Cryptocurrency and the blockchain industry are now weathering the bear market. ArcBlock (ABT) firmly believes that the only way to overcome this crypto winter is to create consumer-friendly products and services making the general public truly feel the value and benefits of blockchain technology by delivering the promises step by step.

Hereby is our statement as follows because we received some unreasonable requests from seldom crypto exchange as well as found out some of our partners encountered similar situations recently:

ArcBlock is aiming to establish the world's first blockchain 3.0 platform by focusing on giving developers the ability to manage, build and deploy decentralized applications easily since its inception. That ArcBlock technical white paper was officially released in early 2018 is to attract supporters and early adopters to foster community consensus by presenting a compelling vision of ArcBlock.

During the past year, ArcBlock has made steady progress in engineering and products and its development platform has officially been opened for developers and businesses by the end of 2018 on schedule. The “ArcBlock 2019 Product Roadmap (Request for Community Comment)” was released at the same time to outline products and services upcoming for the next year. In doing so, ArcBlock and its community consolidated and strengthened consensus on next steps for the platform and ecosystem building.

While the roadmap was released and reviewed within the global community, ArcBlock saw the rise of self-organized consensus community our users formed to monitor, advise, propose and communicate on ArcBlock’s future development, and to raise the independent voice all around the industry as well.

The ArcBlock platform has been steadily expanding its influence in the developer community and the technical partners. As of today, we have held 4 hackathons attracting nearly 300 developers to sign up and develop 20 DApps, as well as 18 blockchain technology lectures online and offline have nearly 1,000 audiences attended. And our engineers also published 23 engineering blogs which received tens of thousands of views.

More than 20 exchanges, including the global mainstream exchanges such as Huobi, OKEX and Bithumb, have voluntarily listed ArcBlock Token (ABT) since February 2018. We have always been open and willing to cooperate by providing various support for compliant and generally accepted marketing activities and user incentives that have the potential to increase ABT adoption.

Be compatible with the decentralized principles ArcBlock holds that ensure token holdings are as dispersed as possible by giving as many individuals and developers access to ABT, we only consider and support the exchange marketing events which attracts the real supporters and developer users. However, any behavior or action that runs inconsistently with ArcBlock’s approach to the market, e.g. any activities that create falsely generated short-term traffic, or creation of false transactions in the market, is not something ArcBlock has participated in or will do so.

Recently some exchanges that do not have enough individual users or trading activity to support their existing operations approached us to propose a fee-based arrangement that puts ArcBlock in a situation where the actions do not align with our principles and industry accepted guidelines, we cannot and will not cooperate with those exchanges, and would prefer to withdraw ABT trading from these platforms altogether. Even so, the goal should not be to create conflict, but rather to build and strengthen partnerships by working together to establish healthy trading activities and to support long-term, clear-cut industry rules that will help win the trust of users and regulators.

Hereby is our reminder for ABT holders to take precautions against the potential risk of the inability to trade and withdraw tokens from exchanges where ABT trading volume is extremely small and put ABT in their own digital wallet with their own private key on the blockchain.

Meanwhile, ArcBlock will further its cooperation with the long-run exchange partners to increase access to ABT and to generate responsible, trading activities for our users. ArcBlock is focused on meeting the first quarter product release objectives outlined in the 2019 roadmap titled as “Forge Chains into Networks”, and hopes to work together to create an effective plan to increase market exposure, user education, and industry awareness.