Just nearly 2 months since the last card staking requirements revision, Crypto.com(CDC) has went out and did it again, effectively doubling the current staking requirements. It has now increased across the board from 2,500 CRO to 5,000 CRO for the most basic tier cards.

Now - this has not been an easy journey for all CRO holders this year. There were 4 changes to the staking requirements:

• MCO to CRO Swap, 1 August 2020 - 50 MCO -> 5,000 CRO
• Emergency AMA, 4 August - 5,000 CRO -> 1,000 CRO
• 2.5x Increase, 2 November 2020 - 1,000 CRO -> 2,500 CRO
• 2x Increase, 18 January 2021 - 2,500 CRO -> 5,000 CRO

Over a period of 4 months since the MCO to CRO Swap, we have seen the price value of CRO steadily decreasing.

The revision on 2 November 2020 was discussed by Kris Marszalek, CEO of CDC, as the staking requirements were far too low to cover costs. As the price of CRO continues to falls further, Crypto.com has went ahead to double the staking requirements again without justifying why this time. 

Is this the right move?

CDC has garnered mixed responses in both their Reddit and Telegram channels. This has obviously overshadowed the Crossfire event, the final test run before CDC mainnet goes live. 

CDC Should Start with Why

I have mentioned this in my earlier post, and I am going to say it again - it is important to communicate why certain changes are made and if it align with your company's mission. 

The Golden Circle tells us that organizations that start with Why, the purpose, gets better results and customer acquisition. We often failed to see CDC's original vision, which was to make "Cryptocurrency in Every Wallet". Increasing the stake does not gel well with that, and having the CEO just casually mentioning that there's a new staking requirement seems like he does not care about his company's vision either. 

What Kris had done in his recent AMA seems to be outside-in. He has always communicated a lot on the "What" CDC is doing - getting licenses, gearing for mainnet launches, and virtual card releases. It is important to discuss that, but had he switched the way he communicate around, he may get buy-in a lot easier. 

CDC Should Slow Down *Changes*

Being a start-up is not easy, CDC needs to remain agile and have to roll-out changes quickly. However, CDC also needs to understand that too many changes destabilizes things and this is why CRO prices are not bouncing back up. 

CDC could really use a change and communications head to spearhead product strategy and stabilize the community sentiment. The Kübler-Ross Change Curve explains that people generally goes through different states of emotions and how CDC could have better tackled the situation to garner community support. 

While CDC maintains the needs to be agile, the product strategy should aim changes at different product stacks and give time for stabilization on products and features that impact the community most.

CDC Should Look at Community Sentiment

Once the community is just about getting pumped about the recent BTC bull run, CDC rolls out drastic changes again. The staking requirements were not a 10% to 20% increase, it is an 100% increase and such drastic changes impact community sentiment heavily. CDC could measure customer experience through NPS (Net Promoter Score), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) or CES (Customer Effort Score).

Customer experience had taken a huge dip along with the CRO prices as some holders have their portfolio dropped as much as 65%. CDC seems to forget a huge portion of price actions are reliant on community sentiment and things are not recovering well for the past four months. 

Summary

In full disclaimer, I still have two months left on my CRO Stake and obviously I am unable to unstake given the changes. I really hope for a turnaround as I want to breakeven but many people have written off their investment and I am cautiously gearing towards that. I am a Singapore user and we are having issues with international payments, which means having issues with Netflix, Spotify and Lounge access. CRO does not have a lot of utility now and we have to wait a while to see what the mainnet launch does for utility as it is delayed from Q4 2020 to Q1 2021.