Poloniex Delisting, Legal Risks Memo & Exchange Expansion Plans

Poloniex Delisting

Yesterday, a number of members on our team received the following email from Poloniex Exchange about Peercoin being delisted, along with a number of other crypto projects:

First, it should be stated that we are on good relations with Poloniex and they have been an exchange partner of Peercoin for the past 5 years, since April 8th, 2014. We also have close contact with their technical team. However in spite of this long established relationship we found out about this delisting along with everyone else.

We are currently in the process of reaching out to their management team so we can better understand what factors have led to this decision. At this point however, all we can do is speculate as to the reason why Poloniex has taken this action.

Open a Support Ticket

We encourage everyone who supports Peercoin to reach out to Poloniex by opening a support ticket and asking them to reconsider their position. Explain your support for Peercoin and why you think it would be a mistake for us to part ways. Also ask them to get in touch with our team at foundation@peercoin.net so we can discuss the matter and negotiate a solution.

Regardless of the outcome, the Peercoin Team will continue on its current mission of modernizing Peercoin’s protocol as communicated in our April Monthly Update…

Exchange Expansion Plans

In addition to our development work, the Peercoin Foundation also recently obtained a legal risks memo from a US based attorney at law that we hired to estimate the position and the legal treatment of Peercoin under U.S. Federal securities law. A digest of this memo has been provided here for unofficial and public use: https://docs.peercoin.net/#/peercoin-legal-risks-memo. You may refer to this document for educational and informative purposes.

Modern exchanges today require this legal memo upon listing to show proof that Peercoin is not classified as a security. Now that we have officially obtained this legal memo, there is nothing preventing the Peercoin Foundation from being able to list at more liquid exchanges. We are currently in the process of determining which exchanges we will apply to list at in our upcoming expansion efforts. Please also consider donating either PPC or BTC to the foundation fund so we can pay various listing fees at different exchanges.

Of course we also hope that Poloniex will reconsider their position and remain an established partner of Peercoin as they have for the past five years. Our team will do its best to continue reaching out to them and we appreciate any help the community can give in doing the same.

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I sent a message in a private/customer capacity, and received the following:

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Thanks for your feedback and we will be sure to pass this information along to our product team.

We delist assets as part of our mission to provide customers with the most innovative projects that fuel the industry and to ensure the assets meet the high standards customers deserve, which is why we created the Circle Asset Framework.

Under the Circle Asset Framework, we consider listing or delisting assets based on whether the asset has sufficient trading volume, whether it aligns with the core tenets of the crypto community, whether it is backed by robust technology, whether it creates real value for a meaningful number of customers, and whether it’s backed by a strong, experienced team. In addition, we also consider other factors such as new guidance from regulators.

For additional information on why we make these decisions, please see our Delisting Policy. If you have any other questions, please let us know and we will be happy to help.

Best,
Poloniex Support Team

Delisted coins today vs. BTC:

Steem Dollar: -7% (but seems to be stablecoin pegged to USD so does not count here)
Peercoin: -11%
Syscoin: -16%
Burst: -34%
Counterparty: -41%
Namecoin: -47%
Huntercoin: -72%

With BTC/USD today +8%, that delisting news has cost peercoin only 3% of it’s value.
Shows how wrong their decision is. Good news for Bittrex.

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Regarding their listing criteria:

Aligns with the core tenets of the crypto community - PPC ticks.
Backed by robust technology - tick.
Creates real value for meaningful number of customers - PPC tick on real value, although maybe not “meaningful number of customers”, see below.
Backed by a strong, experienced team - tick.
New guidance from regulators - tick.

Maybe the sticking point is sufficient trading volume and “meaningful number of customers” but, even here, PPC has taken steps with the market making.

Hello, friends. I just saw the Poloniex delisting news. Hopefully it gets reversed, because I think Peercoin deserves to stay. I’m still rooting for it.

EDIT: I’m going to launch a video on this.

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What will you be arguing?

The video is simply news coverage, rather than an argument. I posted it in a separate thread: Poloniex delisting makes the news on One Minute Crypto

Very Simple reason:

  1. No trade, how can Phoniex makes money? it’s a trade platform not Wikipedia.
  2. Few users, low popularity, who care PPC, the community?
  3. No high profit (like btc, ltc, eth,eos), how to attract people?

Still someone said that PPC has good profit, Suppose one person bought PPC with $5 around Jan, 2014 with a little bit money, now he still loss, if he bought any “shit” coin except very few coins like PPC,NMC at that time and hold till now, he is rich now! In the only one Peercoin community of China(since 2013) is currently almost closed , noboddy would talk about PPC.If you join BTC,LTC, ETH,EOS,BSV,BCH,DASH,IOST,BTS,STEEM,NXT… any community, you will find there are so many “believers”!
We do respect the fist POS coin-Peercoin, but will she go to the history only or launch some value application of reality?

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Peercoin has had the longest and most fair distribution of coins, which is essential to POS and something you can’t easily replicate.

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You are correct, the past can’t be replicated, Peeercoin’s story can be retrospected since long long ago, let tell the story to the people : once upon a time…

I think it is possible to restore Peercoin to its proper place in the market or I wouldn’t be here right now. And it’s important that the team work on the issues that you pointed out so that we can attract people here again. However the beginning of that restoration process starts with technology that is actually current and exciting. Peercoin is not fresh and exciting in its current form.

Understand that we had a period of about 2.5 years (2014-2016) where very little development took place. Sunny King had not focused on building a proper team to replace him when he eventually started focusing more on his career. As a result, Peercoin naturally fell behind everything else.

Only in 2016 did we start Peercoin back up again by forming a new team. 2016 and 2017 were focused on team building and adjusting to our new roles. Even then, development was slow because we relied on volunteers who were working in their spare time.

2018 however is where things started to slide into sharper focus. Before the Foundation, we were lucky to release a core network upgrade in the span of 2 years. Thanks to the Peercoin Foundation though we just released v0.7 and v0.8 is soon to follow after that. Never before in the history of Peercoin have we had a higher rate of development than we do in the current moment.

Peercoin hasn’t been current with Bitcoin since before 2014, and yet with financial help from the Foundation we are on the verge of seeing that once again. And once we do, that is when the real fun stuff starts happening again. That is when we begin work on integrating Peercoin with all the fresh and exciting technology out there and bring interest back to this blockchain again.

It has taken a long time for us to get into our current position, but we’re here now and we’re moving forward. We have great plans for the future and an exchange with decreasing use like Poloniex is not going to stop us. Do your best to hang in there through the dark times, believe in what the team is doing, lend a helping hand, and things may turn out well for us in the end.

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Appreciate all you have done for the community.

awesome crisis proceeding. and today I saw ppc is in good performance.
And Sunny king and his partner created Peercoin in 2012, his role was famous at the beginning, and he never has forgotten Peercoin community although he is busy.
Good wish on PPC

Yes that’s true. Sunny still works with the team in an advisory capacity, helping with various things when we ask him to. He is also a supporter of the Peercoin Foundation, and from what I can see he is happy with its performance. By bringing up Sunny in my previous post, my point was to establish how utterly dependent the community had been on him at that period of time, something we’ve been evolving past for a while now with the Team and Foundation.

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I’m shocked that you write here your coin was worth $ 9 at the peak now it is at the bottom and who needs it? people have invested a lot of money in your project and you have received zero profits only and you can collect money supply year after year and it’s right that people have nothing to remove you from fooling around to find other projects that can resist and move on but you just can’t made for people in general

Here’s the unvarnished truth from someone who has mined and held since 2013. PPC cannot just hang its hat on being the oldest and first staking coin. It hasn’t held value. It’s %1 reward for staking has never hit %1 in my experience. It takes holding the coins in a wallet for 30 days before you can even begin to stake. That is a huge disincentive to anyone trading it. PPC has an identity crisis. It needs to make itself relevant again. Maybe increase the staking rewards and lower the holding time til staking can occur.

I’m sorry that you’ve had trouble staking due to trading, but staking is not meant to be a mechanism for profit. It merely exists to provide stakeholders with an incentive to produce new blocks. The network doesn’t need every coin to stake in order to be secure, so naturally some will choose to let their coins sit and stake while others will use them, trade them, or invest with them.

Increasing the staking reward will only exacerbate the problem for people who don’t stake. Read this.

I also disagree that Peercoin has an identity crisis. I think it used to have an identity crisis, but over time we’ve gained a much better understanding of Peercoin.

In the early years for example we used to advertise staking rewards on the website as one of the main benefits of using the network. I believe this was a mistake. As mentioned above, staking is merely necessary for security. We never should have placed such a huge focus on earning rewards or interest.

I think the updated text of peercoin.net does a much better job of explaining Peercoin’s identity and purpose. It’s a cryptocurrency network with efficient security. Because of this it is inexpensive to operate and security can be sustained indefinitely.

This allows the Peercoin network to be relied upon as a mechanism to securely store value over time (longer than other networks with costly security protocols), whether that value is fiat wealth stored in PPC or a document or some other data stored as a hash on the blockchain like Perpera allows us to do now.

The point is that in 100 years, the data stored on the Peercoin blockchain will still be secure because that security can be provided cheaply. I can’t be as confident that Bitcoin will remain secure due to how costly it is to maintain. Peercoin gives peace of mind that your data will always remain reliably secure and available in the future.

What we need to do is continue to expand the uses of the Peercoin blockchain like what we’ve done with Perpera and PeerAssets.

I actually recently wrote an updated short description for Peercoin that we will be using from now on…

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Respectfully, the concerns and positions outlined on the economic philosophy behind the coin may be trying to envision a 100 year egalitarian perspective, but more immediate concerns are the lack of market interest in the coin which affects its retention of value, and a lack of motivation for those who do have them to mint and contribute to the network’s stability. I never see more than a few dozen nodes on the network. I don’t see a 3 to 4 percent minting rate doing anything but bringing additional savers to the network. Non-minters must not be unfairly disadvantaged by those who decide to mint? I really disagree with that position. The approaches used here are trying to be as equally fair in value to the person who has a coin right now doing nothing to support the coin to the person who has a coin 50 years from now who has. That is idealistic. Yes we do not want centralization of ownership due to inflation, but we are getting centralization instead due to deflation. This coin is currently teetering at 40 cents. Hardly anyone wants it. Providing minting rate better than just the rate of destruction would be a step in the right direction. The 10% rate scenario in the posted position is a strawman. Opposing a 3-4 percent rate would be a better argued position. I have a fair amount of coins. I fire up my wallet once a month, mint a couple days, hopefully receive a fraction of a coin and shut it down. Sorry, but it’s kind of hard to get excited about that. Maybe that’s all PPC wants to be. I have a Poloniex account and I’m still holding my coins, but I’m not surprised if a market decides to drop the coin from its book due to lack of trading interest. Cheers.

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The PoS inflation rate is a critical network parameter, and increasing it affects attacks like stake grinds and N@S attacks, so we should be careful about increasing it flat out without also attempting to improve the continuous mint rate/difficulty. That said, rfc0011 attempts to do just that, and would result in a 5x mint reward at the currently low mint difficulty. Do you have any thoughts on this proposal?

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I do agree with your concern about low market interest, don’t get me wrong. It’s definitely a problem that we need to work on correcting. My disagreement is just with your proposed solution for generating interest. Plenty of other PoS networks have tried different minting rates. I’m not sure whether it has helped any of them remain relevant though.

In my mind the lack of market interest comes down to a number of different factors. Here are some off the top of my head…

  1. Lack of marketing.
  2. The forced shutdown of BTC-e, which was Peercoin’s primary market. This resulted in a decrease of exchange liquidity.
  3. The lack of a legal face for Peercoin, which is important for interacting with other legal entities such as exchanges. This lack of a legal organization prevented Peercoin from being able to expand to other exchanges after BTC-e was shut down. This was rectified however in 2018 with the start of the Peercoin Foundation and as I mentioned in the OP, we finally received our legal risks memo that allows us to officially apply for listing.
  4. The community’s previous dependence on its founder Sunny King and his absence starting in 2014-2015. As I mentioned in this post above, the new team did not form until 2016 and development did not start to speed up until the formation of the Foundation in 2018. The low market interest in Peercoin is most likely heavily influenced by the fact that over the past several years the team has simply been playing catch-up with Bitcoin. This type of development we’ve been doing is not very interesting or exciting to people or traders, but it is necessary. They want to see new innovations, which is not something we were able to focus on given how dated the protocol was. As I mentioned in my reply above though, now that Peercoin core development is nearly caught up we will have the time to start focusing on integrating fresh technology with the network, which will help increase interest. Perpera is only one example of a new use case for the Peercoin blockchain. Others will be introduced as we continue.

So I hope you see that there are a number of factors that have led us to our current position and that we’ve been doing what we need to in order to get things back on track. I don’t mean to list a bunch of excuses, but these are some critical things that have led us to the reality of our current situation. The Peercoin Foundation is an invaluable resource though and it has helped boost our progress over the past year. With the Foundation’s continued support, I’m hopeful that we can overcome our current difficulties and improve sentiment and interest.

By the way, have you seen this RFC? It’s not exactly what you’re asking for, but it’s something we’re considering and should help reward those minters who care enough to support the network…

Edit: Looks like Nagalim beat me to it, but he linked the GitHub RFC. Here is another link to the forum discussion…