Welcome to the November edition of the DigitalX Newsletter. As the weather gets colder and the leaves begin to fall in Boston, we continue to stay focused on enhancing our international mobile money application, AirPocket. In this newsletter we will discuss the latest updates to AirPocket, as well as exciting partnerships crucial to the growth of our core market. We also announce our new tagline!
If you have any questions or comments for DigitalX, please email us at newsletter@digitalx.com.
Company Update
Last month, we announced two major partnerships that dramatically expand AirPocket’s addressable market. The first of which is a signed deal with AT&T, allowing AirPocket to provide mobile recharges to their 12 million subscribers throughout Mexico. Secondly, we signed a deal with
TransferTo. This partnership allows AirPocket to top up virtually any pre-paid phone worldwide. We have completed integration with these key partners and as a result an updated version of AirPocket was released this week.
With the latest version of AirPocket, users can top up more than 400 million subscribers phones across Latin America. As well, recipients in Latin America can make a request for a top up from friends and family in the United States directly from the AirPocket app.
Another major focus with the release of an updated app was to simplify the AirPocket user interface. We have made significant improvements in the registration and send flows, integrating a simpler and more intuitive design. We have also added an Activity Screen so that users have a record of their transactions directly within the app.
In addition to app updates, we are also updating the AirPocket logo with a new tagline that speaks to the core belief of the AirPocket brand: “Secure Your Future”. This tagline reflects our history as a bitcoin and blockchain company, using the world’s most secure network as an extension of our products. It speaks to the future of our customers - that using AirPocket will open doors to financial inclusion and new credit facilities. The new logo will become part of our branding assets in the next few weeks. Stay tuned!
Market Update
The past month saw a nearly $100 increase in the price of bitcoin and an impressive rally in a new and promising crypto-currency Zcash. The recent trend of expanding investments in the emerging blockchain space continued, along with the launch or continued development of projects aimed at integrating blockchain technology into mainstream finance and communications markets.
In assorted news, blockchain development consortium R3 recently added an interbank trading platform to their blockchain trials; Myanmar recently announced a blockchain-based securities exchange trial; AT&T, with whom DigitalX recently announced an agreement for selling mobile phone credits, recently announced a patent filing on a home blockchain-powered
server; and Capital One recently announced a blockchain experiment centered around the healthcare space.
An exciting recent development in the blockchain space was the mining of Zcash’s so-called genesis, or first block, and the subsequent rally in its
price. Zcash, which launched this month after significant time in development, is built on many of the same principles as bitcoin, with a fixed lifetime supply of 21 million coins and a similar block hashing ‘mining’ system for verifying transactions. The primary difference with Bitcoin is that the transactions on Zcash’s ‘blocks’ are completely anonymous: unlike with Bitcoin, the full chain-of-custody of each parcel of bitcoin value is not traceable on the blockchain, a Bitcoin feature which had alternately charmed regulators and troubled some potential
adopters. In contrast, Zcash relies on so called non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs, a feature which allows its blockchain to be completely untraceable to users who do not possess certain keys. However, possession of special view keys can allow a selected third party to view a wallet address history.
While Zcash as a currency may not hold much interest for those not interested in cryptocurrencies directly, its anonymous blockchain creates a potentially more useful location for publishing smart contract data and metadata than the bitcoin blockchain. As DigitalX moves to deploy AirPocket’s smart contract platform, we will be watching Zcash and related technologies closely.
