Welcome to a New Hot Cross

Overhauled UI/UX, a Unified Discovery of Applications, a KYC Portal, and More.

Oct 12, 2021

Slide from an internal deck. Puzzle pieces are snapping together.

What happens when you get a group of builders together who put shipping and deployments before glitz? What if our focus was purely on making the best possible products that we can make instead of overpromising anything to anyone, ever? That’s how Hot Cross started last year.

Zero promises. We did what we wanted to do.

It may not appear as such, but the greatest magic trick we ever pulled was making people believe that we were just a cross-chain bridging project with a little bit of farming thrown in for good measure. It’s become much more than that and time to change. There’s no big bang news here. Stop here if that’s what you’re expecting.

But there is change coming. We’re approaching more than a year of working together as a team and it means taking a full overview of our stack and what that means moving forward. It also means identifying our weaknesses and strengths, a practice that will become vital if we wish to have another year ahead.

📰 TLDR: a new unified application is launching tomorrow that will allow you to access everything that we are building under one roof. Discoverability is now in focus. Subdomains will change into a unified domain that shows all apps under one roof. Things are getting smoother, easier to find, and more fantastic.

“Web sucks. Socials suck. Who are these people?” A time of pure bliss. Nirvana.

How We Began

Our thesis when we began building Hot Cross was exactly what it is today: when given sufficient mobility and freedom of movement, users will take advantage of opportunities that had otherwise been impossible to get to. We saw what was happening on Binance Smart Chain during September and October 2020 and immediately jumped on the opportunity to service other teams that wished to have a proper peg-in / peg-out model for their ERC20 canonical token.

Simple. Difficult. Useful.

Function before Form. That won’t change. We built many of these and the new one is different.

It became apparent that if bridging was in demand that the next step of that process was to ask why. “Why are people attempting to bridge over to Binance Smart Chain when the only two mega-platforms over there right now are PancakeSwap and Venus? Whatever, we’ll figure it out. Build now, questions later.”

March 16, 2020, internal mind map. The bridge, minter, and Cross Pool shipped.

Not Just Farming

It’s our fault, really. When we began coding and putting Cross Pool under six audits the thinking was, “there’s no way to gain single-sided yield on BSC right now that is flexible, can be allocated just like launchpads on CEX’s, and frankly we think we can do it better than others. Let’s try that yeah?”

The product has been a success, so much so that other teams came in, used our technology, and kept coming back because their communities enjoyed using Cross Pool. To this day it remains one of our strongest products and we do suspect that with the impending launch of IHO’s and Cross Yield, Cross Pool itself will benefit from both new additions to our ecosystem.

Cross Pool is the best way to stake and participate on-chain.

But we’re not a farming project and never have been. Our token is a fixed cap, a highly important piece of the Hot Cross ecosystem and it’s not farm fodder.

For users, Cross Pool is a way to stake. For us, it’s a way to understand psychology and behavior. For teams, it’s a way to offload staking programs onto a platform that does them extremely well. For sustainability, it’s hit and miss. Sometimes fantastic, sometimes not. It really depends on the assets that are available at the time.

That is to say, Cross Pool was a way of understanding data and analytics on user behavior that is utterly priceless to our development framework: gather data, make decisions, ship, see how they react, gather more data, and then act on it.

Then What Are You?

Zoom out.

We’re a multi-chain, cross-chain tool suite builder that utilizes the Hot Cross Token as a way of granting users access to our ecosystem. Want to be a part of what we build? You’ll need some HOTCROSS for that, for the most part.

This includes things like Cross Pool, upcoming compliant IHO’s and Launchpads, gaining access to HOTVIP and the goodies that come along with it, Cross Yield, Cross Send discounts, Cross Mint, and much more. Sooner or later HOTCROSS will feel like sticky glue for the legos that we build, but at our core, we are hunters of information.

We find trends, needs, research like wild animals, and then attempt to capitalize on those opportunities from an infrastructure layer. Building roads feels better than building the cars that drive on them. That’s not to say we won’t pull something out of left field and surprise from time to time, but our compass points to sustainable infra.

No data. No Hot Cross. No Hot Cross. No data. Riddle me that.

Where Is This Going?

The last year has been good. Things are getting a little messy though:

The website is still “ugly”. (⏳);
Our documentation is lacking and we need an incredible technical writer to come in and hammer out technical documentation as their life depends on it. (⏰);
Our product suite subdomains are hard to remember. send., bridge., mint., crosspool., you get the idea (⌛️);
Our socials are fantastic. Telegram is messy though. We will put efforts into Discord pretty soon. (⏰);
And our ultra-rapid pace of shipping has turned into an expectation rather than an outlier. That is to say, we’re putting a bit too much pressure on ourselves at a cost of optimization. We will need to clean up what we have and work on going vertical. 2 or 3 chains where we go deep, with more where we go shallow. (✅)

If you are competent in the above, reach out to us. This is our “show us what you got”.

But again, the last year has been good.

And relatively safe.

Stop. Tell Me. Where Is This Going?

Here’s the game plan:

Tomorrow we will be launching a new website that contains a unified UI/UX for pretty much every product that we have developed during the last year;
On the same day, we will open up KYC immediately so that users have forever access to any IHO, launchpad, or compliant-facing product that we create. Don’t fret, this doesn’t include Cross Pool. Just the B2B compliance-facing products that we wish for our community to gain access into;
Depending on the former, we will announce the first IHO on either Thursday or Friday, but no later than that;
Next week, we will put super-charged efforts into the IHO, while also finalizing the last 2 audits on Cross Yield, HOTVIP, and a few other stealth projects that we have not yet announced.
That will round out October and it will be an amazing one.

Updates on Pending Launches

Here’s how we see things playing out:

Launch the new unified website;
Launch the IHO KYC portal;
Launch the IHO;
Launch Cross Yield on Binance Smart Chain;
Launch Cross Yield on Avalanche;
HOTVIP has been ready for weeks - we’re waiting on a good time to deploy it;
Cross Pool 2 needs to go to audit - first we tackle the giants in front of us;
Launch [redacted because you already got enough juice above].

So we ask you: where will you go with us? Are you ready for another year ahead? Do you wish to become part of our ecosystem and community? Do you want to play the long game or the short game? We have both.

Never still. Always moving. Even when it feels like the waters are quiet.

More tomorrow. And the next day.

🤝 Interested in participating in a Cross Pool, Hot Cross IHO, or launching out your idea on any ETH and EVM Network we support? Get in touch. We’re waiting to hear from you.

Ongoing Work at Hot Cross

📣 Tell a friend about @hotcrosscom, @hotcross, @hotcrossann. It would really mean the world to us. We have been building since last year, but we work like it's still the beginning. Bookmark Linktree and subscribe to our updates for more.

About Hot Cross

Hot Cross is an extensive multi-chain and cross-chain tool suite that enables blockchain teams and their communities to thrive. At its core, Hot Cross aims to be the best toolbox for ETH and EVM networks. Their development philosophy is agile, and they are a cohort of builders who aggressively seek out opportunities to meet the demands of the now for both B2B and B2C. The core thesis that Hot Cross presents is that users and teams will migrate in part to new networks that feel familiar when presented with good tooling and freedom. Hot Cross is a company and an ecosystem in and of itself, and our goals are towards allowing communities to flourish using our technologies, whether or not they know we are the ones building them.

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