In the past quarter, the crypto market has seen its greatest hit, where one of the biggest crypto exchange FTX has gone insolvent.
It has caused a chain of reaction across the board, as many companies has their crypto funds parked with FTX.

Many Companies has went insolvent but for us :
“We are solvent, we are still making progress and your funds are SAFU “

Not only blockchain companies were affected, tech companies as a whole were all affected, Where some have seen to plummet as much as 99%.

With that much fear in the market, we understand the next 1 or 2 years will be a tough battle for our team, thus we have tried to keep our team as lean as possible to make sure we have ample runway.

Good news is countries all around the world are opening up as immunity against Covid has improved a lot. We forecast that traveling will be back to 90% levels before Covid, although looming recession, due to multiple rate hikes, might counter this expectation.

We are going to make a certain shift in key decisions to ensure that our company continues to grows for the next 1 to 2 year.

But before we share let us look at what we have accomplished the past quarter:

1. Beta TripCandy Platform

We are at the phase of trying to get a decent product market fit, which is why there were a lot of minor alterations of the platform along the way to reach the optimal user experience. We are moving steadly and achieve the stats below.

Current achieved summary :
Average Monthly Active Users – 1k
Average Daily Active Users – 35
Highest number of users in a single day – 77
Most booking done in a single day – 3
Highest ticket booking – $1,488.83
Our total revenue for 2022 Approx. – $35k

We believe next year will be a better year and that we hope to aim 5x to 20x our revenue growth regardless of the tough market.

2. Release of Crypto Payment

We already have the existing credit card payment method and now we have release our Crypto Payment.
We are accepting the main crypto currencies such as BTC, ETH, USDT, USDC and BNB.

We have included complete wavier for transactions fee for any payment made in crypto.

We have not included CANDY as a payment option due to a possible change in network – Read further on company shift (Part B) below.

why?

Typical Credit card and debit cards have transaction fees ranging from 3.4% + 0.50 to as high as 4.9% with currency conversion.
With crypto payment, we are able to bypass most of this painful transactions and save on transactions fees.
This cost saving we received are then passed on back to our customers as discounts (waivers on fees).

3. Launch of Staking Pool

We see a lot of people staking on our platform, since our release of our staking program, this has shown us good retention of user using our platform and having faith in our project.

Here is our current staking summary:

Staked to date: 62,377,457.862 CANDY
Total CANDY rewarded: 229,811.677 CANDY 

We foresee this growing gradually the next couple of months, as well as doing possible fundraise through private purchase of our token.

Why?

We are constantly growing our network in the web2 and web3 space and have been considering of raising funds on equity, token or both if required.
Reason why we are not raising at the moment is due to our possible forecasted revenue further below in point 5.

4. Launch of Blog page

We have launched our blog which is one of our vital go-to market strategy for long term and sustainable growth.
We have been focusing additional technical resource on building the technical side of our blog to ensure we achieve a high Search Engine Score.

Current Blog summary:
Total Content – 20 (12 more pending backlog)
SEO score – 91 to 100% (depending on the blog content)
Total word count – 50k+ Words 

We are looking to produce an average 16 to 25 content per month which should eventually bring our traffic from 1k a month to 10k – 20k by the following quarter. This would overall boost revenue and bookings.

5. Closed the year with $35K in revenue

Even though we have launched our platform near the end of the last quarter, although unexpected, we managed to generate some revenue. It may still be quite little at this early stage but this is a good step and progress for our team.

Revenue generated for 2022 – $35k

Comparatively, it still does not cover our current monthly burn rate but it has helped us get a good understanding of what we can really achieve the following year for 2023. We are looking to ramp up our revenue and see what kind of confidence we can get for our company from external investors ( VCs, Family office, Angels ). We want to be careful of how we dilute our holdings and how their vote is inline with our company’s vision to ensure stability in the long run.

6. More partnership

We have continued to build more partnership with major players in the market and direct supply chain hotels.
This allows us to continue growing our hotel inventory world wide.

Current Inventory: 1,000,000+ Unique Hotels
Partners : 10+

We are still finding a lot of technical challenges in integrating that many suppliers and is expected to be done by this quarter.

This are our overall summary of what we have achieved this quarter for our small team of 9 members.

 

Now for key decisions to ensure that our company continues to grow.

We are looking to increase our revenue rapidly and possibility of raising further funding.
However there are some requirements needed in order to level up.

A) We are releasing a new Logo for the company

We will be differentiating our token design from our TripCandy Company Logo, this allows us to communicate our company more professionally as well as allow us to easily integrate with our partners. The token design would still be kept the same as the old logo.

We will be sharing more info on how this affects our brand positioning over the next few months.

B) We may need to move to a new network or be on multiple network.

Currently we are on BSC which is where we first launch our project, however due to the large number of scams on this network, it is not well received for further fund raising. We have been recommended heavily to move to polygon. But this shift is a big move on our tech and it will take at least 1 month to 3 months to make this shift.
We will try to do this shift only when we have confirmed or need to fund raise.

C) We may halt trading on pancakeswap (DEX) and only open on probit (CEX).

We have noted that DEX has a fix formula that restrict and limit the growth of token price and most or all major projects that have grown very significantly heavily relies on CEX only, where DEX volume is less then 3% or even 0.5% of their total volume. In short, we may go majority CEX down the road.

A full CEX model allows actual human psychological demand and supply to set the fair market price, instead of a DEX which is restricted by algorithm.

D) We may use part of the Liquidity pool for Short term Cashflow.

As we will be halting and migrating the liquidity pool to CEX, this require some time, thus we will be utilizing some of its liquidity to grow and scale our company faster. CEX will still be open on Probit but the liquidity pool will not be maintained by us. However, we will lock in the price of our token on pancake so that when we relaunch on polygon or Ethereum, it will be based on that locked USDT price.

Any major changes with regards to liquidity pool, will be announced 30 days prior to any actions for transparency.
Holders can make a decision to grow and stay with us.
However, take noted if we have received a funding round this will be announced only during the change in Liquidity pool.

Why?
This is to reward our holders, where a part of the funding round funds committed will be used to buy / acquire CANDY token ,  increasing our token price to a certain margin, it maybe 2x or 3x of the locked USDT price.

Thank you for your kind attention to our quarterly company update.
We look forward to bringing you more accomplishments down the road.
~Stay SAFU