MINE V2.0 Upgrade report

MINE Network
8 min readJun 2, 2022

The State of the Project

Status quo

The current state of affairs is very complex and takes place on many levels, which makes it difficult to evaluate and communicate everything in single announcements. This report will bring clarity and highlight all currently important areas of the project that are currently being worked on or are affected by changes. After our extremely successful launch, which was very well received by the general public, a sustained downtrend followed in the wake of persistently poor market sentiment. A short digression of the strategic orientation is useful here. Fundraising at the beginning is necessary to finance the project for at least two to three years, even if the market does not play along. In return for their investment, investors who believe in the project very early on, without a running product, get tokens distributed. Here, several forces are acting together at once. Each VC wants to receive the entire amount of tokens as soon as possible, which would be very harmful for the project when distribution time is too short. For this reason, the distribution time is stretched with the help of so-called vesting contracts to massively reduce the selling pressure. This is an attempt to achieve a balance between stretching investors and quick distribution. If the distribution phase is planned too long, the project will not find strong partners, and if it is too fast, the selling pressure will be too high. Our unlocking structure is very well set up and rather project-oriented. Since our fundamentals, team and advisor background are very strong, we were in a comfortable negotiating position here. So we see that token unlocks cannot be avoided, but can be designed in such a way that they can do a balancing act according to the market circumstances in order to finance the project well enough. Unexpectedly, our launch was so successful that it went up to 40x the public sale price. As endless growth is a miracle the free economy has been working on for decades, it was impossible to maintain this upward trend in combination with token unlocks and a general market downtrend, even though we had KuCoin, one of the strongest exchange partners on our side from the beginning.

New project positioning

In-depth analysis of the market needs and the community revealed a diverse picture that led us to recenter the target of this project. The general hype around the topic of Metaverse did not pass us by without a trace. After all, a good reaction to market trends has always been one of the most powerful tools of good core teams. In the beginning, MINE Network was intended as a small project, industry solution and exclusively as a financial weapon for active miners to cushion the price volatility of the mined assets and thus direct dependency on the underlying price. Tokenized hashpower in manifestation of hashrate tokens extremely improves cash flow within the mining business. Education about mining and hashrate tokens was also at the forefront of the development of the project. Building a metaverse around it to upgrade this business concept was therefore the next logical step to give the project a new scale and higher-level component. This is where our Gamepaper 1.0 was born with outstanding strategies to give additional use cases to the MNET token as well. The MINEverse is still very popular in our community today. Even so much that we decided to upgrade the concept even further. NFT DeFi is a topic that is currently very much in the discussions. Many new projects are forming that are releasing the dead value of NFTs in the wallets and the trend is quickly moving away from the pure use of NFTs as avatar images. We are seeing NFTs as in-game items, token allocation NFTs and much more. We will be there from the beginning wrapping various underlying assets in NFTs and joining NFT DeFi. Hashpower will be the first type of wrapped NFTs we will offer. We will integrate these types of NFTs into our metaverse- and token economy to add more use cases to the MNET token as well. More NFTs with other underlying assets will follow.

Roadmap and future outlook

The project is still very young. Our current roadmap is partly not feasible in time for several reasons. Especially in the development of the Metaverse MVP there were hurdles to overcome, which led us to replace the dev team in this area. The old one was too weak, technically not able to implement the discussed features and deliver the necessary quality. Due to this previous collaboration we unfortunately lost some time, but we are trying to make up for it as best we can with our new team. We will introduce our Development Studio in the next few days and announce an official partnership. We have a very strong team here at our side, with whom we have grown close through countless video conferences, phone calls and personal meetings. We are very proud to work with them. The roadmap will be adjusted accordingly and more apt phrases will be added to the respective development phase. We are now almost at the end of Q2 2022 and are confident to introduce the MVP end of June or early Q3. In the meantime, there will be regular updates on the current development status. The updated roadmap will include points like below and more:

2022 Q2 — Q3

  • Completion of MVP consisting of 3 animated characters and a walkable world.
  • Start of testing phase [limited to the community].

2022 Q4

  • Completion of the testing phase
  • Adjustments and improvements
  • Pre-launch phase

2023 Q1+

  • Initial launch of MINEverse, where you can earn different underlying assets in a game-like environment.
  • Massive user onboarding

Mining partners

Discussions with various mining partners have been ongoing for quite some time now and we have found two strong partners in the BitDeer and KuCoin mining pool that we can rely on in the future. Official announcements will be made at the beginning of the cooperation. Especially for the Metaverse playable mini-mining games these two partnerships will become very important.

Development

Testnet 2.0

The tests of our testnet have been successfully completed and all purchasing and staking functions are running smoothly. If you find a bug or have other suggestions for improvement, please fill out this form. https://forms.gle/eyqDvxijfxCjgMLNA

Metaverse

Metaverse development is now implemented with the Unity Engine. In the last few years, tons of games have been produced with the Unity Engine and the software enjoys great popularity, especially among smaller studios. Unity is particularly versatile and extraordinarily flexible with broad support for almost all current operating systems and consoles. The engine also stands for the very efficient price with high compatibility so Unity is exactly what we need. The Metaverse itself will be a 3D world where mini-games can be played to earn various underlying assets in NFT form as elaborated in point 1.2. With the upgrade to Game Paper 2.0 we will present the exact implementation of NFT tokenization and financialization to the public in the next few weeks.

Target group

The target group of the project will be different than planned at the beginning. The importance of Hashrate Token as a derivative and vehicle for mining professionals should not be underestimated. By implementing it in a metaverse and with the idea of providing a spileric and simple way to communicate mining knowledge, the concept of mining becomes accessible to the masses. The hurdles to enter the mining market are still very high, because a lot of capital and knowledge is needed.

Current market situation

We are fully aware of the impact that recent market movements, particularly the UST stablecoin situation, have had on individuals and families. UST depegging situation and other market events had a significant impact on overall market performance. We have seen historic weeks where global equity, commodity, and crypto markets groaned under the pressure of central bank inflation targeting and prevailing geopolitical conditions such as the Ukraine crisis. A higher-than-expected U.S. inflation rate of 8.3% was a key trigger for the sell-off in recent weeks. Crucially, core inflation (excluding the impact of food and energy) continues to show a sustained acceleration in inflationary pressures, destroying hopes that the Fed has acted quickly enough. This increases the likelihood of stagflation or recession. While cryptocurrencies have faced macroeconomic issues in recent weeks and months, the fallout from the Terra crisis, where we saw LUNA plummet by more than 99.99% and the related stablecoin UST struggled to survive, has led to the Terra blockchain being forked and the old coins being -classic-tagged. A coordinated and opportunistic attack to disrupt the UST market (the third largest stablecoin market at the time) proved successful for the attackers, who undoubtedly made a significant profit at the expense of the ecosystem. Bitcoin and the broader crypto complex also sold off, with Bitcoin briefly pushed to $25,000 and Ethereum to $1,700. Since then, prices have recovered somewhat, with Bitcoin and Ethereum holding above $30,000 and $1,900, respectively. Newborn coins with small market capitalizations like MNET are much more volatile and are hit mercilessly by poor market conditions. However, they benefit even more in a positive market environment.

Necessary adaptation

The macro market has deteriorated a lot, both for cryptocurrencies and for stocks in general. We are a long-term project and we are building for the long run, but we have to take the current market conditions into account. In a bad market, the most important imperative is to survive and make sure the project can live until the market is ready for what we are building. Every bad market brings difficulties and challenges, but those who weather the storm will reap the juicy rewards of the next harvest and create next-generation products. We recently fundraised, and now it’s time to focus on what’s important and trim fat, both in product direction and human resources. This what we did in the last weeks. We are focusing our resources on key talents and product sections and cutting the rest. Focus and survival is the alpha and omega to reach max efficiency. The history of the crypto industry is full of teams with the right idea at the wrong time that failed to realize their vision and we will not be one of them! We expect, based on our experience, that the following things will happen over time:

  • Capital markets slow down
  • Loud calls for regulation. We see it in South Korea right now, that because of Terra breakdown, stablecoins, among other things, are very much in the focus of regulators.
  • Speculation in the market will go down for a while, mainly because retail investors are not pushing as much anymore. Many stories and projects will be rewritten and the market environment will change.
  • A lot of talent will pour into the market in the next few months looking for a home with solid projects.
  • Marketing activities are going nowhere, as the market has been swept clean and Crypto Twitter and Telegram communities in particular are very diluted.

We will prepare for these things and walk hand in hand with the community through this valley.

Upcoming Updates

  1. Website update — The website is currently being adapted to all the innovations and adjustments.
  2. Twitter Ticker — Our token ticker on Twitter MNET is also used by a very large and influential Korean music channel, it seems. This circumstance leads to our tweets being partially consumed by them and not getting the attention they would normally get. We are currently considering an alternative ticker to avoid these difficulties. You can also make suggestions here: https://forms.gle/eyqDvxijfxCjgMLNA
  3. Whitepaper 2.0 — The Whitepaper v2 is currently being adapted to all the innovations and adjustments.
  4. Partnerships — We have a handful of partnerships up our sleeve that we plan to announce in a timely manner. Before that, however, the above-mentioned structural changes will be implemented in order to present a congruent and complete vision of MINE Network to other communities as well.

MINE Network Resources — Socials — Contact

Whitepaper | One Pager |Website | Wiki | Medium | Twitter | Telegram |Email

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