Office Hours #24: TGE Update + APYX Platform Vision + Roadmap

and the market starts to improve. We can essentially announce a couple of weeks to maybe a month out. All right, it's go time for TGE and we're gonna do it. Maybe even announce a shorter window, like let's say two weeks out. Hey, it's ready and we're doing it. That way, we remove a lot of the uncertainty of picking a date many months out in the future like we did last time. So when is it gonna be, exact dates, we obviously wanna do it sooner rather than later. We do think the markets, in the process of turning, we thought for a while that it would turn quicker, that stretch would return to par, that momentum would come back in. It just took a little bit longer, but we're really close. To stretch back at par, we'd love to see stretch back at par, stretch running the ATM sum. We think that would really fix the narrative. So I mean, heck, it might be a month, might be two months and things are kind of back on track and there's excitement and we can launch. Might be, maybe it's a couple months, but the team is incentivized to get TGE out the door, the protocol, the foundation has tokens. And so there's no kind of side value here or value leakage. Like the token is the key part of the value here. So we're all aligned to get TGE out, but we want it to be a success for the long term. So I'm not putting a date on it there, but hopefully that gives some context and some color. And my strong hope is that the market really turns here soon and we can do TGE within the next couple months. But again, it's going to be a lot more dependent on the market going forward and we will give a date when we're much closer to the actual launch so that the market can't kind of flip on us. There have been a few questions in our discord. If there are any specific conditions that need to be fulfilled before we TGE, in terms of TBL, in terms of BTC price hitting a certain mark any type of exchange partnership, product readiness, and what has been asked several times is whether STRC returning to BAR is a hard condition for us to TGE? Yeah, I wouldn't say it's a hard condition. I think there's, we've talked about working on some additional products. I mean, I think stretch being here at basically 99, if it just stayed there for a while, I think that wouldn't necessarily be the end of the world. I think it's more about TBL starting to grow again and people getting comfortable with the digital credit narrative, volatility subsiding. So I think it's less about a price and more about confidence coming back into stretch and to digital credit. And we've seen confidence with SATA building quite a bit. Obviously, DFTV launched Chad. We think there will maybe be some others that launch some variable rate, non-convertible, like targeted price table, preferred as well. And so I think as the digital credit narrative grows and confidence builds there, that should be a tailwind for Apex. So there's a world potentially where stretch is not at par and everything else is doing well and confidence has come back. Probably not, right? You probably need stretch to be at par for that to happen, but no, it's really close and strategy has been buying back at an increasingly rapid pace and they just increased their buyback program to another $2 billion. So they are very committed to getting this back to par. And I think they'll succeed in getting it there. So I think it's just a short matter of time before confidence comes back in. Yeah, and just to add to that, all the more to the point of why it makes sense to TGE around stretch returning to par and ATM being ran. If you look at SATA, I mean, SATA and even Shrives Common Equity ASST, once it returned to par and they were able to run it and start pulling some other levers, I mean, the whole narrative behind that company is a whole just absolutely exploded. And it continues to do so. And so when the same thing inevitably happens to strategy, it's going to be a massive tailwind for APEC. So in many ways, not having that wind tour back going into a TGE just really, amongst other things, it's a good example of not making sense. So just to add that bit, can we elaborate a little footer on why we announced this point in time for the TGE update? Some people have been wondering why we communicated this only this close to the originally planned TGE on October 13th. And yeah, there have been a few concerns how the community can trust the next TGE announcements that it won't get delayed again. Yeah, it's a great question. We were hoping that the narrative would kind of flip. We were hoping that stretch would be back at par, say in early September, and then we'd have enough time for the narrative to kind of come back in. The intention wasn't to delay TGE. We hadn't planned to delay TGE all along. This was a like, hey, we wanted to do this and this was the plan. And as we were getting closer and closer, it's just like, look guys, it's not, the market is just not cooperating. And so, maybe we should have kind of pulled the plug a little bit sooner, but I think we would have also been kicking ourselves if we'd say pulled the plug two months ago. And then the market had rebounded and then we're like, well, I guess we could have actually TGE'd and it would have been great. So that's kind of where we ultimately settled on. Obviously, high insights 2020, if we'd known how the market was going to behave, we would have delayed TGE sooner, or not even set a TGE date all along. If we had perfect crystal ball, but I think we were just thinking that the market would flip and it didn't quite flip as quickly as we thought. So that was kind of the rationale for waiting till a little bit sooner and going forward. We've just committed not to giving a TGE date so that we don't have to delay again. And that kind of goes into why we would announce that we're going to do TGE with a short window to the actual date so that there's no potential market dynamics that could inject themselves and blow things up again. So, but ultimately it is kind of up to the market and this is why I know a token launch is very different from an IPO, but this is why public companies don't announce when they're going to IPO until like literally the day of because anything can happen to DRL and IPO even a week out. So, if we give a couple weeks notice on TGE, I think that's probably the smart move going forward. Moving on from the timing onto the economics and accumulating as many PIPs as possible through various strategies, is there any dilution happening to existing forming activities? So, some people were a bit concerned that extending season two and thus giving more time for participation and also more opportunity for new people to enter season two, will that reduce the eventual value of the points that they've accumulated so far? It shouldn't. So, the idea was that we would extend or we would increase the size of season two, commensurate with the increase in time. Now, that's not to say that maybe larger farmers or more farmers come in later. And so, let's say the back half of season two produces a lot more points. And so, there could be some dilution that way, but as long as the kind of points accumulation is steady state, then there should be no dilution. And the situation where points emissions would go up would be when TVL is coming back in, people are getting excited, we're getting close to DGE, whatever. And that would be the point where we would say, all right, season two over and here's DGE. And so, we also don't want to dilute ourselves too much here. So, I think the design was there should be no dilution with the extension here. Again, there's some market factors that could go either way, dilution or accretion, if fewer people start farming because they're upset about delayed DGE, whatever, then actually the people who stay in would get more points. But on a steady state basis, we wanted to see no dilution. And so, that's why we've committed to adding more allocation in the season two, commensurate with the time increase. Can we elaborate on any other ways that we can compensate or potential dilution or potential discounting the expected value of the tokens due to a longer duration or maybe on the concentration risk side on S-TRC, maybe on the aspects of us launching more products in the future, so there will be more ways for APYX as a platform to accrue value. Yeah, I guess the way I think about this is, the only people that should really be upset, I mean, I get liquidity thing, because you always may want to always take some liquidity, but I think the people that are most upset about the increase are the people who plan to completely dump on day one. And the points program is just designed, I mean, it's fine if people do that, right? Anyone can do whatever they want, but the points program, all points programs are designed around long-term holders, people that believe in the project, they think it's gonna be big. Sure, maybe they take some profits at TGE, but it's designed for the long-term holders. So for the folks that are super upset about a short increase in duration, there's not a lot that we really can do and really should do. Like we don't want to disadvantage the long-term believers, long-term holders, the protocol in general, to compensate the fast money. I will say the project is gonna get better. We're continuing to build where laser focused, where it heads down. So there's gonna be more and more products being launched, more operational improvements, more, what's the right way to put it? We've got some interesting things planned for APX and APY to make APX further stable or more stable, more stable than stretch. So we'll be launching something along those lines soon. So the longer we wait, the project should get more built out, TVL should grow. A lot of great things should happen such that TGE should be bigger. So by waiting, the idea is, you get hopefully the same allocation, percentage-wise, as you would have, but you get a bigger pie and that kind of compensates for the delay. But ultimately, the focus here is on the long-term and if someone's super pissed because they weren't able to dump all immediately and move to the next thing, the points program is never really designed around short-term flippers. Anything we can tell the YT buyers who have base their current valuation or previous valuation, let's say, heavily on TGE on October 13th. Yeah, I mean, look, there's multiple calculations that go into or multiple numbers that go into a YT valuation. One is time, the other is valuation of TGE. And then of course, the other is like, your percentage of the season. So percentage of the season should be basically solved for you, it should be the same. Sure, the maturity of that position.