more details until the project is ready to be released, however, we will update our roadmap retrospectively to show it. Stay tuned!
Note: Although the milestones are listed in a defined order in this article, that does not mean they will be released in that order. A particular strategy has been carefully devised, that will ensure the most effective release schedule, in order to maximize our ecosystem growth.
Finally, we’d like to summarize by stating that a great deal of thought and energy has gone into the milestones of this roadmap, and we can’t overstate how exciting the future for POP! is. We believe that you’ll all be sharing that excitement with us in the near future, and we suspect you’ll be pleasantly surprised with our developments, given that we’ll be greatly expanding our ecosystem to drive significant adoption, drastically increase platform performance, as well as stimulate explosive POP! token demand and utility. We like to think of the rest of the year as a big bag of Popcorn just starting to cook — it’ll grow… and when it does… it’ll grow fast!
We’re excited to hear your feedback, so make sure to let us know what you think!
And as always, keep POPpin’!
About POP!
POP! is a platform that allows 2 projects to objectively display mutual trust and commitment to each other, by locking their respective tokens together and creating a trustless Mutual Liquidity Pool (MLP). In addition, it grants POP! users the opportunity to provide single-sided liquidity, in the form of their favourite token, by matching them with another POP! user and adding their joint liquidity into the MLP.
Powered by Faculty Group, POP! aims to set a new golden standard with regards to partnerships, and how they are perceived in the digital asset ecosystem.
