Statement addressing Finances and Costs

Crosswise Finance
6 min readNov 16, 2022

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Dear Community,

in regards to ongoing discussions in our community I would like to offer a clear picture of how the funds collected during our pre-sale have been used and how the exploit and development of version 2 impacted our financial situation.

Pre-Sale and Version 1

The development of version 1 started already three months before we launched our pre-sale. We hired a team of 8 developers, each earning an industry-standard salary of around $6.500. The development of V1 took 8 months until we launched in January 2022. Two marketers, one focusing on the community management and the other on the marketing strategy, completed our team back then. The CMO was paid $7.000 per month, the community manager $3.000 for 4 months, starting with our pre-sale until the launch.

So, lets split the development cost of V1:

8 Developers, each earning an average of $6.500 is $52.000.

Development started in April and took until End of December. Thats 9 months in total.

9 * 52.000 is 468.000.

The marketing team costed us 7.000 * 4 , plus 3.000 *4, a total of 40.000

So the cost for staff for Version 1 was a total of $508.000.

Of course, we had to market the pre-sale and launch of Version 1 and booked several AMAs including SatoshiStreetBets, SatoshiClub, ad spots at Dextools, BscScan, press releases at Benzinga, Bitcoinist, BusinessInsider, Techtimes and more.

The marketing costs added up to a total of $400.000 including the ad material, which consists of videos, banners, articles.

So these costs add up to a total of $908.000.

After launch, we have already booked AMAs with Gollums Community, Travladd and a few other communities and had an extensive marketing plan on how to push Crosswise.Finance in regards of trade volume and TVL. Also, we had already worked on CEX listings. Those costs add up to $60.000.

To conclude, the total amount we spent until then was $968.000. It seemed reasonable as the TVL of our V1 was quickly filling up to almost $9.000.000 just two days after launch.

Please note, that I as the CEO have completely financed the development from April until the Pre-Sale in October. I have put in over $400.000 to develop Crosswise.Finance and market the pre-sale.

Exploit and V2 development

The exploit happened just a few days after launch. A total of $340.000 of the projects funds got stolen from the LP pairs of $CRSS-BNB and $CRSS-BUSD. We managed to secure the liquidity provided to all other pairs, such as BNB-BUSD, ETH-BNB and so on.

Let us calculate all costs until now:

  • Development V1 — $508.000
  • Marketing and Marketing Material Pre-Sale and V1 Launch — $400.000
  • other costs, such as deployment, Affiliates of the Pre-Sale, refunds for explicit investor groups (commission): $140.000
  • Exploit V1 — $340.000
  • Audits: TechRate (Pre-Sale) and CertiK (complete DEX and Token V1): $87.000

Total cost — $1.475.000

Note, that we collected a total of $1.850.000 from the Presale rounds 1 and 2.

After all of those costs the remaining amount was $375.000.

We decided to put in the remaining amount in protocols such as Venus to earn some interest. The remaining amount was in the following coins: BNB, ETH, BTC, ADA, LINK, MATIC and BUSD. As the crypto market crashed from that point on we have lost around around 55% of its value. The remaining amount after that was $168.750.

Following the exploit we had to switch our complete development team as there was a visible connection between those with the exploit. A new version, V2, was needed as V1 could have let to more issues in the long run as the functionalities, such as the auto-compound, could break at some point due to logical issues in the smart contracts and how they interacted with one another.

Therefore Greg and I started looking for new developers to quickly start development and satisfy our community with a swift update.

We were able to quickly find a replacement and hired a CTO with a longer track record. The team consisted of 1 smart contract devs, 1 backend dev and 2 frontend developers. The CTO salary was set at $8.000 and the other developers earned an average of $6.2000.

This team has been working on V2 until mid July. We didn’t see satisfying progress and the re-development of the smart contracts still wasn’t completed. Also, after missing multiple deadlines for the entitlements calculation of our users of V1 exploit, we were at a point to end the cooperation with those devs. The development of V2 until then, including the TechRate audit at the end of the development, let to an amount of:

6.5 months of development, with 5 devs (1 CTO, 2 frontend devs, 1 smart contract, 1 backend dev, 1 graphic designer, 1 CMO), monthly cost: $42.300, total cost of $274.950.

As you can see, the remaining amount after the market crash was $168.750 for development which we used to pay our development team. From the point the balance hit 0 the project was financed by myself privately, as the CEO, again.

Since then we had to cutdown the team size and hired a new Lead Dev since the end of July. Since then, 3.5 months have passed and we are 2.5 weeks ahead of our re-launch. The spendings since then, including our new TechRate audit, add up to a total of $24.000. As a founding member with me, Greg, our COO has only received a wage until Mid 2022, a total of $40.000 for a timeframe of 1.5 years.

Summary and personal statement

As I have mentioned before, the remaining funds of the project were $168.750. V2 led to the spendings of a total of $298.950. From the management team only Greg has received a wage. The total costs are $338.950 including the management costs. $170.200 have been financed from my own pocket until now, not including the costs until V2 launch, initial liquidity and deployment costs to keep the project alive and running. Also, further marketing costs will come up. Without marketing, the launch of V2 wouldn’t attract enough new investors with organic growth only.

I have written this article to specifically address the rumors and FUD in connection with our raised amount and people saying, that I as a CEO took out the funds and drive around in a fancy sports car to my huge villa. Definitely not, I have put in cash to save the project and haven’t earned a single penny for my work of over 1.5 years for the project.

Dear community, please support us as much as you can with the launch of Version 2! Not many projects come back from an exploit. Many projects decide to rug and abandon the project. We didn’t and powered through, even kept on financing the project privately. On the 03. December we will finally launch again.

Best regards,

Frederic Beeg

CEO Crosswise.Finance

About Crosswise Finance

Next-gen cross-chain Decentralized Exchange (DEX) building a seamless DeFi user experience. Crosswise Finance bridges the gap between centralized and decentralized exchanges, bringing together the best of both worlds. Crosswise is committed to it’s community and brings back customer service and support to the DeFi space.

Disclaimer: This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making investment decisions.

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Crosswise Finance

Next-gen multi-chain Decentralized Exchange building a seamless DeFi user experience. Crosswise bridges the gap between centralized and decentralized exchanges.