A Closer Look at JSEcoin

The Good: JSECoin has developed a unique and creative way for mining cryptocurrency, which focuses on the web.  Using the power of a web browser, JSECoin can be mined by individuals through their browser; it can also be implemented into websites, making it a great source of revenue for website owners/operators. This approach should see viral growth with regards to the coin being mined.

The Bad: Although JSECoin has nailed the production side of the equation, my concern lies with the usability and the demand for the coin.  The team at JSECoin needs to focus on creating demand and usability for coin, otherwise we will have a bunch of people who love to mine the coins, but no-one interested in buying those coins. 

The Bottom Line:  We are very early in the JSECoin story, after all they're still in the midst of their ICO.  They are off to a running start, having created a very marketable solution for mining, but as mentioned above, they will need to start focusing their efforts on the flip side of the equation, otherwise the fate of this coin will be sealed. I believe this project has great potential and I will continue to follow and support their efforts via the mining solution, social sharing etc.

Learn more about JSECoin on their website: www.jsecoin.com

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As I've mentioned, I'm intrigued with the JSECoin project especially with their browser focused mining and the ability to be integrated into websites.  I believe this approach can easily go viral among website owners and bloggers who are looking for a creative way to increase website revenue.  This is great news for JSECoin, right? Well... Yes, but it's only half the equation.  In order for JSECoin to grow into a healthy solution able to thrive in the crypto space, there needs to be demand for the coin.  This will be achieved though marketplace solutions, partnerships etc.  To this point, I think the JSECoin team has focused their efforts on the mining solution and on the ICO.  I hope in the near future we start to see their efforts going more into partnership opportunities. Without a clear vision/direction for creating demand for the coin, the success of this project will be one sided.  I think this is further evidenced when looking at the current ICO numbers.  It's nearly a third of the way through their ICO completion, and they haven't even sold 1% of the available coins (5 Billion coins available during the ICO, with current sales of 23 Million coins). 

Because it's still very early in the JSECoin story, there's still time for the team to address the above concern, create partnerships, additional solutions, marketplaces etc. Because the clever mining solution, focused heavily on website owners/operators, I think this opens up a great opportunity to partner with businesses in that same realm such as domain name registrars, web servers/hosts, online storage etc.  This would create a sustainable ecosystem, where website owners can mine the coin, with the ability to use them within their industry.

The other point of interest, post-ICO, will be exchange listing(s).  This is essential for the growth of the project, and I'm intrigued to see which exchange(s) they're able to work with.

With my curiosity peaked, and my roller-coaster ride of emotions relating to the JSECoin project, I wanted to connect with the folks behind the scenes to learn more.  I reached out, and Mr.Matthew Vallis, Chief Strategy Officer, was very quick to respond and answer any and all questions that I had about the JSECoin project.  Here's a look at the Q&A interaction...


What prompted the JSE Coin project? How did it get started? 

James Bachini (CEO and co-founder) previously had some successful adtech companies which he scaled up from start-ups. He was interested in all things blockchain and tech, believed that the adtech industry was ripe for disruption and that blockchain tech was a great way to target the sector. With old school friends Dave Mallett, John Sim and ex-colleague Tracey Howard they formed a team and the company you see today is the result of just over a years work. The platform was originally launched as a proof of concept in August 2017. Primarily this was focused on publishers/webmasters but they included a browser-mining demo tool which picked up a lot of organic traction and went on to become the self-mining tool. 

Where does the name come from, JSEcoin? 

It stands for JavaScript Embedded Coin which is the technology that enables us to run code within a web browser.

You're currently in the midst of an ICO, can you provide an update as to what that process has been like and where you currently stand? 

The ICO is ongoing, very happy with getting a flawless audit on the smart contract. Investment has been a little slower than we would like, but due to our small budget, advertising is just ramping up and the funds raised so far have been primarily from the community we have grown over the last year. We have surpassed the soft cap we have set internally and we are all committed to the project. We have been in discussions with large investors and funds, it would be great to get as many people on board as possible. The ICO is not just an exercise in fundraising, it’s also a great opportunity to spread our brand, grow our reach and built our user base of publishers, personal miners, merchants and community members.

It seems that a big part of crypto success is dependent on being listed on exchanges. Have you already began discussions with exchanges? What is process like in terms of number of exchanges, timeframes etc? 

We have engaged with exchanges already and been open with our community regarding our plans with this. What we target will be dependant upon the level of funds that we raise, however the most likely outcome at this point is that we will target a single mid-level exchange initially with more to come online once we can grow our trading volumes. A key issue most projects face is that the crypto markets move quickly and exchanges move the goalposts often in listing requirements and the fees they require. Fees can range from free all the way up to ~$2million USD - as with all the decisions we make we will try to ensure that we are using investor funds where we think we can drive the most value.

Your solution provides an alternative source of revenue for website owners, obviously its traffic dependent, but can you quantify how much websites can earn through the JSE Coin solution? Can it potentially replace display advertising on websites? 

At current levels one of our largest publishers earns ~80k JSE per month. This is equivalent of around $500usd at the ICO price. If the value goes up then it will of course make this more profitable. Some webmasters will choose to supplement their ad revenues with JSE. Some will perhaps trial running only JSE and realise they get much more traffic as annoying ads have been removed. We believe that this is something that needs to be disrupted, ads can ruin the user experience and cause people to resultantly use other sites. User experience is key in today’s world, with the best companies in the world absolutely driven by it. We also offer a solution that allows a website visitor to choose to turn off their ad blocker or choose to run the jse code. Up to 50% of people use adblockers - this shows how annoyed people are by ads, plus how little webmasters value the user experience. We can help both sides, webmasters can monetise their content and users can get an ad free experience! But of course the remuneration needs to be at a level where this is suitably incentivised. One advantage the project has over Monero miners is once listed on exchange we can adjust mining distributions to balance demand and pricing on exchange. Companies like Coinhive have no influence over the underlying blockchain technology and this will give us a long-term advantage to dominate the publisher mining market. 

The web-based mining is very intriguing; what does the other side of the business look like... Where do you envision people will be able to spend JSE Coin? Are you already working on those partnerships/relationships?

We believe that JSEcoin is a perfect fit for e-commerce. We already have a small number of merchants up and running. At the moment as we are not listed in exchange it is more difficult to onboard merchants. We will push for more adoption post ICO as people will be able to exchange their coins for fiat. As transfers and payments are fee free this is great for micropayments in the short term, as banking and PayPal fees currently make this uneconomical. Jsecoin payments will only ever take up to 30 seconds to clear, often they are almost instant so this is also a major advantage. We will be launching our branded apparel shop shortly, the items sold here will only ever be available to buy with JSE and this will be a great example to merchants how they too can integrate JSE payments and in the future only accept JSE - as it’s so simple that anyone can use it (a major flaw of most cryptos) and the user experience is great. It is important we create additional value in addition to browser mining to establish long term demand on exchanges.

It seems to me there are a ton of potential partnership opportunities, such as browsers (browser plugin), WYSIWYG website builders/platforms, and more. What other partnerships/relationships have you already established or are you working on? 

Currently the ICO is taking up the majority of our time. However we do have plans to develop a number of partnerships within the commerce sector. Browser plugins and payments within the gaming sector and apps are also an area that we would like to develop. We also have plans to grow our enterprise solutions side of the business also. As we are powered by a browsers excess resources, we offer the greenest blockchain in the sector. This also means that costs are a fraction of our peers. We believe that this means we can not only be friendly to the environment, but also allows us to work with the SME sector to build blockchain solutions (helping the little guy get access to the latest tech - exactly what we are doing with our lottery based system of personal mining which means there is no advantage to server farms and everyone has an equal chance of earning JSE) - currently the cost of large peers renders this impossible. 

Once exchange listed each partnership and development we announce will boost stakeholder confidence, demand on exchange and ultimately token price. This will become a core focus of the project over the next few years.

Scaleability is a major point of contention throughout the crypto industry. How does scaleability apply to JSE Coin, and what are you doing to make your network effective and efficient. 

There are constant updates ongoing to the backend of the system. We pushed out a major update the week prior to the ICO in anticipation of more traffic. This included sharding of datastores to make private and public data more manageable, improvements to client/node communications and real-time mining updates via webscokets. We believe that the current setup would work efficiently with a significant increase in traffic. We do expect significant increases as the ICO progresses and once listed on exchanges / merchants come online. We will continue to build further infrastructure and improve the code. In the future we will have more manpower and this will be constantly monitored and plans will be updated as the project evolves. 

How does the 'Team Remuneration work? How/when is the team's compensation issued? The JSEcoin whitepaper suggests the team is compensated 5%, but it's based on the total 'hard cap' of coins (10 billion). As such, that's 500M coins... if these coins were issued at the conclusion of the ICO... that would mean the team would actually hold over 60% of the coins in circulation (200M in circulation + 100M in ICO & 500M to the team). 

5% of total cap is the lowest that I have seen from any project. There are 5 billion coins available in the ICO with the remainder to primarily reward miners over a 10 year period. 4% is allocated to the founders and you can see this via our blockchain explorer. The additional 1% is to remunerate advisors who are helping the project in a number of areas. When the project launched we started the blockchain with 20m JSE in each of the cofounders accounts. This was because it looked strange having zero circulation for the first few months but in hindsight this wasn't the smartest move because the funds have never been used but has opened us up to criticism because the founders currently hold a high percentage of the current distribution. Post-ICO we will remunerate the shareholders with up to 4% of the hard cap (this will include the funds already in the co-founders accounts). We don't believe there is any benefit to the founders having a large holding of the token distribution and if the ICO doesn't reach our goals then we may adjust the shareholder remuneration down but not up. If our long-term plans are to succeed then any more than 1% per individual would create more personal and project risk with little real usable reward. 

After the ICO concludes, what is the process for the remainder of the coins being issued? And once all the coins are in circulation, how does JSECoin and it's team members turn a profit? 

The coins not issued are to remunerate miners / webmasters over a 10 year period. In this timeframe we will have built a profitable company through our merchant tools and enterprise solutions offerings. We will have to reward miners in a different way when this cap is reached. At this point there is potential for some sort of transaction fees or alike. However it is our preference to keep transactions free if possible, so we will potentially pay miners in JSE that the company has bought from exchanges. This is a long way off at the moment but we will have detailed plans and options that we will discuss with our community before any decision is made (potentially voting by consensus which is a system we have on our work stack) 

What role has social media played in the development of the JSECoin community and what platforms are proving most successful? 

The primary channels for interaction with our community are telegram and discord, we have ~4K members in each and our community is quite active. Often the community come up with good suggestions, help find bugs with the system and promote the project via their own accounts on other social media platforms. We also have a presence on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Youtube, Steem.it and Medium. We’d like to grow our presence and grow our active community - social media has been a great way to grow our brand with minimal cost involved. We are very grateful to the support we have had from the JSE community who have been instrumental in getting the project to where we are now.

Where do you see JSECoin in 5-10 years? 

A household brand that has achieved mainstream adoption using ethical means, having made a significant difference to blockchains environmental footprint. Powers payments across the e-commerce world and known for being the company that made blockchain technology accessible to everyone through ease of use and great user experience. 

Any other points or developments you'd like to highlight? 

I think it’s important to highlight that the world is changing very quickly, the project has moved onto a much larger scale than was originally planned. This has happened because the team are able to foresee market changes, interpret likely outcomes and plan accordingly. 

This will continue to happen - it’s the teams belief that the power usage of most major cryptocurrncies is unsustainable, there has to be a better way - we believe that in time our method of securing the blockchain will be the favoured method. 

We therefore will have first mover advantage, however we are not complacent and realise that user experience is what is going to drive cryptos move to the mainstream. Everything we build is built around the user, making it easy, secure and intuitive. Making our users feel safe and confident with cryptocurrency is what drives us and will continue to differentiate us from the competition.