PeepCoin history, present and future
In the summer of 2016 a “Coin for the people” (PeepCoin or PCN) was launched, using their own private system for instant, fee-less and secure transactions between individuals and merchants. An inital ICO price was 0.01 US$ per token.
The website text contained a number of red flags (e.g. this quote: “we use a predetermined value system that ensures everyone benefits. The price is always rising in value, this ensures that your money is growing…NO RISK!!!”). But still millions of dollars were raked in and a fairly large community was build around the coin. The coin was (and still is) listed on a number of exchanges and can be followed on CMC. The original developers build a working blockchain protocol, Peepcoin wallets for Windows, Mac and Linux and a staking mechanism to keep distributed nodes processing all transactions. All the code was open source and a fair amount of developers were involved to build the eco system.
Around the fall of 2017, the website was suddenly pulled off the air. The main developers left the project and the domainname became up for sale. The price had already tanked to sub 1 satoshi levels but the coin continued to be traded on minor exchanges. Very large wallets remained dormant.
In the avelange of new coins this past year, an operational blockchain with a coin listed on a number of exchanges and with thousands of coin holders, is in itself a valuable asset. A new team (including some of the original devs) were able to forward all PCN traffic to a new website, announcing the DAPS project and preparing a fork from the PCN blockchain with a 1:1 swap from PCN to DAPS.
The new coin will be an anonymous payment system with a trustless governance system. They set up a code of conduct that any developer who wanted to contribute needed to follow before being allowed to add to the code base. The new DAPS would have a number of proven technologies stacked to make it a very secure and anonymous payment method. This was in the period that another privacy coin XVG was the target of several hacks and one comment on youtube was that “DAPS will have everything that XVG wished it had”…
This news gathered some momentum and the PCN price went up to an ATH of 18 satoshi in a couple of months. Mid June 2018, the DAPS team noticed one of the biggest and oldest wallets was starting to trade again and a 1:1 swap would potentially create a very dominant whale, most probably the original PCN initiator. They intended to exclude suspicious wallets from the swap but based on legal advise, the team quickly decided not to do a swap but an airdrop based on a snapshot they had just taken from the blockchain (block 1120535, or 06/27/2018 at 02:00 UTC), blacklisting the suspicious wallet addresses. This triggered a massive dump and sharp price drop back to 1 satoshi within hours of their announcement.
The reasons for The foundation to revive PeepCoin
A lot of people owning PCN got recked and some were even hit twice. Many were left holding bags of what was now seen as a dead coin, a coin with no future, dumped on the fast growing pile of dead ICO’s. In that chaos and turmoil a number of community members put their hands up and decided to try and help in the true sense of the crypto community ethics. After all, there was still a community that had not sold their PCN and were supporting the original purpose of PeepCoin.
Especially in the first days & weeks, this sort of open sourced leadership has its tricky moments of uncertainty. Being a new team that was committed to transparency and trying to build community trust a vote was held where we asked the community if they wanted more transparency from the team. Transparency in the sense of names and profile pictures that would reflect actual real live people and not random cartoon avatars. The community voted yes, but this turned into a fight back in the boardroom as some team members didn’t want that level of transparency and others did. We lost a number of good team members then but we completely understand their apprehension on disclosing details and rather prefer privacy in terms of security. After some time the early turmoil in the team settled down, new members joined and by doing so the PXN Foundation was born.
A lot of discussion was happening within the team in the early stages while listening to the community. In these first few moments it wasn’t really clear what direction would be best but a number of ideas were jotted out and announced to the PCN community. Both on Discord and Telegram the community picked up steam again and the low price was a good opportunity for the more optimistic followers to load up their wallets with millions of coins. In absolute numbers, trading was massive.
Initially we thought after our proposal to swap to PXN another team would pick up PCN and maintain it. But what value would we be bringing to PCN if we did this. Potentially this could create another community of REKT disgruntled folks. We absolutely didn’t want that to happen. We realized the PCN community (including ourselves) wanted PCN to be maintained and updated indefinitely and by doing so establishing value again in everyone’s investments and creating a better future for the PCN community.
Stay tuned for more news as we go forward, thank you!