Blockcast Interview -Q&A Review
Useless Executive Director — David Wyly
Blockcast.cc
On July 12, 2021, Useless Executive Director was hosted by Blockcast.cc, a broadcasting news source for the blockchain community. Blockcast.cc was founded in Singapore and has a network of partners in Hong Kong, S. Korea and China.
Let us welcome the Useless Executive Officer David Wyly. Tell us more about yourself, David.
Thank you for having me! As you already said, I’m David Wyly — I’m a 36-year-old husband, father, entrepreneur, and crypto enthusiast. By day I’m a Senior Software Engineering Manager for a teletherapy company, and by night I help run two mobile app startups. I’ve been in software development for about 14 years. I really enjoy challenging myself with writing clean, modular, and scalable applications, as well as managing and collaborating with other software, cloud, and QA engineers. Living in Utah, I enjoy hiking through the beautiful mountains that we have here.
1) Can you tell us about Useless and please tell us about your useless team too.
Useless is a community-led, first-of-its-kind hyper-hyper-deflationary token on the Binance Smart Chain network. Originally, I came across Useless as an investor and was lucky enough to catch it minutes before it launched. I really enjoyed the fun, carefree humor of the token, and felt that it had infinite meme potential. When I reached out to the original developer, he told me that the token was originally intended as a joke and that he didn’t expect anything to really come from it. Being useless, he stepped aside and handed the keys over to the community — and ever since we have worked hard to innovate and build something great around the token.
Our useless corporate team includes 6 doxxed directors, myself included, who have keys to the multi-signature wallet and contract interaction. Additionally, we have a bunch of useless core team members from across the world with a variety of skills in software development, advertising, marketing, product management, graphic design, and community management. Sometimes they are too useful at what they do.
2) “World’s first Pump-N-Burn Token Mechanism”- Can we know how this mechanism works?
One of the key innovative features around the Useless ecosystem is how we inject 100% of the profits from Useless Crypto, LLC into the token. One of the primary ways we facilitate profit injection is through “Pump-N-Burn,” which is simply purchasing USELESS tokens with corporate profits and then burning them, which permanently removes them from circulation.
One of the primary benefits of pumping profit into the token is that we are essentially exploring a new form of crypto-equity. Token holders are almost elevated to the status of shareholders, which unlocks a lot of really exciting functionality like, for example, crypto-dividends.
3) Being the first of its kind hyper-hyper-deflationary token on BSC, what are some of the features that we should take note of?
By itself, Useless token doesn’t really have that much utility, other than being a cryptocurrency that can be traded. We believe that it’s what is built around the token, not the token itself, that grants utility. At Useless, our corporation and community-led team are building products that generate revenue and inject profit into the token. With Pump-N-Burn, there is an additional deflationary mechanism where tokens are purchased back and then burned. This is why we call the token hyper-hyper-deflationary, as burning happens more aggressively than some of the more common hyper-deflationary tokens out there.
4) Zooming into the details a bit, care to tell us more about your tokenomics?
Like many tokens on the BSC chain, we have a transaction tax that provides benefits to tokenholders — many of you may know this as “tokenomics.” Of the 8% transaction tax, 4% goes towards reflection/redistribution to all token holders (including the burn wallet), as well as a 4% tax that goes towards automatic liquidity acquisition.
Interestingly, we do not offer tokenomics on exchanges. The beating heart of Useless is PancakeSwap. Any BEP-20 wallet on the BSC blockchain will receive reflection rewards. We did the math, and we came to the conclusion that arbitrage trades are cheaper, listings integrations are faster, and that all exchanges are treated equally and fairly — allowing for a more consistent and predictable experience with the token between exchanges. This also solves the problem where exchanges become “price islands” with vastly different prices due to how expensive it is to move tokens between exchanges.
5) What is your business and tech roadmap? What should we expect in the next 3–6 months from Useless?
On the mobile application side, we are implementing a few lessons learned from Robinhood, which vastly simplified the process of buying and selling stocks to the point where normal people began to feel comfortable participating. We want to do the same thing in the complex and confusing world of cryptocurrency. For starters, there is not a really good mobile app that has a clean, easy-to-use chart that doesn’t require a flurry of complex finger maneuvers to operate.
We are also exploring and validating other potential features, such as a whale-tracking application, or even a light-audit where we rate the risk of crypto projects based on a checklist of investigative criteria.
6) I see that your token is a registered corporate entity. Where are you registered and have you figured out what to tell the IRS about how you ‘burn’ the profits?
Useless Crypto, LLC is a registered corporate entity in the State of Utah, USA. Because we’re not 100% what the IRS will think, since we’re not tax experts, we plan to play it safe and withhold a certain percentage of our profits from being sent to the furnace. If we end up not owing to any taxes, then we’ll inject that money back into the token.
7) What are your business revenue streams?
We’re in the process of building those streams. First, we have merchandise, but currently, that’s only a proof-of-concept to demonstrate how the system works. We do not intend to rely on merchandise sales for any of our operational expenses.
We expect our bread and butter to be the mobile app ecosystem, as we have already discussed. Monetization is planned to come from listing fees and advertising, which can be pretty lucrative in this space.
We also are building a “tokenomics bypass” smart contract and dApp that allows for you to send Useless to any BEP-20 wallet without the 8% tax, as long as you pay a 2% BNB surcharge. We intend to use this to claw back some BNB from arbitrage trading. We can further monetize this by allowing for other tokens to whitelist and use this contract for their own tokenomics bypass and we take a small cut.
Because we think of ourselves as more of a startup than a token, we are hungry to find new and innovative revenue streams, so I would expect that we come up with more ways to make money over time.
8) Many think that we will get into crypto winter soon. If this happens, since you are hyper-hyper deflationary, can I assume that the token will do well despite the downtimes? Tell us your views.
Hyper-hyper definition will certainly help, yes! But what we feel is really fortunate is that we do not need to rely on getting more token holders in order for our token and ecosystem to benefit. Even if we were to not have any holder growth, as long as the corporation makes a profit, the token will benefit from the external buyback. We feel that this will give us the ability to weather any crypto winter that comes our way.
9) Can you share a “useless” but inspiring quote for our community?
From an early age to be cautious and fearful of my inevitable encounter with quicksand. But then I read somewhere that said, by raising your legs slowly and laying on your back, it becomes impossible to sink into quicksand. Now, you too, are armed with the secret to survival. Go forth and thrive.
