This was certainly one of the more tempestuous weeks we’ve had here at Curate. On April 5th, we finally unveiled our long-awaited news. To say that the news was met with mixed reviews would be a bit of an understatement. But despite some initial pushback, the majority of our community is as excited as we are about the future of Curate. The community’s belief in our project is demonstrated best by the almost 1 million XCUR that has been staked this week.

The most important news for us to highlight is that CoinSmart is making a large equity investment into Curate. This announcement was followed closely by the news that we have an upcoming p2e game. This game (Xcursion) is currently in development with an established gaming company, Workinman. Also mentioned in our announcements, is the continued development of our GenM physical goods marketplace. The physical goods marketplace will be described in more detail in the weeks ahead and will feature heavily in our growth later this year.

But of course, it wasn’t these announcements that garnered the mixed response. The announcement that most divided people this week was the news that the XCUR tokenomics is being adjusted. The supply of 8.5M XCUR will increase to 60M over the space of a number of years.

This tokenomics adjustment will be tackled a bit further down in this article. But in order to understand WHY the adjustment was made, it must be put into context of the other developments we’ve announced. In other words, the tokenomics adjustment isn’t a separate event from our other developments. It’s actually an integral part of the other large pieces of news.

COINSMART’S EQUITY INVESTMENT IN CURATE

The most significant announcement of the week was that CoinSmart has invested in, and purchased a small ownership stake of Curate. For those who don’t know, CoinSmart is one of the few select crypto-asset trading platforms in Canada that’s been registered as a securities dealer and marketplace. It’s a publicly-traded company on stock exchanges in both Toronto, Canada, and Frankfurt, Germany. CoinSmart is also working on building its presence in Europe and is fully compliant with local regulations.

Every aspect of this partnership is an absolute boon for Curate. But specifically, this partnership helps us immediately in a few ways:

The purchase of the equity stake brings a large injection of capital into our company. First and foremost, it vastly increases our budget for crucial operations such as Research & Development, and Marketing. In other words, we now have increased funds for improving our product, AND letting the world know about it.

Another major benefit of this partnership with CoinSmart is that it allows Curate to leverage some of CoinSmart’s many connections to other top-tier crypto exchanges. It’s been the dream of many-a-member of the Curate community to see XCUR listed on a number of large exchanges. This investment from Coinsmart directly helps us achieve these listings moving forward.

P2E GAME IN DEVELOPMENT

Curate has been working behind the scenes with gaming studio Workinman on a p2e game. The game has been in development since December 2021, and we’re brimming with excitement over our work with them.

Gaming is a rapidly growing sector of the NFT and crypto space. Developing a game for our ecosystem will undoubtedly result in greater visibility of the Curate platform. We’re also excited about the prospect that an NFT game developed for the Curate ecosystem will be able to take full advantage of our lack of gas fees and cross-chain capabilities.

It was with these considerations in mind that we set out to find an excellent gaming studio to align with. Workinman IS just that studio. They have an excellent reputation as a gaming company and have produced games for Disney, Marvel, and Nickelodeon.

As mentioned, the game is well into development at this point. While we’re still making strategic choices about how the end product will perform, we’re delighted to announce that the game will be ready well before the end of 2022. To say that our team is excited about this project would be an understatement of epic proportions.

TOKENOMICS ADJUSTMENT

It should be clear by now that our plans for 2022 are more ambitious and achievable than ever. The well-timed push from CoinSmart dramatically increases our capacity to achieve and surpass our goals. But, with this optimism and a clear path forward, we’re met with a realization that our tokenomics needs to be adjusted. Eight million XCUR tokens are simply not enough for us to achieve our goals.

For instance, acquiring listings on major exchanges is insurmountably difficult when our token supply is so small. Also, attracting further VCs for investment is near impossible without more XCUR on hand. Our p2e game’s rewards will be paid out in XCUR. Considering these future uses (and more not listed in this article), it’s clear that more XCUR tokens are needed.

Making a drastic change to our tokenomics is a decision that the team takes very seriously. Many spirited meetings and debates have happened over many months within the executive team. Ultimately, only one conclusion became clear: Changing Curate’s tokenomics is, in fact, the best decision for the sake of our long-term growth and sustainability.

We understand that many people bought into Curate with the expectation that XCUR’s low supply would have the potential of a more dramatic price increase compared to other projects with larger token quantities.

But the simple reality is that our previous tokenomics with such a low supply of tokens caps the future growth of our platform. The low supply will inevitably handcuff us from getting to our goals as a company if we don’t make adjustments.

FINDING BALANCE

Balance goes a long way in any important endeavour. Adjusting the amount of tokens in a blockchain project is no exception. With this in mind, 60 million tokens is the max supply that will EVER be in circulation.

These tokens aren’t going to be released all at once, but will slowly be unlocked over the space of years. The last thing we want to do is immediately dilute the value of each token. In fact, some tokens aren’t likely to be unlocked until sometime between 3 and 6 years from now. The first small increase in supply will occur after this next round of staking: Staking rewards will be paid out from the new supply of XCUR.

Adjusting the supply of tokens is an action we take very seriously. It’s also something that we will only do once. We want our community to rest easy knowing that this tokenomics adjustment will not happen again. In that spirit, Curate employed Chainsulting to audit our token contracts.

The audit was successful and there’s one VERY important detail that begs to be mentioned here: As part of the audit, Curate renounced ownership over the smart contract address. This means that NO more tokens can ever be minted.

TWO AMAs

Along with our announcements this week, Curate participated in two AMAs. We have always valued transparency and accountability, and it was our intent to unflinchingly demonstrate these values to our community. We did our absolute best to be visible and engaged in open communication with as many individuals as possible.

Dialogue is central to the vitality of any community. Despite an exchange or two that felt a bit heated, we were overall quite happy with the engagement we received. We appreciate each and every person who took the time to listen and share their feelings with us, despite the level of tact or type of response they chose to share.

It’s valuable and important to hear from as many perspectives as possible when talking through major news announcements. It’s our hope that we continue to grow through this period and our ties to one another deepen.

1 MILLION XCUR STAKED?

Rounding off this week, it was truly extraordinary to see that we achieved almost ONE MILLION XCUR staked in-app. This occurred mere days after our huge announcements – and within 24 hours of the staking, round going live. In our eyes, this truly shows the support of the community and trust in our project as we move forward. We feel humbled, proud, and excited about the profundity of this show of support by our community.

Thank you everyone for investing – your time, money, and belief – in Curate. We care about you, we care about our project. This year we’re going to make you more proud than ever to be a Curator.