On Mar 24, 2022 3PM UTC, Velo Labs kicked off the first “Leadership Fireside AMA”, a live chat series with the leadership of Velo. In the first session, we were joined by Mark Fisher, our newly appointed CMO. Continue reading for the five key learnings from the wonderful session!

Marketing goals for Velo

There are opportunities for us to be better both with respect to 1.) the visibility of the Velo project and 2.) our engagement with the community and investors. One of the things I’m excited about is our new community engagement framework.

Starting in Q2 we’ll be providing:

• Official roadmap updates quarterly and more frequent (e.g. monthly) informal updates to keep our community informed of progress
• Quarterly AMAs and interaction opportunities with our executives and tech team
• Proactive communication of Velo project partnerships, news, or various exchange updates
• New community opportunities both through Telegram and other channels for feedback and suggestions

Short-term goals: I’m excited first and foremost to build the Marketing function here at Velo which includes:

• Working more closely with our Product team to craft market-facing product marketing campaigns for our core products, which include cross-border remittance and our Velo FCX trading platform, among others.
• Developing more awareness and opportunities to learn about our core cross-border payment infrastructure and partnerships.
• Building relationships with press, media, exchanges, and key thought leaders to anchor marketing campaigns as we grow the Marketing organization.

Long-term goals: I’m focused on building the Velo brand. Our goal at Velo is to change financial infrastructure so that more people can access the financial system easier, faster, and cheaper. What that means from a Marketing perspective is we need to build the capabilities to support a global approach to the business.

That will happen by:

• Creating a robust performance and demand generation machine that helps attract more anchors to our network
• Partnering with our clients and technology providers to tell unique stories to the market to surface key issues and solutions to current financial infrastructure problems
• Building more opportunities for our community to develop on and invest in the Velo platform

We need a great team to make all that come to life and so I’m very focused right now on establishing our processes and hiring the best people.

Plans to support cross-border payment development

Cross-border payments will continue to be Velo Labs’ core product and it is the anchor to our growth, both in Southeast Asia and globally.

The technology we built to support this cross-border payment infrastructure and ecosystem, Velo Digital Credits, serves as a core building block to Velo’s other products.

Our goal this year is to continue to add more anchors (financial institutions) to our payment network and increase the number of live corridors. We already have one corridor live between Europe and Thailand and we expect several more soon.

It’s important to note that cross-border payments are very complex and so, signing new partners and launching new corridors involves many steps. For a new remittance technology like Velo Digital Credits, setting up an anchor isn’t just a one-off process. Onboarding and transaction testing is critical and can be quite complicated. Which is why building a global, B2B payment infrastructure is such a large project that takes time.

To date, we have signed with 5 different partners and have started to onboard them through the process leading to pilot transactions.

Once complete, we will see the real-world use cases of the Blockchain in cross-border payments across Europe, the United Arab Emirates and the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the United States.

We’re excited to ramp-up the volumes transacted on these corridors, following successful testing and product adoption. We will keep you updated on the progress as we go.

Our goal from a Marketing standpoint with respect to our cross-border payments product is threefold:

• Raise more awareness for the solution through product marketing and robust information, press, and media outreach.
• Support our new partners and new remittance corridors with well-timed marketing campaigns.
• Work with our partners to tell unique and powerful stories to the market once our corridors go live.

Velo FCX and it’s significance to Velo ecosystem

FCX plays a key role in the Velo ecosystem. At the core of our cross-border payment infrastructure is the ability to send fiat currency across borders via the blockchain. We do that by using Velo Digital Credits and creating a stable currency exchange.

FCX is actually an extension of that concept by giving institutional and retail traders the ability to trade currency pairs on a digital, decentralized exchange.

While the initial launch of FCX includes core functionality to trade six currency pairs, as we ramp up volume we’ll be turning on additional features like liquidity pools, staking opportunities, and the ability to trade exotic digital assets. So unlike a “traditional” digital currency exchange, FCX will have a number of other key features built-in to create a robust fiat / digital currency trading platform with smart order routing and automated market makers.

And in addition to the Velo digital assets I mentioned, we’ll be extending trading capability to a wide inventory of Velo and non-Velo digital assets, extending to custom Velo digital credits (USDV, AUDV, HKDV etc), non-Velo stablecoins (USDT, USDC, DAI), Velo Tokens and ultimately even Bitcoin!

In the long run, it will become a blockchain-based currency exchange where everyone can easily exchange digital representations of fiat (1:1) at a lower fee.

Our early landing page is live at https://velo.org/fcx and we’ll be launching a Beta waitlist soon (we’ve opened it up to a select group of institutional traders right now). When we do we’ll be sure to send out invites to the community.

Watch Velo FCX Q&A with Mark & Armin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jyUcKmiuZ8

Velo Virtual Assets (VVA) and it’s progress

VVA was really an opportunistic product that the Velo team brought to market. The team here at Velo created VVA last year and ultimately brought it to market market in Q1 of this year.

But I should be a little more clear: while the team at Velo completed our product roadmap and launched the VVA technology, the larger crypto market went through what we’ve all experienced: a significant downturn. As such, the market demand for tokenized real estate offerings diminished and several of the partners involved in VVA decided to pause their projects.

When the crypto market rebounds, we expect that demand will increase and when it does we are ready with the VVA technology and product.

Now, a bigger question is probably: “how does this fit into your larger roadmap?” And that is a very good question.

I’d answer that by saying our core technology and the Velo Protocol (with its Digital Reserve System) creates the ability for us to flex into various projects where blockchain and tokenization can create opportunities that might not otherwise exist

The commercial real estate space is a good example. In the same way that our cross-border payment infrastructure makes it possible for people to more easily and efficiently send money, our ability to tokenize various assets that aren’t normally accessible gives retail investors access to new investment opportunities.

And in a broader sense, it creates more exposure and adoption of the Velo token, which is good for the long-term health of our project.

Addressing questions on the token burn

The token burn was done for two reasons:

• It was absolutely the right thing for the company to do long-term. When there is a supply level that ultimately is unnecessary and we can return that value back to the investors and community over the long run, it is our responsibility to do so.
• It helps the company by strengthening our tokenomics and some of the key ratios that matter for things like % of tokens in circulating supply, which are important for further exchange listings.

It was the right thing to do for the community. If you look at the history of token burns across many projects, in some cases you do see an immediate spike but in most cases you see the effects over the long term as the lower supply is factored into the token circulation and use.

There were also some questions around burning tokens from reserve. That is where most projects do large token burns from. The alternative would be to burn from circulating supply, meaning we would have had to buy back a very large amount of tokens from our existing investors, however we would rather use our capital to grow the business (e.g. hiring fantastic new employees and building new products).

I’ll also mention that I saw several questions come in about the specifics of the burn, when exactly we posted the TxHash, the timing of the burn completion, etc. For all of those questions, I’d ask you to review the posts I already made in Telegram on March 16th while the burn was in progress and on March 17th when the burn was completed. I detailed the logistics of the burn and there’s plenty of information there around the specifics (as well as in our Medium post). I believe those posts are pinned in the Official Telegram channel.

We’re committed to doing the right things for our investors and our community that further the strength of the Velo token and our project. The burn will help in the long run and we’re glad to be able to do it.

Click here for more details on token burn announcement: https://medium.com/veloprotocol/multi-phase-token-burn-20-of-total-supply-b11dc4daa400