August 30-th held an Ask Me Anything session at ICO Speaks telegram chat. From the Espcoin there was:
My name is Eric Loit, I am the Managing Director of the ESP Project and CEO of the entire group of related companies. I have been in the embedded computing platform industry for the last 30 years bringing complex hardware and software solutions to market. I am very familiar with engineering and innovating new technology to create fully functional ecosystems. I am very technology driven and have provided bespoke solutions to a number of Fortune 500 companies and government entities over that time. The last 3 years I have been focused on developing Educational ,HR Recruitment and Point of Sale platforms in a cloud service based methodologies. There is where we have determined a great fit for a utility Token and is the genesis of E$P and the ESP Coin Project.
Let’s get started!
Q: What is the high level synopsis of the ESP Project
A: The ESP Project has created a ERC-20 utility token E$P on Ethereum to support ecosystems of Education, Renewable Energy & Digital Payments. E$P is a component of a much larger vision where the project will help build out the individual use cases in the three mentioned sectors. Using the decentralized nature of crypto, this address key problems that exist in each market segment. The project is not only creating the Token but is building out the market and creating the use cases that will utilize the token as well.
Q: Why Three Different Focuses (Education, Renewable Energy, and Digital Payments)?
A: We have been working on the Educational platform for over three years, as well as looking to deploy certain POS solutions at a country level. Both platforms had some common issues, especially in developing countries for which the E$P Token nicely solves. Combining this with a need to create a funding platform for Solar (renewable energy), the E$P Utility Token was a natural fit. We wanted to be focused on socially responsible, environmentally friendly and ethical businesses. Making the quality of Education better, enabling all to have access to online convenient services through use of digital payments and helping the environment by helping facilitate bringing renewable energy projects to life is our way of achieving that goal. We really wanted to be involved with something that matters.
The E$P Token has deeply integrated use cases in each of those sectors. As our business units are bringing value back to the coin base, being diversified across a couple of different industries also lends us strength and resilience without relying on any one particular mode of business.
Q: Talk a little about the history of the ESP Project and the related businesses
A: As I mentioned before, we have been doing the business development centred around Education, HR and Point of Sale solutions. When targeting both the UAE and Vietnam as our initial launch points, one of the difficulties was managing online payments and the associated costs. Using Tokens we could easily reduce the cost without having to have merchants processing fees and removed several third parties making the overall transactions faster, more secure and lower cost.
Second, especially in Vietnam and other developing nations, many people do not have bank accounts. Being able to partake in the online services such as content consumption and with our student information management system, online school fee payments, it was obvious that we needed an enabling technology that could be easily made available to all. Having a digital wallet on a smart phone that almost everyone has, makes this possible. This was the true genesis of the ESP Coin Project.
The Token project is quite new at less than 4 months, but there has been 3 years of technical and opportunity development for the various ecosystems. Just prior to launching the ESP Coin Project, I was approached to create a micro lending funding platform to bring residential solar projects online. This was one more component that helped us make the decision to launch the Token, having multiple use cases for the same technology turned it into an easy decision for us.
Q: Please summarize what has been completed to date.
A: Keeping to the Token itself, we made the decision to start in May of this year. Since then we have completed the initial seed round where we have raised funds to manage the project. Created the token contract code, had it audited and certified by Certik. Launched a pre-ICO / early adopter phase making the token available on the Website. Began the marketing and awareness campaign. Finalized our first partnership with CircleBlue for usage of the Token in East Africa with others being negotiated now. Launched the ICO and have made the Token available on UniSwap. To say the least, it has been a flurry of activity just related to the Token in the last 12 weeks. The various business units also continue to progress as we are getting to the critical phase of beta releases in the near future and advancing the various roadmaps.
Q: Is the Token available now? If so, how and where.
A: Yes, it is currently available on our Website www.espcoin.io (http://www.espcoin.io/) which can be purchase with ETH using Metamask. It is also available on UniSwap where it can be swapped against 100’s of different digital assets. For those that already have the E$P token, they can also earn by adding to the liquidity pool on UniSwap. We are currently negotiating with a number of central exchanges and hope to announce our partnership soon. Officially we are in our ICO phase which we expect to run to the end of September after we are on a central exxchange.
Q: – How does the E$P Token apply to the Education sector
A: We have a few use cases that we will use the Token for. First is our Student Information Management System called SchoolConnect. Here the token will be used for digital payments for things such as school tuition fees, books, school lunches and field trips. Its a convenient way for the school to manage payments which is also convenient for the parent to easily make off their smart phone. The SchoolConnect platform will be paid by the school or education ministry and is not intended to be sold to the parents or students.
The second is our educational content delivery platform. This platform, users will pay for content in E$P, content creators will earn E$P for their viewed content. Advertisers will pay in E$P for their placed content, and consumers of content can earn E$P for watching advertisers content. This will be offered as a commercial application called Talk2Expert and as a fully decentralized platform that will be 100% self regulating using the same E$P token as a means of payment.
Q: Do you have partnerships that you are leveraging for the widespread use of the E$P Token
A: We recently announced our partnership with CircleBlue, a Point of Sale / Electronic Cash Register (ECR) network for EAC countries. Here we will add the E$P token to be used for digital payments and loyalty points rewards. Partnering with CircleBlue means that we would have 1000’s of points of presence with merchants across an entire country. This makes the E$P Token available to many merchants and consumers. The ECR can also act as a Fiat to Crypto exchange making it very convenient for the user to convert to and from E$P.
We have other similar partnerships for other regions of Africa and the world to offer the same solution. We hope to be announced in the first couple of weeks of September a larger but similar agreement for espcoin.
We also have access arrangements at the highest level of government in the UAE for our educational platform. Once development is complete we will have the consideration to provide our student information management system across the entire public school system in the UAE.
Q: Speaking about the token, what is next in line for its development?
A: Next in line is working on some of the scalability issues related to the token. Ethereum has an issue of high gas fees and therefore high transaction costs. We will be looking on our implementation strategy for a layer 2 solution to reduce the transaction fee. This is vitally important in developing nations where payments and transactions may only be a few dollars and having a 30 transaction fee is a complete show stopper. This includes looking at some cross chain solutions. Cardano will be supporting ERC20 style tokens in September and we believe this will be a natural candidate for our second chain solution. This means that we will develop and deploy a gateway that allows users to easily move tokens (value) from one chain to the other.
Q: What will be the underlaying value that supports the Token
A: This question has answers on many layers. First the token economics. We have a fixed minting of 500 Billion tokens that will burn down to a final circulating total of 50 Billion. The deflationary nature of the token increases the scarcity of E$P and therefore increases its intrinsic value. We have a 1% transaction fee where half of that fee is immediately burned which the other half is randomly passed on to an existing token holder.
Second, the company will be using the profit generated by the various business units back into the project to purchase back tokens and burn them. 90% of all profit that the Project earns will be used for this program. All purchases and burns will be listed on the website and conducted on a monthly basis beginning next month.
Having operational business units that is creating the use cases and putting value back into the coin base I think is one of the USP’s of our project
Q: Your Whitepaper talks about a low friction gateway between different block chains, please elaborate on this upcoming feature.
A: As I was mentioning before, we will be creating gateways between different blockchains to leverage its lower transaction costs or other unique features of that blockchain. We feel it is necessary for users to easily move between chains for a variety of reasons. Ethereum will still be the dominant chain when using on chain smart contracts, but for high speed low cost digital payments, we may have an ecosystem that uses Cardano. This requires a gateway to exist such that it is easy for users to move between the two chains to take full advantage of different ecosystems.
Q:Do you have AUDIT credentials or are you working to AUDIT your project,” to make it more secure and reliable???
A: We have had an audit of our Token Contract. We will of course be auditing other aspects of the project in relation to the financials. We conduct internal security audits to make sure our systems are secure and we limit by policy access to any corporate crypto assets. As a project overall, we must submit to the governance of the BOD where we establish strict guidelines as well as accountability throughout the organization
Q:I have seen that you have done many AMAs, my question is, what do you expect to get from so many AMAs and what are your goals with the community?
A: I am not sure we have done so many, but community awareness is very important. A larger community and its support gives the token strength and resilience. As well, for the individual busines units, this is a very good way to establish market presence and market feedback. Even these questions that are being asked are very instructional. We value the community as without it, we would not exist.
Q:What is the structure of this project , is it decentralised or a open sourced protocol where everybody can contribute? If so, how does the governance plan on being handled?How do you plan to spread awareness about your project in different countries where English is not spoken well?
A: Currently we have both an open and closed model. For the business units, they will be a closed implementation of the technology that we will deploy in a decentralized fashion. We hope that our business units are a blueprint for others to follow. On the decentralized apps, yes we will open source the required components for the community to use and contribute. There will be some technology unique to the decentralized version such as dapp governance, QA and contnet policing that will also be added and completely open sourced. We will establish committies to decide the direction and deveopment of the dapps
Q: Can you please kindly provide me a roadmap? What are the top priorities of the project?
A: Best place to get updated is on our news channel and our roadmap is on espcoin.io. All the social media links can be found there
Q:Could you please explain do you plan to add farming and staking support for your project in the future?
A: Our micro lending platform that we will deploy for our residentail solar projects will feature a staking component as the source of capital and the retunrs will be fully distributed to the stakeholders. We are expcting this in Q4 2021.
Q: Is your project only for elite investors, what about others with small funds, is it open to everyone?
A: Great question. For sure we are not targeting the elite. This is open for everyone, we are happy for people to acquire even small amounts of the token as a sign of support for what we are doing. Remember we are targeting the developing world, cost is very key, so we have tuned the tokenomics to have an affortable price (similar to the Vietnamese Dong) and can be avaialble to all
Q: Have you being audited ?
A: I think this is an important question. We are guided by our corporate policy. The prevalance of rug pulls is really a scourge on the industry. As such, we limit access to the token, the token has be certifed. We also limited our seed investmet to no more that 12.5% of the total circulation. During the ICO, we further limit the purchase of tokens to no more than 1% as we don’t want a single account to have a statistical influence that could negatively affect the price. We have some volatility controls built into our policies though we cannot control the price, we aim to have some influence when there is increased volatility
ICOSpeaks hosted an AMA Session with the Espcoin Team. That’s all for today.
Thanks to all users who participated.
Thanks, Espcoin for being with us
Thanks, all and see you soon😉
Cheers 🥂
Take a look at our other ama sessions
