Earlier this year, while researching a curious experiment to fund a retirement with earnings from cryptocoin faucets, I came across a coin that has grabbed my attention. I didn't know it at the time, but DNotes would quickly become my second largest crypto holding after BTC. (Should I say hodling? In this case, definitely!)
Let me tell you what I saw that got me interested.
The first thing I noticed was that they had additional separate websites dedicated to educating people about cryptos. Ok, nice.
They also had an online wallet with a bit of a twist. The DNotesVault, where you can store your coins if you don't want to manage a wallet yourself, actually has a guarantee fund. Yes, they actually have a separate fund, offline in cold storage for security and all that, just to guarantee the funds you store in the Vault.
That's something they don't have to do, and I hadn't seen anyone else doing that. But they thought about that and implemented it for the safety and security of their community. Banks only do that with your dollars and euros because it's a government mandate. These guys do it because it's the right thing to do. Ok, very nice.
What really caught my eye were CRISPs. Cryptocurrency Investment Savings Plans.
You deposit funds in a specific type of account in the Vault and agree not to withdraw the funds (although you could, with a penalty - seems fair) and they provide you with interest. Just like a bank, only the interest is actually much better than anything you could get in a bank today.
These guys were providing something I hadn't seen any other coin provide. They were building stability right into their coin ecosystem. They were thinking about the needs of the consumer. This idea really stuck with me.
So I wondered why this coin wasn't better known and I started looking around. It was very quiet in the forums and social media. It was more or less dead.
When coin developers and their communities go quiet, it usually means the coin is dead. But this one wasn't. It was still there after three years, maintaining very good gains since its inception. And doing it without some of the volatility that other currencies had.
I soon discovered that it wasn't dark because it was dead - they just went radio silent for a while. But they weren't sitting still. They were actually very busy.
Planning.
There was a lot going on behind the scenes.
I learned that I was right about what I had thought they were doing - thinking about the needs of their community and their ecosystem. They actually had a philosophy. And they were planning further based on that philosophy.
I think it was within days of me opening a CRISP and hilariously (to me anyway) beginning to fund it with tiny bits of coins from faucets, that they started announcing the things they had been working on.
Such as:
Re-releasing the coin as DNotes 2.0. They are going to allow owners of DNotes to swap out the coins with the new version. Other coins have done this and it's a rather bold thing to do. But seeing what else they are doing, it makes good sense.
They had rewritten the code so the coin was going from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake to be more in line with their overall philosophy. PoS coins are getting a lot more traction now. This is a smart move.
They have also rewritten the code in a different programming language - C#. According to the developers (and lots of unrelated outside sources), it will allow the coin to be used for a lot more applications to be built on top of it and add a lot of functionality. I know next to nothing about these technicalities, but I'll take the techies at their word on this. This also seems like a great move.
There's going to be Lots of PR associated with this Dnotes 2.0 rollout. That includes lots of press with co-founder Alan Yong's book and all the videos they are producing to support it and promote DNotes.
There's more, including projects further down the road such as banking-like services, multicurrency credit/debit cards, and a full cryptocurrency exchange.
Ok, now it's not just a matter of 'I like their philosophy.' It just got real. There are a lot of reasons to think DNotes 2.0 will not be undervalued like DNotes 1.0 had been. DNotes 2.0 is very likely to take a place among the top 50 coins in the near future.
So, at the time I was opening my account, the price was going up and I was hoping I wasn't too late.
I don't think the sharp rise in price earlier this year had too much to do with what the DNotes team was doing. I think it had much more to do with the general crypto market forces. There was a huge influx of capital into altcoins in the months prior, and I think there were many examples of huge gains by altcoins that were being played out, and DNotes, which was very much under the radar, just became the next victim of that wave.
But, it already had my attention. And to a certain extent, I was panic buying before it went up too much. The wave played out and the price came back down. Too much if you ask me, but many close to DNotes would say that it is undervalued anyway. I was actually ok with the price coming back down. That just gave me an opportunity to keep buying little chunks of DNotes at a better price.
So here we are. Probably a few weeks away from the swap to DNotes 2.0.
I'm a little too cautious to make a specific price prediction for after the release of 2.0. I think there are just too many variables.
But, I look at the market caps of some of the top 100 or even top 50 coins, and I just can't justify many of them. And I look at the plans the DNotes team has, the approach they have taken, and their general philosophy, and I can't help but think that DNotes belongs up there.
I do the math and I shake my head. That would mean a huge gain in the price.
Discovering DNotes reminded me how I felt when I first found and researched Bitcoin 4 years ago. I just have a gut feeling about this one again. I was right about Bitcoin. I hope I'm right again.
Full disclosure - yeah, I own some DNotes. Duh! My hodlings of DNotes represents less than 10% of my crypto stash. I own less than 10 different coins. I didn't write this post to pump DNotes and I don't work for them. I just believe in it and have some faith in the team and would like them to succeed.