Understanding Wootrade: Quarter Two, 2021
With continued regulatory announcements and mining crackdowns throughout June, the market saw trading volumes decreasing drastically across both centralized and decentralized exchanges. Amidst regulatory uncertainties, the silver lining remains that institutional adoption continues to rise, with traditional financial giants like Citigroup offering cryptoasset management products and a16z raising over $2.2b for crypto venture capital investments.
As Wootrade strives to speed up the cryptocurrency evolution, we continue to engage partners, to share our vision of the future and to join forces with industry peers. These efforts have bore fruit in the form of new partnerships, significant growth of our community and new Wootrade team members. And while jurisdictions around the world have stepped up their efforts to instill more discipline in the industry, Wootrade is quickly adapting to navigate the ever changing legal landscape, and devising more products suitable under the new conditions.
Engagements with traditional and crypto institutions remain a key area of expertise for Wootrade. This is supported by its tight relationship with Kronos Research, its proven record in asset management, and in bridging institutional trading strategies from CeFi to DeFi. This deep expertise lends credibility to Wootrade as a brand name, which allowed COO Ran Yi to be invited by Paypal Innovation Labs to share how centralized finance strategies can be brought over to DeFi. Another example is Wootrade’s inclusion as a member of the DeFi Alliance to help bootstrap liquidity for DeFi startups. Looking ahead to Q3, several more engagements and sharing sessions are in the pipeline with reputable traditional and crypto-native institutions.
While regulatory headwinds have strengthened, the Wootrade team continues to move forward with compliance by taking proactive steps to ensure our compliance with applicable laws. Chief among these measures are KYC (know-your-customer) and AML (anti-money laundering) compliance, as well as on-chain analytics to ensure that we can monitor and report suspicious transactions. These are compliance building blocks that will eventually allow us to provide additional features on the platform, such as fiat gateways and derivatives trading.
Despite the market downturn, the company remains financially healthy with employee headcounts continuing to rise across all departments. The business development, product, and legal compliance teams within Wootrade continue to work hard behind the scenes to ensure that Wootrade Network’s products continue to scale and support adoption across institutions, CeFi, and DeFi.
The WOO Token
*All statistics in this report are accurate as of July 9th, 2021.
Quick token insights:
- The circulating supply is now 467,533,624 out of a total of 2,992,110,102 WOO tokens.
- With roughly $315m in market capitalization, the WOO token is ranked around #140 on Coingecko. Despite market cap declining by almost 10% since the last quarterly report, WOO has jumped up 40 rankings, which indicates relatively strong performance compared to other cryptoassets.
- Q2 saw unique holders on Ethereum more than double to over 9,100 unique addresses. We’ve seen substantial growth with 2,200 unique holders on Binance Smart Chain, 445 on Huobi’s ECO chain, and over 200 on Polygon. In total, there are around 12,000 unique WOO holding addresses, up from 4,000 in Q1, which represents a gain of 300%.
- Many users still hold WOO on centralized exchanges, with about 254m WOO (54% of the circulating supply) held by users on WOO X, Huobi, AscendEx (Formerly BitMax), MXC, and Gate.
- Over 110m WOO tokens are held on WOO X , a 3x increase since the end of Q1, making it the most popular platform in the ecosystem.
- In DeFi, we have seen massive growth in on-chain staking, with adoption in many DEXs across chains. Overall DeFi staking has seen almost a 10x increase since the Q1 report, now at around 30.6m WOO tokens up from 3.6m. Currently, 6.5% of circulating tokens are locked in DeFi applications.
Total number of WOO staked in each main DeFi app:
- Bancor: 12.3m
- Sushiswap: 2.25m
- Uniswap v2: 6.75m
- PancakeSwap (BSC): 5.5m
- QuickSwap (Polygon): 2.41m
- WooFi Pools (BSC): 1m
- Raydium (Solana): 234k
- MDEX (HECO): 200k
New staking program
- The program involves a transition to lower staking yields. The rewards are comprised of a base rate, with additional yield earned for completing challenges that support the Wootrade ecosystem. This approach is designed to better align incentives of Wootrade and its users by rewarding those who participate most actively.
- The updated program now offers a consistent base rate for rewards across all tiers instead of scaled yields. To compensate higher tier stakers, we will unveil several non-inflationary benefits (more free on-chain withdrawals, referral volume incentives, governance votes, and token airdrops from WOO Ventures).
- This program was designed with a focus on long-term sustainability to reach the goal of net deflationary tokenomics (where monthly buyback and burns more than offset the new WOO tokens entering the circulating supply).
Tokenomics and Statistics
There were 59.3m WOO unlocked this quarter. This is down from the 160m WOO tokens that were unlocked in Q1, a 63% reduction in inflation. The main reason for this decrease was the conclusion of the private sale vesting at the end of Q1. The factors leading to token unlocks are:
- Seed round vesting: Around 25.7m tokens were claimed
- Team token vesting: Around 12.4m tokens were claimed
- Advisor token vesting: 3.4m tokens were claimed
- Ecosystem rewards: 1.04m tokens left the wallet
- Liquidity management: 6.6m tokens were used to initiate liquidity on the different blockchain networks.
- Private sale (unclaimed from Q1): 9.9m tokens were claimed
- Woo Ventures: 99.8k tokens were used in investments, each with a vesting period of at least 12 months
Burn statistics
- April: 372,120.49 WOO
- May: 764,736.00 WOO
- June: 121,907.00 WOO
- Total for Q2: 1,258,763.49 WOO — this means 1.7% of the circulating supply of WOO has been burned in the first half of 2021.
Product Development
WOO X — the flagship modular exchange opened doors to early supporters on March 31. In total, 1,589 closed beta testers with different trading backgrounds from various regions were onboarded within 3 months. The system was accumulating $5–10 million in daily trading volume with 65 million WOO tokens staked on the platform.
After the staking update and referral program implementation, WOO X entered its Open Beta phase with 3,587 users, $20 million in average daily trading volume, and 110m WOO staked on the platform.
From an operational point of view, customer support began to scale. The KYC process also came to WOO X in June, ensuring WOO X remains in compliance with regulatory bodies worldwide, which is essential for the longevity of WOO X. Users can now increase their 24-hour withdrawal limit from 2 BTC to unlimited withdrawals by completing KYC.
Vital systems including order matching engine, security and risk control, and the UI were improved. Some of the major technical updates include:
- Support for USDT deposits in the TRC-20 and Algorand token standards
- A new system of zero-fee internal transfers was set up for WOO X users
- Stop Loss and Take Profit order types added on WOO X
- ASK and BID Market order types added on WOO X
- Pure spot mode and API trading was enabled
New tokens have been added to WOO X. At the end of the quarter, the platform hosted 44 trading assets.
Growth (Community and HR)
New team hires plus a summary of the team:
For Wootrade, there are now 76 total team members with 23 new members added in Q2 — this means our workforce almost doubled in Q2 and continues to grow rapidly to match the pace of the company. This can be roughly broken down as follows:
- Management: 7
- Business development and marketing:16
- Developers: 21
- Product: 13
- Operations: 19
The Wootrade community saw drastic growth on all the social networks around the world. Our Twitter following grew from a modest 14k to 36k over the 3 months.
Other highlights:
- Our official website hosted 55,539 users with a traffic increase of around 40% since the Q1 report.
- Wootrade welcomed Indonesian, Indian, French, Arabic, and Taiwanese communities. With them, the brand has ecosystem partners and representatives in 11 regions around the world.
- We welcomed Sir Thomas WOOdison — the FAQ bot and moderator in Telegram community groups.
- The newly established Wootrade Discord server is already hosting over 1,000 verified members.
- We started a series of Building Wootopia — monthly community calls on Twitter space and sharing them on YouTube. Everyone is welcome to tune in to share feedback, thoughts, or ask us questions related to the industry.
- #hotWOOsummer — a challenge kick-started by our community has evolved into a fit community movement with dozens of photos posted daily. WOO merch is being sent out to reward active participants.
Future Outlook
Remember the date — August 20th. That’s when WOO X will open to the masses, including an iOS app, an updated website, margin v2, and open signups. This is when WOO X will be more scalable on three key parameters:
- Architecture
- Security
- Customer service
Futures Trading is expected later this year, but with the recent regulatory stance, WOO X will be mindful of launching derivatives products in regions that lack clarity.
The various product teams will continue to launch new features, including more DeFi integrations, new token listings, new yield and investment products, more staking benefits and challenges, improvements to the referral program, social trading, merch, and other marketing campaigns. With a large and talented team, strong networks, and an explosively growing community of partners and token holders, Wootrade is poised to make a significant impact on the trading industry in the second half of 2021.
Stay tuned to Wootrade’s social media throughout Q3 for many exciting developments!
- Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/WOO_X/
- Website: https://woo.network/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/wootraderS
- Discord: https://discord.gg/wootrade
- Telegram: https://t.me/wootrade
- Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/WOOTRADEann
- Medium: https://medium.com/wootrade
The content above is neither a recommendation for investment and trading strategies, nor does it constitute an offer, solicitation or recommendation of any product or service. The content is for informational sharing purposes only. Anyone who makes or changes the investment decision based on the content shall undertake the result or loss by himself/herself.