I’d like to wish everybody a Happy New Year.  We have over 50,000 shareholders (and shareholders in waiting).  We are very proud of this achievement.

Preferred Stock Rights Change

The lawyers want me to start by pointing out that we made a change in the Preferred Series A shares, those are the shares owned by all of our shareholders.  We changed the liquidation preference and that change affects your rights.  Please read about it here.

Bitcoin!  Stock ticker symbol! The fun stuff!

We transitioned our business on how you receive rebates from shopping.  Now, you’re getting free Bitcoin when you shop at 1,800 great stores.   And, we’ve finally got a ticker symbol – RWRDP.  Now, our job is to take those two really important events and do some great things with them.

We’re happy with the transition.  We chose to do it during a slow period, so that if we missed something, it would have a smaller consequence.  It’s been almost a month, and it had a positive impact on our business.

I’m less happy with the progress towards actually having our stock actively quoted.  We’ve applied for the last steps in the process, but it just takes a long time.  I’m going to repeat myself here.  Even after it’s quoted, I expect there to be very little activity.  How that’s going to affect the stock price is anybody’s guess.  Our stock price might end up looking like the price of Bitcoin, with very high volatility.  Or, maybe not.

Thinking positively, I believe our stock will be actively quoted next week.

Buying and Selling RWRDP

Because we’re new on the market, quoted on the OTCQB, and very low priced, it’ll be harder to buy or sell our stock through a stock broker.  They think of us as a penny stock (any stock that trades for less than $1 is a penny stock), and so stock brokerage firms (think Charles Schwab or eTrade) have stricter requirements.  We’ll do an announcement once we’re actively quoted.

Raising More Money / Government Shutdown

Like most early stage companies, we need to raise money to pay some of our bills, we don’t have enough cash gross profit yet to cover all of our costs.  We’re preparing to raise money via another Reg. A+ offering.  Because it’s a Reg. A+ offering, ordinary people can invest.  Our targeted price per share is $.15 (the last time we had an offering, people paid $.09 a share). That price may change up or down before we file.

As I write this, the U.S. Government may get shutdown because of political battles.  The folks who review and qualify offerings will be laid off.  Our fingers are crossed.  With no shutdown, we estimate we’ll get our offering qualified in about a month’s time.  But no guarantees on timing, it’s controlled by the SEC.

Blockchain / ICO / Offering

What’s most exciting about this upcoming offering is our intended use of funds.  While this may all change (the lawyers made me say that), we’re raising part of the money to fund building our own token, our own coin.  We’re getting ready to do an ICO, an initial coin offering.  We have the perfect use case for a coin built on a blockchain.  We’ll have a whitepaper to share soon, but for those who care about these things, our initial plan is to call the coin REWARDScoin, and build it using the ERC-20 standard (an Ethereum-based coin).

Another exciting thing about this offering … we’re going to be accepting Bitcoin (and some other cryptocurrencies) as payment for stock.  We may be the first to enable such a thing to happen.

Our transition to our members getting Bitcoin was in support of this.  So another use for the funds is to recruit shoppers who are interested in cryptocurrency, so that when our coin is ready, we already have a market for it.

And once our offering is qualified, we’ll be able to issue stock again.