Hello Protonians,

Welcome to Newsletter #5, the week of the NFTs!

After a turbulent weekend and equally bad Monday, the market recovered for a short period of time. In times like this, there is a lot of fear and uncertainty and we see people often panicking and making hasty decisions. Having said that, it was reported earlier today that the US inflation rate is up to 6.8%, the highest since 1982. Also, the Chinese property giant Evergrande defaults on a $300 billion debt. I strongly recommend you avoid looking at the crypto prices this weekend. You don't need that stress in your life. My only advice is that you control your emotions or they will control you.

While the price of Proton XPR may drop in times like this, the fundamentals and goals do not, Proton team don't stop the work because of that. Check the video at the bottom of the newsletter from about five years ago where Marshall talks about Metal Pay and the future of crypto.

I wish you a great weekend and thank you for reading.

Good news everyone! CoinEx listed Proton XPR earlier today. Founded in 2017, CoinEx is much smaller than KuCoin and Gate.io but they support a lot of languages like Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, Russian and are providing global trading services in over 100 countries and regions. The best part is that CoinEx support Proton mainnet and the withdrawal fee is 1 XPR!

We are moving one step closer to getting Proton Loan released as Marshall mentioned earlier this week on the telegram channel. He pointed that "Loan audit is complete and the final touches are fees calculation and fiat". This suggests that we may see both Loan and fiat released at the same time.

Also mentioned in the Loan channel, we find that KYC is mandatory to use the platform, which makes sense given that lending and money are involved. This, on the other hand, means that if we want Proton Loan to be accessible to the wider audience the new global KYC partner must be in place because at the moment only a small number of counties can verify and even then it fails for some users.

Marlon in Proton Loan - LOAN

Yes, KYC is mandatory to use the platform.

Telegram

Marshall in Proton Chain - XPR

Loan audit is complete, the final touches are fee calculation and fiat

Telegram

Metal added four new coins to Metal Pay last weekend, following the addition of four more coins the week before. People sometimes complain that Metal Pay isn't being developed whereas it's exactly the opposite. This year Metal Pay got 2 more state licenses as well as an EU EMI Intermediary license which is a big milestone, giving Metal Pay exposure to the nearly 500M population of the EU. Other things that are less visible were the new custody provider and new identity provider. I think it's safe to say that Metal Pay is actively developed along with Proton and they are moving in the right direction.

In other news, there is a new social platform running on Proton Chain now - Snipcoins, their tagline reads "Connect, Share, Discuss NFTs, Cryptocurrency Projects and Market".

One of the groups on the platform, the NFT group has 217 members already, the whole platform looks and feels very sleek and browsing through different pages is very quick. It has certain similarities with Facebook to be honest but it's really cool:

In the last issue, we mentioned that a new NFT marketplace is being developed on Proton Chain, we now know it's called NFT.market and it's accessible here. You can also subscribe to their waiting list to get early access to the beta version of the platform.

Again earlier this week we saw the release of yet another NFT marketplace but this is no ordinary marketplace. It allows you to sell and trade your own 3D assets as NFT. It's endorsed and developed by Proton Chain top block producer - ProtonNZ and that's what being BP is all about. Adding value, growing and developing the Proton brand, great work!

This is definitely the week of the NFTs. Here's another NFT project, a team of developers launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds by selling their unique "To the Moon" NFTs. The funds will be used for the development of a new multi-functional NFT marketplace running on Proton Chain. Find all the information about this incentive in the Twitter thread below and make sure you check their NFTs:

If you have any doubts about Protont I suggest you watch this almost five-year-old video of Marshall on what Metal Pay is and how he sees the future of crypto:

And if that's not enough here is a picture of Marshall and Glenn at Facebook HQ in January 2018 after Facebook asked them for advice on launching their own currency and crypto platform (Diem). That's long before Facebook even announced anything crypto related in public:

• Proton and Metal data source: CoinMarketCap
• Price change based on Thursday close price using latest data in range (UTC)
• Loan data source: Protonscan (Alcor exchange only at the moment)
  

I'll use this week "tweet of the week" to give credits to all Proton Chain block producers! Great to have you onboard, supporting this great project!

Any comments and suggestions are more than welcome. You can find us on Twitter, Telegram as well as Reddit. Thank you for supporting ProtonUK.