Hi ZIMBOCASH family

We’re at a historic moment. The payment functionality is now ready. We’re about to open it up to our ambassador team to test. We are working a bit on the front end to improve your user experience.

But it works great. It looks and feels like an online payments account and we’re super excited about this next step.  The money supply has been fixed at 4.5bn ZASH. And we are about to execute on our goal of establishing sound-money in Zimbabwe. We currently have over 40k subscribers and the number is growing every day.

In our last fireside chat, we spoke about the active referral system. We wanted to give further detail behind this and the next steps to going live.

Here is the detail behind the active referral system

Firstly, we would like to confirm that the rewards are all there. No-one has lost their rewards.  However, all of your historic rewards will be combined together including the referral reward, click reward and ambassador reward, and proportionately unlocked after each person you have referred has made their first transaction.There is no time limit on this.

Here is the background

The goal of ZIMBOCASH is to have a community of people who use ZIMBOCASH in day-to-day transactions throughout Zimbabwe.  

When we first implemented the system, we provided a referral incentive where you could earn more by introducing others. However, over this time we have received a large amount of spam. Of the 40 000+ sign-ups, over 7000 have been spam.

These spam sign-ups mainly fall into the following categories:

• Some members deliberately using bogus emails.
• Members signing-up others without their knowledge.  Some of these members have complained and asked to be removed.
• Members using incorrect email addresses such as gmial.com, gmail.co or gmail.cgm.
• Members helping people create email accounts so they can register.  Unfortunately, these new members have never accessed the system and in many cases have forgotten their email addresses.
• Several ambassadors have signed people up using Yandex Mail – including our most influential ambassadors. Most of these people didn’t ever access their email addresses, all our fireside chats to these addresses have ‘bounced’.  
• In addition, we had some members falsifying clicks on their referral link.

This has resulted in the following challenges:

• The bounced emails triggered our web services to put a stop to our email system until we completely redesigned the system.
• Most active members have some aspect of invalid email addresses in their referrals.
• A large amount of money and time has been spent by our team cleaning the ‘dirty’ data.
• On the flip side, we have had some highly active community members who have spread the good news of ZIMBOCASH. They have loyal followings and have told people wherever they go to sign up to ZIMBOCASH.
• We have several millionaires (“whales”) that we have been working with closely. The problem is that all our ambassadors and high net worth individuals have some degree of invalid emails.  

The solution

We have engaged experts to analyse the data in detail and we have completely redesigned our entire IT infrastructure.

With the new system, we are validating emails, phone numbers and subscriber details.  It is important that we have clean data because once we allocate ZASH, it will be recorded on the blockchain and the transaction accounts will be created. It becomes ‘money’ at this stage. We can only allocate the money to people who are validated. Unfortunately, this is a non-negotiable.

So, with that in mind – we would like to repeat that you have not lost your ZASH balance. The additional rewards earned will be ‘locked’. It will be unlocked as the people you referred access the system and make their first payment.  

Here are responses to some comments we have received:

• We have taken your input and will put the total balance on the dashboard so you can keep track of your ‘locked’ balance. 

• We are also considering giving you a list of people who have signed up with your referral code – we are in the process of obtaining advice on this from a privacy perspective. 

• We will also send you an email when a referral has made their first transaction and unlocked the related referral rewards. 

• Some ambassadors have said that they have not been consulted. We did set up a zoom call to discuss this with our regional ambassadors and our broader ambassador community – where we invited the public at large. This information was also sent out in a fireside chat. 

• Regarding decentralisation – the sign-up balances were always on a database that we managed. However, we are about to put these balances on a blockchain so that they become actual tradable money. Here is an example of an account we were using to test that was successful:

https://tronscan.io/#/address/TWKPSe8bZjKZX2kVRHbpxq7V4aEiuyYaYN/transactions

• Note that the online wallet will still manage the private keys until the network grows and people then can exit the platform if they wish.

Exchange analysis

Because of our data issue and the fact that we have ‘whales’, we have had extensive discussions internally about the impact on the exchange. When we announced the listing on Bithumb Global, we have had many people asking “how do I sell my ZASH on the exchange.”

We need to clarify a few important factors here.

The first is that the value of your ZASH is in the network of people making transactions on the ground. While we want people to be able to sell on the exchange, we want to first create a culture of people using ZASH for payments. If everyone sells immediately, there will not be enough buyers and the market price will crash.  With no market price, ZASH will not be able to be used for transactions.  

To resolve this

1. You need to make 6 transactions, for every 10% you wish to sell.

2. Once we go live with the exchange, we will be carefully monitoring the number of people selling ZASH. The initial proposal is to implement an exchange selling daily limit and we will monitor the outcome. Another proposal is to implement a cash-out fee. These would be designed to limit the supply on the exchange while the network is being built.

3. We highlight that there are a range of global regulations around cashing out. A KYC (know your client) process is required to verify identity using photos and videos. We don’t have the expertise for this so we would outsource from one of the reputable global KYC providers.

We had hoped that our exchange would perform the KYC but it isn’t the case. We must implement this step given the issues we’ve faced. We highlight that we value our user privacy and we will do what we can to protect KYC information.

The basic principle that we have always maintained is that the value comes when people use the network for transactions directly between themselves. The market price is something that is necessary and will become more robust as the network grows – which will, in turn, provide more flexibility for Zimbabweans to pay for goods using this channel.

Payment functionality

With all that said, the good news is that we’re about to enable payments on the online wallet. This is why we had to take the step of cleaning the data. It’s been a huge effort to get to this moment, and we’re really proud of the way it works. It has a clean look and is simple – easy to use.

There is not a person on the team that has not worked weekends and late nights every night for the last several months, with moments of tears and sometimes extreme pressure. While we have had road humps, we are at a historical moment where we are achieving something special that has never been done before – that of a decentralised sound-money system for an entire nation.  

We know that there is some pain in the change with the referral rewards. We are grateful to those that have built the community. Please stay in this conversation with us.

We trust this gives you some background to the recent changes.

If you haven’t yet signed up, you can get 3125 ZASH at www.zitenga.com/register.  But hurry, our halving is taking place at the end of June.

There is some very lively debate on our official telegram group https://t.me/zimbocash – come on over and share your views. And follow us on twitter: twitter.com/zimbocash   

If you want to earn more, get others to join using your member ID (remember these are only unlocked when they make their first transaction). You will also earn more when others click the link from a unique IP address. You can get this from your dashboard when you login at www.zitenga.com/login. 

Warm regards,

The ZIMBOCASH Team