Welcome!

DACH - Business Development Q4/19

Dash Embassy D-A-CH (www.dash-embassy.org) was founded on the 23rd of Feb 2018. In the beginning the project was about increasing visibility and awareness for Dash to build up trust in the D-A-CH region. Therefore we did a lot of PR, Roadshow Events (Meetups) and attended conferences. While doing so we learned a lot about our market and the crypto related mindset of the people in our region.

In the middle of 2018 we slightly changed our focus towards business development and integrations. The first step was a letter campaign contacting 350 BTC accepting merchants in D-A-CH region to make them accept Dash and to learn about the tools they are using and their experience with accepting cryptocurrencies.

Due to the outcome of this letter campaign and the attached phone survey we are now focused on integrations at FIAT Gateways like ATMs, Exchanges and Wallets and companies from the payment industry such as Crypto-to-FIAT payment services, traditional payment service providers, cashier systems and payment terminals.

We believe that integrating Dash into such multiplicators will increase the number of Dash accepting merchants significantly and in a cost effective way, as those businesses are onboarding merchants in their own interest. With continuous partnerships we ensure that Dash’s competitive advantages are pointed out.

We are part of Dash Co-Working (DCW) and we are inviting every other long term DFO to join us to share experience and learn from the other teams. For more details regarding DCW please have a look at: https://t1p.de/ttb7


1. Highlights from Q3/19
1.1 Integrations

1 Exchange due to integration at BTC-Alpha (Russian Exchange): https://trello.com/c/knrEYfR7/23-btc-alpha

250+ ATMs due to the integration at iQ CashNow ATMs (biggest ATM company in Europe): https://trello.com/c/0LJcjjRm/9-iq-cash-now  

1,000+ merchants due to integration at iQ CashNow POS solution (Austria, Spain, Greece, Italy, Turkey, USA): https://trello.com/c/4LMBiDCL/21-iq-cashnow-pos

36 adult entertainment platforms and other subscription based businesses due to integration at PumaPay (crypto-to-FIAT payment service): https://trello.com/c/KcGSDkr0/14-pumapay

Leading Portuguese football club and smartphone reseller due to integration at UTRUST (crypto-to-FIAT payment service): https://trello.com/c/62vz88Rg/2-utrust

Leading European online casino Whow Games with 9 million registered users, forwarded as a client to UTRUST: https://trello.com/c/Etd94Goj/15-whow-games

1 Dash Giftcard due to integration at CGift (digital an physical Crypto-Giftcards): https://trello.com/c/xvHl87Xa/33-cgift

20,000+ merchants and 60+ payment service providers due to integration at coinify (leading crypto-to-FIAT payment service in Europe): https://trello.com/c/8zLiIjt0/12-coinify


1.2 Events

We have been a Co-Organizer of www.dashconvention.com 

We convinced https://www.gs1-germany.de/ to organize a cryptocurrency day together with us on the 21st of January 2020 to connect our partners from the crypto-payment-industry (Salamantex, UTRUST, iQ CashNow, Coinify) with the traditional payment- and retail industry. 


1.3 Lobbying

Jan Heinrich Meyer (essra) was elected to be a board member of the blockchain working group of https://www.bitkom.org/EN , next to Med Ridha Ben Naceur (GFT Technologies), Elke Kunde (IBM), Boris Lingl (Datev) and Andreas Lipkow (Comdirect) - Bitkom is Germany’s digital association and represents 2,600+ companies of the digital economy. It’s mission is to establish Germany as a key driver of digital change in Europe. Therefore they are creating positioning papers for the government. https://www.bitkom.org/Bitkom/Organisation/Gremien/Blockchain.html 


1.4 Legal

We are in direct contact with BaFin (German regulator) to receive a regulatory classification for Dash as a unit of account and a certificate of compliance for PrivateSend. After several calls our BaFin asked for a legal opinion from our lawyers. Our lawyers are working on this right now.
We are also in contact with FinMa (Swiss Regulator) to achieve the same outcome.

This is needed to list Dash at regulated exchanges in Europe.


1.5 Further track record:

For further track record please have a look at our previous proposals:

https://www.dashcentral.org/p/DASH_Embassy_D-A-CH_Q1_18
https://www.dashcentral.org/p/DASH_EMBASSY_D-A-CH_Q2_18
https://www.dashcentral.org/p/DASH_EMBASSY_D-A-CH_Q3_18
https://www.dashcentral.org/p/DASH_EMBASSY_D-A-CH_Q4_18
https://www.dashcentral.org/p/DACH_Business_Development_Q1_19
https://www.dashcentral.org/p/DACH_Business_Development_Q2_19 
https://www.dashcentral.org/p/DACH_Business_Development_Q3_19 

and our Dash Watch Reports:

https://dashwatchbeta.org/r/FEB19/dach_business_development_q1_19 
https://dashwatchbeta.org/r/MAR19/dach_business_development_q1_19 
https://dashwatchbeta.org/r/APR19/dach_business_development_q1_19 
https://dashwatchbeta.org/r/MAY19/dach_business_development_q2_19
https://dashwatchbeta.org/r/JUN19/dach_business_development_q2_19 
https://beta.dashwatch.org/r/JUL19/dach_business_development_q2_19 
https://reports.dashwatch.org/SEP19/Embassy-DACH.pdf 


You are more than welcome to join our channels on Discord:

Dash Nation: #dash-embassy-dach  
Dash Talk: #dash-embassy


What will Dash get from our proposal for Q4/19?
1. Business Development
1.1 Strategy

We will be following our previous business development strategy from Q3/19. This means that we are focusing our activities on FIAT Gateways such as ATMs, Exchanges and Wallets and companies from the payment industry such as Crypto-to-FIAT payment services, traditional payment service providers, cashier systems and payment terminals.

For a more detailed description of our strategy and the reasoning behind it, please have a look at our proposal from Q3/19 which can be found here: 

https://www.dashcentral.org/p/DACH_Business_Development_Q3_19
 
Right now we are using LinkedIn as our #1 tool for b2b acquisition. It’s working fine, but it can’t replace the personal contact at trade fairs and conferences. This is why we will keep attending payment related events as regular visitors without any sponsoring. In addition we try to get speaker-slots from time to time. 


1.2 Integration Pipelines

To keep you updated in a transparent way we do live reporting for all our integration projects by using the kanban software trello. So please have a look at the specific integration pipelines and projects to get detailed information. Please have a look at the links below and feel free to ask us about single projects.

1.2.1 Exchanges/Wallets
https://trello.com/b/Jn3EuwVC/dach-exchanges-wallets

1.2.2 ATMs
https://trello.com/b/BdEj2A4s/dach-atms

1.2.3 Payment Companies
https://trello.com/b/abHCoAMU/dach-psps

Costs: Staff, Travel, Hospitality
Responsible: Jan Heinrich Meyer (@essra), Klaus Hipfinger (@simontheravager), Sinay Demirel (@sidem)


2. Consumer Activation Research

To become the most used cryptocurrency at the point-of-sale and in e-commerce we need to convince the crypto-community and no-coiners to actually use Dash as a means of payment. Therefore we will need to play an active role in social media and in point-of-sale marketing in future. Our partners from the crypto-payment-industry (Salamantex, iQ CashNow, UTRUST, Coinify) are willing to cooperate. 

To make those future campaigns at the point-of-sale and in social media as efficient as possible, we started to test some marketing messages in Q3/19, which were leading to a prepared landing-page: https://www.dash-embassy.org/get-started/ and our Telegram Group.

PrivateSend: https://twitter.com/DashEmbassyDACH/status/1173567166865707008?s=20
Privacy: https://twitter.com/DashEmbassyDACH/status/1171416064296718336?s=20
Banks: https://twitter.com/DashEmbassyDACH/status/1169229744489029637?s=20
ChainLocks: https://twitter.com/DashEmbassyDACH/status/1165921098959138817?s=20 

Even though these posts have been successful when it comes to reach and interaction in social media, the conversions and click-rates did not perform very well. This means that we need to improve to get satisfying results. We hope to be able to derive a B2C marketing strategy valid for Central Europe, which allows us to cost-effectively position Dash as the #1 solution for crypto-payments, but in our current setup we are not feeling capable of doing this. We will need to hire a full time marketing manager or work with a marketing agency to achieve this. 

To go on with the consumer activation research and for the final implementation of a marketing strategy, we will create an additional proposal so that the masternode network can decide, whether they want us to proceed in marketing activities and to take advantage of the opportunities offered by our partners (Salamantex, iQ CashNow, UTRUST, Coinify) or not.

Costs: Marketing
Responsible: Jan Heinrich Meyer (@essra), Sinay Demirel (@sidem)


3. Events

We will attend events for the payments and banking industry, which are free of charge or have a low ticket price or are connected to an invitation for Jan Heinrich Meyer (@essra) as speaker. We will try our best to acquire as many events of this kind as possible.

Costs: Staff, Travel, Hospitality, Marketing
Responsible: Jan Heinrich Meyer (@essra)


4. Lobbying

Suitable to our Business Development Strategy we are part of working groups about digital transformation, digital payments, Fintechs and digital Banking in the following associations:

• https://www.bitkom.org/ (German E-Commerce and Digitalization Association)
  
• https://www.wirtschaftsrat.de/  (German Economic Council)
  
• https://digitalcity.wien/ (Digital City Initiative of the City of Vienna)
  
• https://www.gs1-germany.de/ (Global standards for business communication)
  

Costs: Staff, Lobbying Memberships
Responsible: Klaus Hipfinger (@simontheravager), Jan Heinrich Meyer (@essra)


5. Website

We will keep our website and all included services up-to-date and constantly create regular news updates consisting of german translations of blog.dash.org articles and updates of our own achievements. New possibilities of accepting Dash by our partner businesses will be prominently featured to promote stronger business development also via our website.

Costs: Staff, Website and Tools
Responsible: Sinay Demirel (@sidem)


6. Social Media

We are using our social media channels for community updates, event announcements and merchant posts and for sharing German dashnews.org articles. 

If you want to subscribe to our channels, we will be happy to welcome you as a subscriber.

https://www.facebook.com/dashembassydach/
https://twitter.com/dashembassydach 
https://www.instagram.com/dash_embassy_dach/
https://t.me/dashembassydach
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuLSfeIMuQ_npjjBY3J_FPA
https://www.linkedin.com/company/dash-embassy-d-a-ch/ 
https://www.xing.com/companies/dashembassyd-a-chug 

Costs: Staff
Responsible: Sinay Demirel (@sidem)


7. PR

We are sending out German press releases whenever we have news to share. In addition we will keep up the work with DCG, DashNews and Shift Communication in DCW (Dash Co-Working) to bring international news into crypto related media platforms in DACH region and DACH news in international media.

For published articles please have a look at the projects listed on our public trello boards in the “done” section.

Costs: Staff
Responsible: Jan Heinrich Meyer (@essra)


8. Legal

While talking to regulated exchanges and Crypto-to-FIAT payment service providers we experienced the recurring need for an official statement about the regulatory classification and AML compliance of Dash by the regulatory entities of the corresponding jurisdiction.

Our lawyers from Germany are working on a legal opinion that we will be sharing with BaFin (German regulator) to get a regulatory classification of Dash as a unit of account and a certificate of compliance for PrivateSend. As BaFin is the most restrictive regulator in EU we believe that other regulators in our region will follow their opinion.

Costs: Staff, Legal
Responsible: Jan Heinrich Meyer (@essra)


9. Team

The team of three Jan Heinrich Meyer (@essra), Sinay Demirel (@sidem) and Klaus Hipfinger (@simontheravager) will persist in this constellation until further notice. 

Costs: External Accounting, Insurances, Legal Advice and Revisions, Office rent, supplies and IT-infrastructure, Staff
 

10. Financials

Budget requested for Q3/19:

166 Dash/month (estimated avg. Dash Price of $ 158,00) = $ 78.6k or € 69.6k (total in Q3)
Due to the decreased Dash price we received € 35.9k (total in Q3). 


Budget request Q4-2019:




We use the 30 days SMA with an average Dash Price of $81,83 for the 4th quarter of 2019 on the 7th of October: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/price-dash-sma30.html#6m

We request the total amount with a volatility buffer of 15% for three months coming because of the risk of possible price fall backs.

Here you can find the Q4/2019 budget numbers in detail:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YrNFLQpBM5Az6P4AkG6T7eBYuxtNzialorK-o7VSMTY/edit?usp=sharing


Links to our Liquidity and Capital Resources: 

DACH Business Development - Public Budget Planning and Accounting 2019:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Oi0KG0LCGEhWOszO9b3QbExNHO1Ru6qJkS4XoOZ3l8s/edit#gid=1772385164

Corporate Wallet Address:
https://insight.dash.org/insight/address/XuMeunJDZrAusw45B4oreuH8RcKUY2fkMN


Thanks for your support! In Dash we trust! 

We are eager to read your comments and are thankful for your advice. 

The Dash Embassy D-A-CH Team