Sign In

Mikk Maal

Building the most entertaining educational platform in crypto

Mikk Maal is the founder of CoinBeats, a company based in Estonia. He has a background in technology and entrepreneurship, having studied at Tallinna Tehnikaülikool (Tallinn University of Technology). Mikk has built a network of over 500 connections on LinkedIn, indicating a strong presence in the professional community. His work at CoinBeats suggests a focus on innovations related to cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.

Highlights

May 21 · linkedin

What do you think is a better alternative to points programs that protocols have been running as a go-to-market strategy?

Points = hope that whatever you get exceeds reality and takes away the necessity to promise anything concrete from the protocol pov.

Points also enable protocols that will never ever reach big FDV to incentivise maximum amount of users to partake in their program because "users" hope that maybe it pays off.

There's a lot of chatter atm about huge launch FDVs and there are no buyers for those coins as there's no upside. Upside is already captured in the private market.

So, whether you reward users with tokens directly, or use points, both require huge FDV to reward hundreds of thousands of wallets participating in the activation program. So either it's ridiculous FDV so everyone gets decent amount of tokens in dollar value, and dump it to the market because there are no buyers at these prices and tokens plummet (as the data suggests), or you launch with more reasonable FDV and give less tokens as rewards and people will be pissed that your points program was a scam.

IMO points or no points, the activation program should simply be capped if you want to make people happy and understand that the goal is not to maximize the quantity of interactions with the audience, but the quality of people you get in.

So the issue is not that "points are bad", it's because the activation programs are designed with the goal to show as big unique wallet count as possible to raise another round or to justify the launch valuation or create the fomo.

Worthy consideration is having a points program that gives users an option to buy the token at certain favorable valuations. You'd still filter out users that have at least some money (so maybe they also use the protocol in the future), and you'd be able to keep the mystery of what tier option you'll be able to get.

🤔

Nov 22 · linkedin

Binance was given a $4bn fine by the DOJ yesterday. CZ, the CEO and founder of Binance, stepped down.

CZ built the biggest and the most dominant crypto exchange. According to Coingecko, Binance did $14.5bn in trading volume in the last 24 hours.

The US regulators have been trying to take down Binance for a long time. It's still a bit unclear to me why CZ and Binance agreed to the settlement, considering that the US is and has been just a fraction of their business.

Maybe CZ just wanted out. He said in his statement that he hasn't had a vacation for 6,5 years. This is a long time in an industry where you have relentless competition, never-ending battles with regulators, and a cult following closely monitoring everything you do and say.

Whatever the reason, it's the end of an era.

There is something that bothers me about the whole thing. The DOJ made a statement that Binance intentionally caused the liquidity crisis at FTX that played a role in the loss of nearly $10b in customer funds. The $4b settlement will be added directly to the recovered assets fund of the FTX.

Nothing against users getting their money back, but will they try to spin the whole story that the FTX CEO Sam who stole the money to donate to his favourite politicians wasn't a bad guy after all and it was CZ and Binance who caused the FTX collapse?

They have already tried that once, and I am pretty sure they'll do that again.

Related Questions

What is CoinBeats' main focus or product?
How did Mikk Maal start his career in the tech industry?
What are some notable projects Mikk Maal has worked on at CoinBeats?
How has Mikk Maal's education at Tallinna Tehnikaülikool influenced his career?
What are the key achievements of CoinBeats under Mikk Maal's leadership?
Mikk Maal
Mikk Maal, photo 1
Mikk Maal, photo 2
Add to my network

Location

Estonia