The End of an Era. The Start of Another.

Originally published on the Credmark blog.

July 2022

July 2022 won’t be remembered as a fun month by anyone in the crypto community.

In June we lost a stablecoin protocol that kickstarted a chain of events that led to the collapse of not a few large centralized crypto institutions. It’s ugly. The only winners – and this is going to be important – are DeFi lending protocols and DEXes. They have proven extraordinarily resilient.

Despite these successes, no protocol or project has avoided the impact of the centralized meltdown. Treasuries have been decimated, investment money has been pulled, and many people have lost their jobs.

Some projects have already shut down, some will shutdown soon, and some are restructuring to survive in these conditions.

Credmark falls into the third category. Our treasury is in relatively good shape, but we’ve shut down a planned fundraising effort due to unfavorable market conditions. We are now making changes to ensure our future success.

Changes

Leadership

My co-founder, Neil Zumwalde, has been a fantastic technical CEO. He ran the company during a critical building period. Under his leadership we developed the best data platform in DeFi. This platform is complex. Unfortunately, selling it requires more education and time than we have.

Because of these constraints, and because of my background selling financial services products, Neil asked me to lead the company through a technology consolidation and early sales phase. We both believe that this is necessary before re-engaging with investors.

Product Focus

Unlike many DeFi projects, we have customers and revenue. We will continue to service these clients and to sell access to the platform we developed. Their feedback has been invaluable. It has allowed us to design more focused, simpler API products. These will be announced over the coming weeks. When we deploy our protocol, we will support anonymous API access. In the meantime we will allow customers to purchase API keys with credit cards.

For the short term, Credmark will look more like a traditional SaaS business than a community-driven data and modeling platform.

Token

Because we have delayed the introduction of our protocol, our $CMK token cannot provide its anticipated utility. We have therefore decided to sunset it.

If you are a $CMK holder, this is what you can expect.

The token’s reported value will drop to a fraction of a penny, and the token will be delisted. $CMK and $xCMK (staked $CMK) tokens will not, however, disappear from your wallets.

We fully intend to launch our protocol when resources and market conditions allow. At that point we will either provide a mechanism to convert your current tokens or airdrop a new utility token. Our core team has discussed this in depth, and we are excited about future possibilities. In the meantime we will focus on continuing to build the world’s best DeFi data platform.

We appreciate the support of our early token holders, and we thank you for sharing our vision.

If you have any questions, please join our Discord server and reach out to any of the core team members. Our mission hasn’t changed. July has been painful but we’ve experienced adverse market conditions before. We will survive and deliver the platform we promised.