Elastic making headway into Vietnam!
“Welcoming our Vietnamese communities in the South East Asian Regions!!!”
Unlike other projects that raised tens of millions of dollars through VC funding or the recent Defi projects raising millions through online ICOs, Elastic is a community project that did not do any fund raising. We are a community centric project. We strive to grow our ecosystem and community from a solid foundation through various campaigns, airdrops, bounties and community incentives through community member involvements. Our primary focus this month is building our community in Vietnam.
Our focus is on developing countries, and our primary goal this month is to build our community in Vietnam.
The reasons why our focus is Vietnam are two-fold. First, we strongly believe that one of the next regions where blockchain and cryptocurrencies will likely experience the highest growth over the next 12–24 months is the Southeast Asia Region. Vietnam will likely play a sizable role in crypto adoption .
For the old timers, let’s take take a trip back in time down memory lane. For the new comers let’s take a trip back in time to see the transformation of blockchain and cryptocurrencies and how Bitcoin went from being a vehicle for money laundering and sale of illegal products and services on the Dark Web to become an investment worthy digital asset, or store of value, that is now being offered by investment banks to their high net worth clients all over the world. Lastly, we will highlight and give quick shoutouts to a few of the industry giants that have contributed to the growth and mainstream adoptions over digital assets, blockchain and DLT over the last decade.
In the early days of Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin, predating the likes of Ethereum, Bitcoin initially experienced its greatest adoption during the first crypto cycle back between 2010–2014 in Japan with Jed McCaleb’s crypto exchange Mt Goxx. It was the biggest exchange in the world at that point in time with north of 80% of cryptocurrency trading volumes occurring on Mt Goxx. After Mt Goxx, Jed McCalab a Bitcoin maximalist along with Chris Larsen, a well known and highly respected fintech start-up founder from the Silicon Valley, along with Author Britto and David Schwartz two early Bitcoin adopters created Ripple Labs with one of their first seed investors being Jesse Powell, the founder of Kraken. McCaleb later left Ripple Labs and went on to create Stellar Lumens back in mid 2014.
Unlike their predecessor Bitcoin, both Ripple’s Xrp and Stellar Lumen’s STR ~ now XLM were both premined coins. Ripple was Venture Capital funded taking the Top Down approach to adoption while Stellar took the Bottom Up community approach to adoption and launched with an airdrop of 3,000 STRs to all Facebook accounts that signed up on their website to claim the STRs.
China first dipped their feet into bitcoin from 2013–2015. At that time their primary involvement was the emergence Jihan Wu’s Bitmain along with pockets of small local and regional bitcoin mining farms with the outlier being a young entrepreneur name Justin Sun along with another individual name Yuhao who became the ambassadors for Ripple Lab in China. These two tech savvy young entrepreneurs helped to launch and manage two Ripple Gateways ~ Ripple China and Ripple CN for Ripple Labs. Justin Sun later founded his own project Tron Foundation by launching one of the most successful IEO selling out in less than 34 seconds on a new and upcoming super exchange by the name of Binance which was founded by then Ex-CTO of OkCoin named Changpeng Zhao, better known today as CZ. Hence China was put on the crypto map and truly became a force to be reckoned with in the crypto space along with the ICO boom of 2016–2018. This was then followed by South Korea crypto hype at the tail end of the last cycle in the early part of 2017. We believe that the South East Asia region will play a big role during our next crypto cycle. Our approach is to first build strong communities in this region.
The second reason why we will be focusing on growing our community in Vietnam is because their high demographic of unbanked and underserved population aligns with our vision. Vietnam is currently where China was 10 years ago in terms of their economy and technology sectors. According to the World Bank’s ~ The Little Data Book of Financial Inclusion Report” published April 2018, “approximately 69% of adults in Vietnam are unbanked.” Of the 97 million citizens, there are approximately 50 million people that are unbanked.
Additionally we will be partnering with 3–4 large blockchain/crypto communities in Vietnam.
To welcome our Vietnamese community members we will be launching “Red Envelope ~ Li Xi” ~ Airdrop and Bounty campaigns for our partners from these blockchain/crypto communities in Vietnam.
