XMM on Twitter

XMM holders,

Now you can follow @ripplexmm on twitter to stay updated.
First tweet was composed today, regarding adjustment of buy-back price.

Thanks.

[Date: 06/03/2014]
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signature: IC97E/wjMTqyW9TLf64kWZ6wwyQqZW8dNITFEYCc9c8QNng4rBxYYq48sakG3lq/qLZBcTTJCpVxX92tSY3OTMQ=

XMM Signature.

I had decided to allocate a Bitcoin address as an official identification for XMM.

This is to add an extra layer of security against the potential risk that my ID (in forum/facebook/email/etc) might be hacked, or somebody elsewhere pretending to be me.

All importance announcements of XMM in the future will be signed by this Bitcoin address:

1DfSsGG3M1CUeUZsBD9qgXE1YwyaECwxFt

Holders of XMM are advised to keep a copy of this address NOW.
this info could be altered by hackers if they break into my Blogger account.


For non-bitcoiners,
Signed message is a feature in Bitcoin that could be used as proof that you own an address.
you can read some intro here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/18qy88/, or just google about it.

Most bitcoin wallet clients come with tools for signing and verifying a message. For those who do not have a bitcoin client, you can do it online through some website, e.g http://brainwallet.org/#verify.

Here's an example for those who like to try some message verification:

message:

XMM - the Fund of Market Making
Issuing address: rExAPEZvbkZqYPuNcZ7XEBLENEshsWDQc8

signature:

H7cvnNcqCKMAn4gOSVLTX9bX59+PMroVOsMT/+WpxTjOfjy7mwIny5vFc9EIcseFwTtClfd28K12Ka0zxgmKTa8=

I've also signed the 'About', 'FAQ' and 'Ripple' pages of this Blog with the address, and appended the signatures at the bottom of each page. To verify, just select the whole page (from the page title to the last character before the dotted line) as message.


Just For Fun.
As a memorial for the launch of the Fund, I had made a transaction of 0.00887777 BTC into this Bitcoin address on last Sunday. (in ASCII code  88, 77, 77 represent X, M, M.)
https://blockchain.info/address/1DfSsGG3M1CUeUZsBD9qgXE1YwyaECwxFt

Summary of Initial Launch.

As at 28/2/2014, a total 111,042 units of XMM had been sold, to more than 40 holders.

An amount of 150k unsold units had been sent back to coldwallet, left only ~40k of XMM in hotwallet for continue selling. Most of the XRP raised had been sent to trading accounts, while ~10% were retained in hotwallet to support buy-back mechanism.

Today, a buy-back offer had been created by hotwallet at price of 1 xmm = 1 xrp.
At the same time, selling offer of new unit had been adjusted to 1 xmm = 1.05 xrp.

These prices will be adjusted from time to time with respect to the underlying-value of XMM. Basically, the buy-back price would be slightly discounted, and selling price will be at premium to its value. To reduce the workload (as said, the task was done manually) I won't make the adjustments too often, probably only once a week.

Thanks again for all the support from each Xmm-holders. Hope our fund could help increase liquidity in Ripple and improve the ecosystem.

Initial Launch of XMM -- 300,000 units.

Here's the official launch of the Fund.

Today, a total of 300,000 unit was issued to the hotwallet,
and offer was created selling them at price of 1xmm = 1xrp.

This initial sell offer will last until the end of this month (28-Feb-2014).
Anybody who like to support the Fund could choose to buy any amount he like.

The XRPs raised will then be sent to some trading accounts to perform market making. The reason I create several trading accounts, is for ease of management. Each account will be assigned for different task (e.g. trading different pair of currencies). Funds would be moving around but will never leave these accounts.

The address of hotwallet and trading accounts are listed on the 'Ripple' page of this blog.

Though I've set an internal target of 10% return per month, there's no guarantee that I could achieve that. Since XMM is not a pure for-profit fund, I hope its holders won't stress too much on investment return.

Make sure you understand the concept and philosophy of XMM before investing.
Please read the previous blog post, and also the pre-launch discussions on forums.

the Philosophy - Currency means Flow.

The main reason human invented money, is to facilitate trades. That's why it's called "currency". To realize its value, money has to flow from one place/person to another.

But the opposite is what happening now inside Bitcoin and XRP community. With the anticipation of potential price appreciation, many people start accumulating and hoarding the currencies instead of using them for transaction.

This is never a good sign for any currencies, especially those new-born. The more a currency is being hoarded, the less will it be in circulation, thus the more difficult for it to play the role as trading medium.

the existence of funds like XMM could be a mechanism to counteract or mitigate people's intention of hoarding XRP.

The fund provide an investment opportunity for ripplers to earn extra profit. So, instead of just hoarding their XRP some people may choose to invest them into the fund, which will then be thrown into market-making activities.

In other words, the Fund helps to mobilise some stagnant XRPs by drawing them out from people's storage. I hope this will improve the circulation rate of XRP thus making it a better and healthier currency.

Our philosophy -- a good currency is the one that flows.

Background of XMM Fund Project

In an ideal ecosystem of Ripple, there will be lots of market-makers that compete intensively with each other, the spread will be minimal and the volume will be huge, thus bring down the cost of transactions and currencies-conversion.

However, this is not the case in current stage. When we look at the order books, the first impression most people get is the wide spread and low volume. How could Ripple become a low cost payment if there's no liquidity?

In normal condition, wide spread means windfall-profit opportunity. This should attract investors, speculators and arbitragers to fill up the gaps. However, currently Ripple's user base is quite small and transaction volume is very low. So even though the margin is great, the absolute figure of profit is still not attractive enough to bring in some big players.

And because ripple is still in beta, there is a high risk of total failure and everything thrown into it may become wasted. Hence most people only willing to invest little amount of money or time into it.

so these had become a cycle: not enough market-makers means wide spread and high cost, thus very few people want to use ripple, then the low transaction volume,  and hence no body willing to invest significant amount of time/money for market making.

The pooled fund is intended to solve this chicken-egg problem.

In the form of pool, we could raised fund to inject bigger tranche of liquidity into market, yet each individual only assume small amount of risk, limited to the portion of money they contribute. And having a manager to perform the market-making jobs means those who have no time for this can still participate in providing liquidity.

Off course, with only one or few funds like this we are still not able to create great liquidity in the system, but at least we take our steps. I'm in a hope that there will me more funds (be it individual or pooled) joining the market-making party in the future, each will have their own trading strategy or technique, and some with automated process to do it more efficiently.

Only with the presence of intensive competition will Ripple then become a highly liquid low cost payment system and attract more users.

Pre-Launced Discussions

Some early discussions about the idea of XMM:

https://ripple.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5864
https://xrptalk.org/topic/1405-xmm-a-pre-launch-discussion/

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