As we approach the end of 2020, it would not be wrong to say that this year will go down in world history. With numerous tragedies and events that have passed we hope that 2021 will be a more prosperous year for everyone. Although the pandemic has disrupted many traditional business, we are glad to say that these past few months have been very notable for BiLira. We expanded our team, issued over 100 million TRYB tokens, embarked on a new investment round and have experienced many more developments. We will cover all of the milestones below but before we do let us touch base on how fundamentally the pandemic has changed our lives.
While the day to day impact of Covid-19 continues to increase, our team chose to promote social distancing and resumed to work remotely. Despite the monotone nature of online meetings, our infrequent face to face interactions helped us boost our overall motivation and performance to persevere.
During this time, the number of users who joined our platform grew exponentially while the number of active users also grew steadily. Our users were so active that they helped us reach one of our major milestones of issuing and redeeming over 100 million TRYB tokens over the course of 12 months. We would like to once again thank everyone who has helped us achieve this breakthrough.
While Covid-19 has caused an unprecedented shock to the global economy, it has also greatly accelerated the need and adoption of a digital economy. Before the pandemic, having online sales for a business was merely an option while today it has become a necessity for survival.
In this period of time, with the limited working hours of bank branches the demand for physical banking is gradually decreasing while the desire for digital banking without the need for leaving ones own house is on the rise. We are witnessing the increasing digitalization of bank customers and an orientation towards alternative financial instruments. In this regard, Turkey’s largest crypto exchanges are advertising in traditional media and announcing sponsorship deals which has had an encouraging effect on many new investors who are eager to try crypto for the very first time.
While we feel that interest in decentralized finance (DeFi) is slightly diminishing since August, we can actually verify that the value of all funds locked in DeFi is at an all-time high exceeding $16 billion. While DeFi started out as just a spark at the beginning of 2020, it has grown massively since then and we truly believe that it will continue to outperform our wildest dreams. The fact that individuals can now have full control over their money, the ability to transfer value peer-to-peer without the need of an intermediary, and the reality that people can already perform many of the financial services that banks offer without the need for a bank strongly shows the potential of DeFi to replace traditional finance.
As BiLira, we would like to remind you once again that we set out our initiative with the vision and we aim to enable every Turkish citizen to meet and connect with decentralized finance and open internet.
We wrote about the developments up till June in another article. Let’s take a look at what has happened at BiLira since June.
- To date, TRYB issuance has exceeded a total of 100 million tokens.
- Throughout the year, the number of members of the BiLira Platform and our community grew steadily.
- The number of digital wallet connected on the BiLira Platform continued to increase gradually. With individuals starting to control their own funds, our users are starting to adopt the vision which is “Not your keys, not your tokens.”
- Today, four banks can be used to issue and redeem BiLira, while the number of collaborating payment processors have grown to three.
- The BiLira team has grown from an idea that started with just 3 founders into an innovative startup of more than 12 employees and counting.
- We as BiLira prepare a weekly Turkish newsletter curated to bring together more than 1000 crypto investors.
- With Ucurtma Projesi, 20 university students have received 60,000 TRYB worth of donations as a part of a 3-month scholarship. BiLira infrastructure was used to support this decentralized giving within the community.
As BiLira, we continue to carefully select all the institutions we cooperate with.
We always work diligently for transparent, auditable and secure transactions;
- We have mentioned in the past that we have reached an agreement with Papara, one of the largest electronic money companies in Turkey. Now, TRYB purchases can be made with Papara on the BiLira Platform.
- BiLira was newly listed on 3 different crypto exchanges including on Bittrex one of the largest exchanges in Europe, with BTC / TRYB and USDT / TRYB pairs, on VirgoX, which promotes itself as the world’s stable cryptocurrency exchange with USDT / TRYB and on Paxful, the world’s largest peer-to-peer crypto market with BTC / TRYB and USDT / TRYB. In addition to these centralized solutions TRYB was listed on Balancer, a decentralized exchange, which offers trades via individuals non-custodial wallets. Thus, we enabled our users to use TRYB in 6 different central exchanges and 3 decentralized exchanges.
- We organized a 5000 TRYB award-winning campaign for those who provide liquidity to the TRYB — USDC pool on Balancer. You can join our campaign that will last until the end of the year. Click here to participate the pool.
- Our users, who have digital wallets such as Argent and Metamask and use the most preferred decentralized exchange Uniswap, gained a minimum of 400 UNIs with the release of the govenment token UNI. A fund of approximately 2000$ has been provided to BiLira users using Uniswap.
- As BiLira, we are listed on Coingecko in the stablecoin tab.
- Kripto Küratör has an agreement for the section showing the price of the 5 most valuable cryptocurrencies with Tradingview and for the “Learning” section with Blockchain Turkey.
- As a result of our partnership with crypto media site Uzmancoin, we prepared a decentralized finance (DeFi) guide.
- Since we aim to make decentralized finance a part of the Turkish people, we launched the DeFi Tab, which provides access to multiple decentralized finance protocols with a single interface.
- We launched our “Swap” page, which enables swap at the best rates on decentralized exchanges. Thus, it became possible to perform swap cryptocurrencies without leaving the BiLira Platform.
- We produced a podcast and a joint content called “A Thousand piece Puzzle: DeFi” with the Turkish crypto community Crypton Network.
- TRYB became the first stablecoin on the Avalanche blockchain.
- We’ve integrated TRYB on Loopring, the Layer-2 decentralized exchange. It is possible to experience decentralized exchange in a cheaper and faster way.
- As a result of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX’s tokenizing American Stocks, it has become possible to invest in American Stocks with TRYB.
- BTC-TRYB pair has been activated on FTX, our users can now buy Bitcoin directly with TRYB.
- BiLira has become one of the founding members of the “Stablecoin Alliance” to accelerate the global adoption of stablecoins and set high security and regulation standards.
- As BiLira, an interview with CoinTelegraph where we talked about the Turkish crypto ecosystem in the axis of 2020 and the pandemic was published.
- On the decentralized exchange Uniswap, we created a TRYB pool with a gold-indexed wDGLD supported by Blockchain.com, Coinshares and one of Switzerland’s old gold refineries, and ensured the realization of digital gold trading.
We have always tried to participate in highly effective and beneficial activities, aiming to create an awareness of crypto money and decentralized finance.
- Our CEO Sinan Koç explained BiLira in the Financial Technology program presented by Sefer Yüksel on Bloomberg HT.
- Our COO Vidal Arditi participated twice in the Crypto Money program, which is regularly broadcast every week on Bloomberg HT, and commented on the crypto money market.
- To celebrate the TRYB listing, Bittrex organized an AMA with our COO Vidal Arditi, where users asked questions.
- We held our traditional AMA events regularly, every two weeks. We hosted people such as Işık Ökte, Şant Manukyan and Cüneyt Başaran, one of the biggest names in traditional finance, as well as Avalanche CEO Emin Gün Sirer and Bittrex CEO Tom Albright, one of the biggest names in the crypto money world.
- Our CEO Sinan, joined the program called Just Stable and spoke about “Stablecoins in Emerging Markets” from the point of view of Turkey. You can click here to watch the broadcast.
- Again Sinan, was a guest on Crypto Emre who is the Turkey’s one of the most popular phenomenon of crypto.
- At Istanbul Fintech Week, our CEO Sinan Koç attended the “Stablecoin” panel with the CEO of Stasis, a stablecoin pegged to Euro.
Finally, we have established the Luna Foundation to accelerate cryptocurrency and blockchain awareness in Turkey. We would like to state that we would be very happy to see crypto enthusiasts, software developers, young people and their thinking minds among us in our association.
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If you want to share your ideas or collaborate with us, you can send an e-mail: hello@bilira.co
