We’re very excited to release the next step in our roadmap launch! We’ve finalised the build on our side, and now we’re just in the process of running all the necessary security checks and waiting for our auditors to work their magic.

Things at TotemFi HQ have been moving at a very high pace, and we have some major partnerships and exciting announcements to follow over the next few days. The team continues to grow, with four new devs joining us last week!

Timeline

We are entering into the final phases before a full launch. Below are the next big milestones on the road to take-off:

• 26th March: Audit Commences
• 31st March: Whitelist open
• 4th April: Whitelist Closes
• 6th April: DuckSTARTER IDO
• ~2 hours later: Full launch on Uniswap

TOTM token public sale metrics

Total supply: 10 million TOTM

Public sale: 450,000 TOTM (4.5%)

Price per TOTM: $0.225

Total value: $101,250

We’re very excited to have you all with us on this journey, and we look forward to welcoming many new members to the TotemFi community as we approach launch!

TotemFi Announces New Partnership with Launchpool

In a move which will make the TOTM token launch even more fair and inclusive, we’re partnering with Launchpool to take advantage of their innovative new Pop-Up-Pools concept. This move will allow us to democratise our private sale round even further, and ensure we’re serving all stakeholders equally.

Launchpool’s Pop-Up-Pools (PUPs) are a first ever for the world of decentralized launchpads, and bring private tier pricing to the wider crypto community. $LPOOL token holders who stake into the PUP will receive a TOTM holding token as reward, which will be able to be swapped for real TOTM tokens at a later date, giving investors access to our private sale price of $0.170.

This partnership will allow us to provide our early investors with another route to market access for TOTM, and represents a commitment to TotemFi and Launchpool’s joint values of openness, fairness, egalitarian investing, and equitable token distributions. We’re also very thankful to Alphabit, who have offered their own strategic sale allocation of TOTM for this endeavour.

Guidelines for the First PUP

The pool will launch in a few days and run for a period of 2 days (48 hours), at the end of which the pool will be retired, and holding tokens will cease to be issued. The PUP will also present LPOOL token holders with an interesting economic decision — they must decide between either farming for more LPOOL tokens in the existing pools, or “allocation mining” in the PUP.

Participants in this PUP must not move their holding tokens from the address where they first receive it! The swap for the real TOTM token will be done in accordance with our vesting schedule, and moving the token to a different address could result in loss of your entire allocation. The holding token has no value other than its ability to be swapped at a later date for the real TOTM tokens.

The complete detailed guidelines for participating in our first PUP will be released in the next few days, so if you’re planning to participate, make sure to check our announcements on Twitter and Telegram every day.

N.B: The $10,000 (58,823.5 $TOTM) allocation for this endeavour has come from Alphabit’s own strategic sale allocation, and will be vested in Launchpool’s smart contract for 5 months, in accordance with the vesting schedule of TotemFi’s strategic sale round.

About Launchpool

Launchpool ($LPOOL) leverages communities, knowledge, expertise, contacts and capital to provide crypto projects with the best possible start to life, maximising their chances for success in this fast moving & dynamic space.

What’s in a name? Building the brand behind Totem.

Hello Totem warriors.

The universe of decentralised finance is big and it’s only getting bigger. As it stands, hundreds of thousands of tokens make their home on the blockchain. So from the beginning, we knew we needed to build a brand that would act as a beacon and was strong enough to set itself apart.

First, we needed a name. DeFi Predictor Protocol was our working title. While accurate, we felt the call for something a little more inspiring. With our vision of creating a community-driven, staking-based prediction platform in mind, we saw two themes: strength in numbers, and prescience. 

The former harks back to an atavistic principle which is universally understood, the latter dips its toe into the world of mysticism and precognition.

After a broad brainstorming session, we eventually settled on a name which we felt embodied both elements: Totem. A word which is both familiar and exotic, encouraging adoption and intrigue in equal measure. Most people, when they read the word, are reminded of the totem poles of the American indigenous peoples, but in a broader sense, it refers to any object, group or gathering of significance and power. A perfect fit for our vision.

Once we were settled on the name, we set about developing that idea into a visual language that could help us stand out from the crowd. Launching into such a competitive market we opted for a bold, clean look, both in terms of our brand illustrations and colour pallete. Totem’s sunset orange, lakewater greys and arctic blues are all selected with this in mind.

The word Totem has strong associations with the natural world, and we carried this forward: mountains, forest and moonlit skies form our set dressing, and we named our staking pools Owl, Wolf and Fox. Each animal is abstracted to its simplest, most recognisable elements, and can be stacked in blocks, representing both the blockchain itself and the T of the Totem family brandmark.

We’ve also given each team member an animal designation, to help consolidate our tribe and better ambass the brand. With each new addition, our Totem grows.

Of course, brands are not static entities, but living things. With this in mind, we’re already looking to the future and thinking of ways in which we can further evolve Totem. This extends not only to aesthetics but also to the development of our product and how we choose to gamify Totem and engage with our community.

Community is at the heart of our vision for Totem, and we’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback on how you perceive our brand. Please don’t hesitate to reach out on our channels and let us know.

Thanks for reading,

Team Totem.

2021, and the inexorable rise of decentralised finance

First seen in investing.com: https://uk.investing.com/analysis/2021-and-the-inexorable-rise-of-decentralised-finance-200465585 

The first 30 days of 2021 didn’t quite provide the placid contrast to 2020 which the world was hoping for, however from the agitation and affray one inescapable fact became strikingly apparent; that there is a fundamental problem with traditional financial systems. 

GameStop (NYSE:GME) brought this to the forefront of the public consciousness, but the reality is that the issues which lead to that situation escalating to the extent it did had been brewing for a long time. In 2014 PwC published a report which highlighted that, within the growing financial intermediary sector of banks, brokerages, centralised exchanges etc., the risks of cybercrime, bribery, corruption and fraud were also growing. 

This is a logical correlation; the more people involved in a financial transaction, the greater the chance is that a bad actor will find his way into the system. Combine this with the perennial risks associated with large, over-centralised, unaccountable institutions, and it should’ve come as no surprise that brokerages and providers of retail liquidity turned their taps off to the public when the price of GME started to raise eyebrows in the (virtual) boardrooms of Wall Street and the City. 

And yet, despite this, the headlines did indeed come as a shock. It incited a great deal of indignation that financial institutions, which had long elicited suspicions of surreptitious malpractice, could so openly display their contempt for retail investors. And in doing so, they also inadvertently achieved something seemingly impossible; consensus across the US party political spectrum.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump Jr. all came out to condemn the actions of brokerages which closed their markets to retail traders, while hedge funds saw no disruption to their market access. No doubt the hypocritical aspect of this fiasco played a part in uniting their verdicts; counted among the rank and file of firms who impeded retail investors were those who claimed to be democratising financial markets. 

This situation brought the demand for a decentralised financial system to a zenith; a public blockchain would be capable of providing financial services and market access to everyone, regardless of their status, location, net worth etc. The number of startups and companies which have recognized the potential of open source networks to change, decentralise, and democratise economic activity is increasing exponentially, with innovative new ventures entering the space daily. 

One such venture is a decentralised cryptocurrency predictions market platform called TotemFi; they offer investors the ability to speculate on the future prices of crypto assets such as BTC without the need for intermediaries. Their CEO, Jolyon Layard Horsfall, was recently quoted in an interview discussing the GME situation: “GameStop has brought the need and the demand for decentralised finance platforms into the forefront of the public conscience; traditional exchanges, even those which claimed to democratise financial markets, refused to provide market access to the average investor. If TotemFi’s users’ consensus were that they wanted to speculate on the price of GME, it wouldn’t have been our decision whether to allow this or not; the users would have decided, and the platform’s protocols would have automatically executed this.”

As such, decentralised networks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum could go a long way in solving issues around high barriers to entry within the traditional financial system because of their permissionless nature, meaning that anyone in the world can connect to it. On a global level, this would alleviate problems of inequality posed by the current centralized financial system.

Additionally, bitcoin and other cryptocurrency networks are decentralized. This means that records are kept scattered across thousands of devices, and there is no central authority or repository controlling the flow of information or activity. Blockchain is also, contrary to the popular misconception, completely transparent, since all transaction records are publicly auditable and trackable on the payment ledger. 

In the wake of GME, retail market participants the world over are clamouring for features such as these, and are turning towards blockchain tech in a bid to extricate unaccountable intermediaries from their financial transactions. As decentralised tech becomes more prevalent, and is adopted by a greater number of users, its potential to reshape and redefine the financial and transactional systems will become more pronounced by the day.