DopeCoin celebrates 5 years! Announces drastic changes.
I am thrilled to announce that today is DopeCoin’s 5th year company anniversary!
I’d like to personally thank everyone who has joined us on this adventure. Without your enthusiasm and support, this project would simply not exist.
When DopeCoin launched on February 15th of 2014 we were naive with not only our choice of brand name but also our understanding of how to drive real-world use to our cryptocurrency.
Our original plan was to have DopeCoin accepted in several online shops, garner some mainstream media attention, and watch as the masses began buying marijuana-related purchases with our coin. Simultaneously we aimed to provide banking solutions for the marijuana industry which was, at that time, blacklisted from conventional business banking solutions.
The problem was….
Even after being featured on Fox News, Huffington Post, PC Mag, and others, the masses were not lining up and using crypto to make purchases and marijuana companies were showing zero interest in using any kind of marijuana-related crypto as a banking solution.
The reality of the situation is that we were too early.
In fact, not a single marijuana-related crypto has been successful at gaining any sort of meaningful traction with regards to real-world use.
Furthermore, the business model of trying to provide a banking solution for the marijuana industry has not happened and likely will never happen.
As legalization continues to spread across North America and beyond, we are already seeing banks who are opening their doors to this quickly emerging industry.
I will be the first to admit that our original business model has been a failure.
So where do we go from here?
The answer is simple, we innovate and adapt.
In order to achieve real-world use with our cryptocurrency two things need to happen:
1. We need to create a scenario where the benefit of using our crypto is so compelling that using fiat or another crypto would clearly be an inferior choice.
2. We need to rebrand.
In late 2017, we launched an ICO and successfully raised approximately 500 Ethereum to build Grow Advertising.
Grow Advertising is a pay-per-click advertising exchange, similar to Google Adwords, that provides a real-time auction-based marketplace for industries that are blacklisted from advertising on nearly all mainstream platforms.
Those industries include crypto, legal marijuana, CBD, vape/e-cig, pharmaceuticals and supplements, and more.
Our platform has been built from scratch and we have invested over 10,000 man hours into its development over the last year.
Some of the key features of the platform include:
- A self-serve portal that allows publishers and advertisers the ability to create advertisements and placements without any kind of third-party intervention.
- A built from scratch auction-based bidding system and delivery algorithm that allows for a real-time marketplace.
- Proprietary anti-fraud features to weed out bot traffic and account for unviewed impressions.
- Advanced targeting features including operating system, geolocation, device, browser and more.
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And most importantly, the platform accepts cryptocurrency and will provide users who pay with our coin with a massive 25% deposit bonus.We will process crypto payments with our custom-built payment gateway Crypto Billings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hGLFSxUHA4Crypto Billings is completely free and allows merchants and customers to use our gateway for absolutely zero transaction fees.
Merchants have access to plugins for the most popular shopping cart software and can easily integrate Crypto Billings seamlessly into their existing e-commerce stores. Wordpress users can even download us directly from the Wordpress plugin store.
Merchants can also accept payments to any wallet address they want and do not need to download any software or use any third-party wallets to store funds.
Our P2P technology allows merchants to accept funds to desktop wallets, cold storage, exchanges, or wherever they like in as much time as it takes the blockchain to process two transactions.
Crypto Billings is already fully live and operational and Grow Advertising is scheduled to go live in North America by the third quarter of this year.
So what about the name DopeCoin?
Well, we are already in the process of forking and rebranding DopeCoin to GROW.
Our mission with GROW is to provide the above mentioned legal blacklisted industries with payment gateway and performance advertising solutions.
During the rebranding process, we will also be forking and upgrading our technology to the latest PIVX codebase.
This upgrade will include nearly instant transaction speeds, enhanced privacy and security features and master nodes.
Development is already underway and more details regarding release dates, a new whitepaper, updated roadmap, and upcoming partnerships will be revealed in the coming weeks.
The day has come for us to part ways with the DopeCoin brand and evolve into something more mainstream and investment friendly as we prepare to release our most impressive technology to date.
There was never a premine or any sort of development fund in place to create or push this project forward over the years. We have been completely self-funded and are still around due to the tremendous efforts of our team and community support.
I am very lucky to of had the opportunity to bring DopeCoin to life and I am thrilled and absolutely committed to taking the GROW project to a whole new level.
Happy Anniversary DopeCoin!
Regards,
Adam Howell
Founder
Link to original article =
https://medium.com/@adamhowell_49157/dopecoin-celebrates-5-years-announces-drastic-changes-998506c5903c 
