NeuCoin is an up-and-coming altcoin that aims to spread awareness about cryptocurrency through games and community building. Recently, the team behind the digital currency made a few announcements on the future of the project. Most notably, the NeuCoin Foundation will be destroying 2.2 billion of the coins in its reserves, decreasing the supply of the currency by 50%.
Also read: NeuCoin Makes Moves With Facebook Game and Tipping Platform Launch
NeuCoin Continues to Make Progress
Dan Kaufman, co-founder of the NeuCoin Project, sat down with Bitcoinist.net to talk about these recent developments. Kaufman explained the details of the supply decrease, its upcoming Facebook game, and gave us an update on the existing projects the team launched in recent months.
Tell us a little bit about NeuCoin’s main goals, what does this project hope to accomplish in the long-run?
Very simply, we hope to be the first cryptocurrency that is held by tens of millions of mainstream consumers. NeuCoin was created for this single purpose by a team who have previously started several consumer services that reached this kind of scale. Once we reach our user adoption goals, we are excited to see what kind of ecosystem will develop around a massive community of mainstream users.
You’ve been seeing quite a bit of growth lately, want to tell us about that?
Sure! Three months after launching our first consumer apps, we’ve hit 300,000 users – and the growth rate is now over 250,000 new users per month. We have experimented with many different ways of distributing a few free NeuCoins to users and we’ve learned a lot from this. The biggest lesson is that fraud is a massive challenge. We also think we’ve arrived at the “magic formula” for NeuCoin to quickly reach many millions of users – partner with big media sites who can give their users one or two NeuCoins per day as a loyalty/retention tool. This is what NeuCoin has done with Jango and it’s acquiring nearly 8,000 users PER DAY for NeuCoin.
Some critics have argued that these aren’t “active” users, or even “real” users compared to holders of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, Dash, etc, as in they don’t know exactly how cryptocurrency works or they’re not sending their NeuCoins around or trading them on Bittrex. We accept the critics’ argument here. NeuCoin users for the most part didn’t pay for their coins or mine them. And most NeuCoin users aren’t fixated on their market value, and don’t trade them back and forth on crypto exchanges.
But to us, that’s the point. NeuCoin is just this fun, easy online token held by a ton of regular consumers who don’t necessarily care about cryptocurrency — yet. To them, NeuCoin is just this internet token that appears in a game they like playing or a music site they like using, and with very little effort they have a balance. Right now they can use the token in a game or tip them to artists. Earn some more by winning a round. Soon there’s another game they can use the same token. Once there are millions of users, there will be more and more things they can do with them. It’s all about size and network effect.
You mentioned in your email to us that you’re planning on reducing the supply of NeuCoins by 50% over the course of 3 years. How do you plan on accomplishing that goal? Do current NeuCoin users have to worry about losing their coins?
No user have to worry about their coins getting lost! What’s happening is the NeuCoin Foundation will destroy 2.2 billion of the 3.2 billion coins that it holds. And this will actually happen in the next few weeks, not over the course of the next three years (though long term the total supply will be as low as 10 billion rather than 100 billion as previously projected, due to less proportional mining by the foundation). In NeuCoin (like in Peercoin) all coins spent as transaction fees are destroyed rather than given to miners. Hence, the technical method by which the coins will be destroyed is through transactions made by the NeuCoin Foundation that are accorded massive transaction fees. The transactions and destroyed coins will be clearly visible on the NeuCoin blockchain.
Bitcoinist reported on your Solitaire Racer and Jango Internet Radio projects a few months ago. How have those things been going, have they done as well as you expected?
Solitaire Racer is doing fine. It has 80,000 users over three months which is good, though not out of the park. But it has been a great learning experience. The Jango partnership has been the home run. Jango has not only been generating 8,000 new NeuCoin users per day – but more importantly – it is proving out the model for how NeuCoin will be able to partner with other large media sites. By giving their users free NeuCoins, the partner sites get increased conversion and retention rates. And NeuCoin captures the partner’s user base.
Any more big changes or projects you’d like to tell us about?
Well, we’re hard at work on NeuCoin’s second Facebook game, called SongQuest. This is a music trivia game, so will hopefully play well to the hundreds of thousands of Jango listeners who already hold NeuCoins.
But the most important “big project” over the next few months is to keep growing the user base at a quarter million a month through the Jango partnership. Meanwhile, this program is being optimized to give Jango even higher lifts to their user conversion and retention rates. This will help us bring on other distribution partners, who will want to see a solid case for how NeuCoin integration helps them, getting their users to sign up, and come back to their site more often.
Looking further out, after we have another 2 or 3 major distribution partners and are marching towards 10 million users, the focus will shift to supporting the development of the NeuCoin ecosystem. Assuming that we can build up a mass market of NeuCoin holders, we have no doubt that all kinds of companies will start offering them all kinds of products and services.
NeuCoin seems to be constantly working on new ways to expose people to cryptocurrency. Kaufman firmly believes that his team’s casual method of integrating their currency into popular forms of entertainment is one of the best ways to teach people about this new technology. As time moves forward, Kaufman and the NeuCoin project hopes to cultivate a large cryptocurrency user base.
What do you think about NeuCoin’s progress? Let us know in the comments below!
Images courtesy of NeuCoin.