Annual report Gulden 2016

Written by Aat de Kwaasteniet

Translated by Roel Boer and Massnl

Date: 07-01-2017

Recap in numbers

All numbers and statistics can be found on several web pages on public lists or were handed over in the interest of transparency.

Pink colored fields are not yet final amounts because the months November and December 2016 are not yet finalized.

Introduction

2016 was a year branded by growth. After the introduction in April 2014 there has always been a little growth, but 2016 was the first huge growth spurt of Gulden. Not just the amount of Gulden in circulation and the amount of users grew, but the price also went up tremendously.

This spectacular growth began after a few effective articles on CoinTelegraph in May and an article on One More Thing on the 29th of June 2016. The Gulden for iOS app was mentioned in that last one, sparking a wave of word of mouth.

Because a lot of new people started to buy Gulden, the price started to move up. New people saw this and started telling their friends how you could earn with Gulden. This resulted in a price explosion in October 2016, where it reached its highest price since ___ of €0.086 per Gulden.

Next to this intense growth period many developments were rolled out. Here are a few highlights:

January:         Funding round for PRIME (blockchain development)

April:                Gulden for Android available in the Google Play Store

                Nocks launches their beta version of Nocks Checkout

                Nocks adds payment options Bancontact and Giropay

Mei:                Gulden Roadmap 2016

                Introduction of the Gulden shares

Juni:                Launch of Gulden.bet 

                Pay any IBAN added to Gulden for Android

                Guldenweb app released

August:        Promotional stickers

September:        Gulden reaches a market cap of one million euros

                Guldenrate released

                Gulden Help/FAQ online to help and assist new users

Oktober:        Gulden dashboard first release

                Gulden coupons launched

                Promotional sticker II

November:        Guldenstats on  the market

                Guldenalert launched

                Gulden Kadobon developed

                Guldenraffle started

                Guldentrader launched

December:        Serious Request Community Fundraiser!

                Gulden 1.6.0 rolled out for download

                Launch of Projectify.me

Most of these activities were started and accomplished by the community. The development team of Gulden didn’t have a hand in it, which is amazing! The community is thriving and that is very good looking forward.  

Price of Gulden

The price of Gulden has made a huge flight. At the beginning of 2016, the price was bouncing between 0.001 and 0.002 euros per Gulden. Until July / August 2016 a slow growth was set into motion. Which eventually resulted in Gulden’s highest value, ever, on 18th of October 2016 at €0.08 per Gulden. This growth spurt was so fast, it was taken over by many users cashing in on their investment. Causing a swift drop in price down to its current levels bouncing between €0.02 and €0.03 per Gulden.

Market capitalization

(Market capitalization is the value of one Gulden times the amount of Gulden in circulation.)

On January 1st 2016 there were 288.100.735 Gulden in circulation. On December 31st 2016 the amount of Gulden grew to 337.708.345. There were 14.761.899 Gulden mined in 2016. A lot less than the 21.024.000 Gulden that should be mined based on the presets and protocols within the Gulden code. The average blocktime of 150 seconds hasn’t been reached due to problems with jump pools and heavy shifts in hashing causing longer block times. Our very own DELTA readjustment algorithm mitigated this problem and has since improved Gulden’s performance.

The rest of the 34.845.711 Gulden has been brought into circulation by the premine.

At the beginning of 2016 Gulden’s marketcap was €360.789 at position 75 of the world’s ranking. December 31st 2016 Gulden climbed the list to position 27 at a marketcap of €8.516.263. At the peak of the 18th of October 2016 the marketcap was an hefty €27.413.413 which ranked Gulden at position 8.

Shares

Gulden started the sale of shares in 2016. Anyone can buy shares and this form of financing is used for the general development of Gulden. There is a long list of new features, innovation and security presented on the roadmap.

One share equals 20.000 Gulden. You can choose to receive your Gulden instantly or to leave them collecting 1% interest every month for a maximum of 12 months. After 12 months your one share of 20.000 Gulden will be worth 22.400 Gulden. The price of one share is automatically determined based on Gulden’s marketprice + 10%

That formula was very popular as Gulden raised a total of 531 Bitcoin. Nearly 7 million Gulden of the purchased shares have been cashed out by investors.

Premine

Costs for Gulden are paid from the premine, such as development cost, servers, ads, paying out the aforementioned shares and more.

The initial amount of premine at the start of 2014 was 170.000.000 Gulden. Up until January 1st 2016 a total of 34.920.729 Gulden was spent at a total value of €32.140.

In 2016 the expenses grew larger as new lead-developer Malcolm MacLeod joined the team and works close to full-time on Gulden. The total development cost for 2016 boiled down to 20.408.716 Gulden at a value of €46.225.

31.559.116 Gulden was spent in total in 2016, as 6.968.600 Gulden was paid out to shareholders and a 4.000.000 Gulden loan to Nocks that is being paid back in Bitcoin (two monthly terms left on the loan). Taking into account all these expenses the total premine now holds 103.520.155 Gulden.

Everything that Gulden now has and has achieved has cost a total of €32.140 + €46.225 = €78.365.

User numbers

As previously mentioned the amount of guldens users experienced an enormous growth in 2016. It's hard to give an exact number for total users of today, since it's all decentralized. We can give a rough estimate based on app downloads and registered accounts on slack and nocks.co. We know since december there are around 40.000 downloads (IOS/android/desktop). We know that roughly 30% of the desktop downloads is be done by people who has already a mobile wallet. That remains 40.000 - 30% = 28.000 individual downloads

As for the numbers from nocks we can inform you that they have over 4900 people registered and they have processed over 36.000 transactions.

Based on previous numbers we can determine the real number would be between 5000 and 28.000 users. If we extrapolate the growth of slack users to the user counts, we come to a rough estimate of 20.000 gulden users at the end of 2016.

Slack use

At the end of 2015 Gulden has started using Slack as a community chatroom. January 2016, the number of users on slack was slowly grown to about 300. During the strong growth in October, the number Slack members also rose sharply to 1993 people in late December 2016. Not all members are equally active but 1993 people have registered at least once.

All these members are active in multiple channels. A new member is automatically a member of the channels #general, #offtopic and #algemeen. In addition, the members themselves choose other channels which best suit them. The following channels are most popular:

#traders with 567 members, #announcements with 325 members, 283 members #marketing etc.

When we see the big number of members in #traders we can imagine that trading is a favorite job amongst the Gulden users.

Slack is used intensively, there are 897,000 messages posted since the start.