Update

Update

Message to Investors,

Intro 

Dear Funganomics Investors and Friends,

I firstly would like to thank all of you for your unwavering support over the past year. It has truly been a troubling time for the blockchain sector on many fronts. Issues not seen before. 

You may not be aware of the extent or specifics of these events, so I thought this would be an ideal opportunity to clarify some of the macro industry context and also provide several Funganomics project updates. 

Sector Issues 

The broader problems that occurred in our industry during the last year or so resulted in challenges for both investors and projects in similar and yet very different ways.

Investors have lost significant amounts of funds across a variety of projects. Luna, FTX, Celsius and many more…. $100 billion, at least. either totally vanished or being held for 5-10 years.

We witnessed first hand the panic surrounding the issues with FTX and investors, worried about leaving or even transferring funds through any centralised exchanges. There is no doubt that, unfortunately, this will continue in the future given the way the exchanges have been developed and implemented. 

If investors were worried about transferring funds on major CEX’s, you can only imagine our views regarding launching on mid tier exchanges. For such a large exchange to fall, it’s sent shockwaves across the sector and within all levels of platforms.  

The effects extend further, as we have seen recently that DyDx (a derivatives platform) planned on unlocking $150 million of early investors’ tokens, which has now been put back to late 2023. Another example of current market sentiment which is underpinned by fear and uncertainty.

This sentiment has also been proven to be true very recently with the launch of the Porsche NFT collection launch, which appears to have been pulled for the time being due to a mixture of marketing and market sentiment issues. The same collection a year ago would likely have sold out in seconds with very little marketing, given Porsche’s huge following on socials. So I tend to lean more towards sentiment as the primary factor for it being shelved. 

This is, in essence why Funganomics have decided to wait to launch projects, whilst also being able to improve our products behind the scenes. This strategy of patience, caution and persistence has definitely worked in our favour, although it certainly would have been an easier process if the sector problems had not occurred when they did and to the extent they have. It is important though to remember that the problems our team and I have faced are far less than the people that have lost their life savings.

Just on a personal note, I simply do not like it. Too many scams and too many innocent people left holding the bag.  It is not positive for the long term health of the sector and frankly it is a real shame. 

Fund-raising 

The primary challenge for Funganomics has without a doubt been sentiment, which has made it more difficult to raise funds and launch products, through retail or larger investment vehicles. This is an area we recognize is critical for our ongoing sustainability and, as such, we have reinforced our capabilities by adding new advisors within the team. Among other benefits, doing so has helped us gain a slew of contacts and access to new funding sources and mechanisms. We have received investments recently, with more investors slated to come on board shortly.

We ideally wanted to raise funds predominantly through retail investors, which would go against the grain of large companies and VCs making the biggest gains, potentially letting them enter afterwards regardless of what the SEC thinks, says or perceives as “consumer protection”. Not that it is a problem for Funganomics directly, but for US companies and US investors it certainly is. 

They have admitted the Howie test must be updated, as blockchain takes on a whole new era of economies. Global regulation of some kind is required long term. Fines for networks and social media platforms would be a seemingly easy way to offer some initial protection at least. 

Not all social media channels have the same issues either, CT has a community that cares not to say there isn’t problems whereas other platforms are the wild wild west. Hunting grounds for new gullible investors. FB is really bad likewise You Tube and Reddit have similar problems, solved with a channel cull or social network fines. This solves Billions being lost to scams. 

Due to the nature of our project, we still want to keep with this thesis of retail investors leading the way, although realistically this philosophy will need to be balanced between larger private investors and retail investors. 

Nobody could have predicted the issues that have been coming to the sector, plus the additional global issues which have further impacted Funganomics and everyone else. What we have done is provide some technical updates through our white paper so you can see some of what has been progressing within our ecosystem. Although I recognise the updates may not be intuitive to everyone, our new website with clearer messaging will also help illustrate where we are headed. We will also prepare a more simplified presentation in the short term. 

We have been able to advance existing products and also build additional ecosystem products. Products that will help solve problems within blockchain, and the majority of what we build will follow this ethos. 

What’s next?

New Website 

We are just about to kick-off a Funganomics website redesign, something that will clarify our messaging, giving new investors a better understanding of our ecosystem through videos, presentations and various media. 

Community Building 

We plan a whole series of community promotions over the coming months, in anticipation of our platform launch. You’ll see the numbers in the communities rise. We’ll have community managers to help manage questions with more periodic updates as we continue building. 

New NFT Platform & Products

We do not plan on launching any NFT products until late into 2023, likely Q4.  This decision comes down to the reasons noted above regarding market/investor sentiment. The good news is that delaying the NFT platform launch provides ample runway to build a community over the coming months.

The new Funganomics platform and products go well beyond our initial ideas and will appeal to both current and new NFT collectors. The team will continue to build features and functions throughout development and post-launch. It is a dynamic environment even now, which is why it is better to be presenting products. 

We will, however, market the platform beforehand, build up our community, and there will be some great opportunities for investors during this time. 

We are changing our Funganomics characters from 2D to 3D, to enhance the playability and realism of the gaming experience.  We intend to have 40-50 characters in total over the series of our games and various environments. 

We have a whole series of collections to launch outside of our characters, with many more before the platform launch. We’ll provide more details nearer the time. 

Digital Wallet 

We have also been working on our own digital wallet, as mentioned it in the WP briefly. We see time and time again investors’ wallets being drained. We want to provide a safe environment for investors to store their assets. 

We have our own ideas for future functions for digital wallets, which were unable to be implemented using external wallets. Our ecosystem platforms will give people a choice of wallets to use, and this is something personal to us as a company, wanting to build more features and functions around security and usability. Given our ecosystem, it just makes sense. We’ll be happy to share code with other wallet providers as it provides value to the larger blockchain security space.

Metaverse 

We are looking to start the build of our first Metaverse shortly, it will represent our first major project with our ecosystem. It is a complex development effort, requiring substantial planning, design work and intricate detailing, across the entirety of the build, not to mention the economics will add to the challenge. 

Our first Metaverse will be a 10SQ Kilometer, custom-built environment. Unreal Engine 5 and Unity enabling multi device gaming. Believe it or not, this is actually the “easy” part for us!

We will ultimately end up designing and building a series of environments. 7 foundational Metaverses in total, with more fun and excitement as the overall ecosystem comes together. 

We have had discussions regarding partnership launches which have gone very well. Just some loose ends to tie up during the weeks ahead. We clearly have the same visions for Web 3 gaming as our partners, which is always a good starting point. 

Our partners typically would not work with start ups like us, as they have a history of working with games such as Fortnight and other big gaming titles.  But they like our vision and technologies, and they can see the benefits of what we will achieve within gaming. 

The partnerships will see us be able to launch games with a big impact, making us key players within the Web 3 gaming space. Helping our communities and economies grow. 

Decentralised Exchange 

Relative to what I discussed at the beginning of this update, we unfortunately foresee the same problems happening again and again with centralised exchanges. The current set up and problems of centralised exchanges is that they act as the bank, stock exchange, market maker (in most cases), launchpad, VC’s and casino’s all rolled into one. Given the volatility of blockchain, this is a recipe for future disasters, perhaps not for all exchanges, but for sure we will see it happen again in many instances. 

Funganomics want to build something different that takes into consideration the points mentioned above and gives investors a new way to buy, trade and sell currencies. Without the worries and fears of losing assets. 

We also recognise that a vast majority of investors have no issue with the current models and thats ok too. Some of our products will not be for everyone.

It’s been refreshing to see centralised exchanges embrace decentralised exchanges as we’ve seen listings appear recently. It’s good to have balance as the sector grows.

We’ve completed the initial specification work with economics and feature listings. We’ll provide more details as the project progresses. Developers are working on it as we speak. 

Summary 

None of this message is meant to be perceived as negative, it’s actually positive because it highlights problems with regulation, models of blockchain, previous consequences and further details on our ecosystem. 

The great news we’ve actually taken this into consideration building our ecosystem, giving the us a far greater stability for success and growth.

Thank you again for your support of Funganomics and the confidence you continue to place in me personally and our extremely hard-working and committed team. 

Very best,

Jeremy Roberts

Founder & CEO Funganomics