What a rollercoaster the past 48 hours have been over at Crypto HQ. Initially, the CRYPTO.COM team dropped on the community that they will be phasing out the MCO token. What is means it you don't have to swap you MCO for CRO, however, they will no-longer be supporting MCO tokens in any way shape or form. This puzzled and panicked quite a few people there were a flurry of questions on line as a direct result:
- Do I have to swap my MCO for CRO?
- What happens to card benefits?
- Will cashback now be in CRO?
- Are existing customers who swap going to need to by a much more CRO to maintain the card stake?
- How will the incentive program work?
- What about my existing stakes of MCO?
All of these were valid questions and if I am honest they did put together a comprehensive list of FAQ items.
https://help.crypto.com/en/articles/4309688-mco-swap-program-a-guide
Most notably among these where:
You will continue to enjoy staking benefits, even if you do not swap your MCO stake to a CRO stake, before 2 November 2020 at 23:59 UTC.
Following 2 November 2020 at 23:59 UTC, your MCO stake will be automatically unstaked and you will no longer enjoy any staking benefits on the Crypto.com App. To continue uninterrupted access to staking benefits, please swap your MCO to CRO via the MCO Swap program.
- your MCO stake will be converted at the MCO Swap Rate. However, the existing staking benefits that you enjoyed before performing the swap will remain unchanged.
Before the end of the MCO Swap program, 15,793,852.04 MCO that is held by MCO Technology GmbH will be burned by sending to the following burn address:
0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
This didn't quite ease everyone's fears though and Reddit was filled with a lot of very unhappy customers, let look why.
All Change!
One of the biggest selling points for Crypto.com is of course the cashback cards. These prepaid Visa Debit cards allow customers to load fiat onto the cards and earn (depending on levels between 1% and 5% cash back on spending (previously in MCO, now CRO) instantly into their account. The cards themselves are nothing too special, you're not spending crypto, nor are you converting crypto they are just a fiat platform. Though that said they second tier and up are all metal cards and there are some good interbank rates when using these cards abroad (making them an ideal holiday card, who even takes travelers cheques anymore anyway!).
With the death of the MCO token it seem the Crypto.com team tried to sneak past a massive price increase on these bank cards and this is where most folks really drew the line. In previous weeks leading up to this MCO had been trading around $3.15-$3.20 (lets say $3.15) this wasn't great and has been a bit stagnant but it meant that the Ruby card came in at around $157ish. That is to say you needed to purchase 50 MCO and stake (no interest though at this level, that is for richer folks) them against the account for 6 months. For this you get a card that is 2% cashback and they will refund a monthly subscription of Spotify as well (making it free). However, as they stabbed the MCO token directly in the heart (momentarily distracting everyone) it appeared the intent was to up the staking commitments for these cards, indeed what was once 50 MCO zipped up to 5000 CRO (in today's price that is a whopping $600) for close to a 4 FOLD increase!
As a direct result of these actions, and rightly so, the community went crazy, the tension on Reddit was palpable. For a time it seemed like all the admins could do was fight fires by taking down some of the most inflammatory posts. However, at the very least they seemed to have been taking notes as well. When I logged in to check my account in the morning it seems they had seen the error of their ways and reduced the CRO staking requirements across the board.
This now drops the Ruby level down to around $120, which is a much more reasonable entry level.
Final thoughts
Despite this craziness I actually think that the Crypto.com team may have come out of this whole thing reasonably unscathed. Don't get me wrong the community at large is really unhappy that not 1 but 2 changes happened over night without any prior warning. There are also folks that have been stacking MCO for a while now and have them locked in still because they cannot move them out of the stakes even though Crypto.com have said they wont support them any more. However, in the long run it does seem like the better bet to go the CRO route. The MCO token was really struggling for a use case and to have two native tokens it seemed a little odd anyway. Additionally, now that all that MCO folks were staking has been swapped over to CRO this opens the door for more folks to get involved in the syndicate programs, if you're not aware of this take a look here:
- https://crypto.com/exchange/syndicate
- https://help.crypto.com/en/articles/3573723-the-syndicate-general-information
Furthermore, as they decouple from MCO folks with larger amounts of CRO (due to the swap) will also have access to much higher staking rates (CRO rates offered are in the 16-18% region which is excellent when you compare it with the old MCO rates).
It seems like every day in the crypto sphere there is something interesting happening. I for one will be watching this unfold. Let us hope though for the sake of all the users that Crypto.com doesn't start changing their mind again.
Hope you enjoyed watching this all unfold, good luck y'all!
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