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Plutus Whitepaper 2024: The Vision
5 min read
At Plutus, our mission has always been simple: create a loyalty rewards token (PLU) with real value that enhances daily card spending and ensures long-term sustainability.
The Plutus Whitepaper 2024 reflects this mission while securing PLU’s future intrinsic value.
Maximising the value of PLU starts with combining features and policies that encourage meaningful participation within the ecosystem:
Utilities: PLU’s primary value will now be fully realised within the Plutus app. Features like PlutusGifts, PlutusMiles, and PlutusTravel are designed to encourage in-app use, and ensure users extract maximum value from their rewards.
Dynamic Fees on Payouts: For years, payouts had no fee or were capped at £/€3 to promote self-custody stacking—a core founding value. Unfortunately, this unique privilege has been misunderstood over time. Thus, our legacy dynamic fees now help change the way product is used and perceived, as approved by 67% of you in the whitepaper.
This balanced approach of combining utilities and dynamic payout fees boosts in-app activity, while reserving self-custody stacking for those who understand and can afford the privilege, and guides others to use the app as intended or face account closure.
PLU earned in-app is now backed by real-world benefits, offering consistent value.
Minimum £/€10 Tangible Value: PLU, earned at its current low emission rate, now provides a minimum value of £/€10 in the app via utilities like PlutusGifts.
Maximum £/€150 Value with No Cap: Utilities like PlutusTravel, launching this month, can offer £/€150 per PLU. With no upper limit, PLU’s value in-app scales with demand.
This ensures PLU’s worth remains unaffected by external conditions or misuse by a small group, staying true to the original vision laid out in the 2015 whitepaper.
The perceived drop in PLU’s reward value is not due to user churn—in fact, our user base continues to grow. The real issue lies in behaviour: some users exploit rewards for short-term personal gains, rather than utilising them as intended (stack or redeem).
I take responsibility for this. Offering services at low fees and allowing users to earn and remove millions in rewards value for £/€6.99 a month was overly lenient. This generous approach aimed to please everyone but ultimately catered to individual interests that conflicted with the overall ecosystem's needs.
Moving forward, we will strictly follow the whitepaper: delivering meaningful utilities, ensuring sustainable tokenomics, and scaling responsibly. Additional services beyond the basic subscription (reward card, bank-like features) will now carry fair fees.
Like Air Miles and all other loyalty programs, PLU’s redeem value will also vary:
Despite the fees and varied redemptions values, PLU remains one of the most rewarding loyalty systems across Fintech, its unique features are unmatched.
Dynamic Adjustment: Fees may increase based on volume or decrease as in-app engagement grows and third-party payouts stop, which ultimately creates stability.
For example, with PlutusGifts:
While 1 PLU earned from a £/€6.99 account offers £/€10 intrinsic value through zero-fee items, a fair balanced fee keeps the feature both lucrative and sustainable.
Those turning $2 in rewards into thousands in gift card value can continue to do so without limits, but face a +10% dynamic fee that may increase to 80% on large volumes—and could reduce to less than 10% once the minimum £/€10 anchor is fully established in Q1 2025.
Details were noted here before the feature release.
Flexibility on Payouts: Users can still withdraw rewards outside the ecosystem for a fair fee, ensuring flexibility while increasing revenue to provide additional features.
PLU’s value is inherently tied to its ecosystem, and this shift will naturally occur as in-app use of utilities increases. While some users have enjoyed, as they call it, 'milking the system' at low monthly costs (e.g., just +150 users removing ~$200k rewards value weekly), the revised structure, stemming from the whitepaper (which you voted for), ensures fairness for the broader user base of 150,000+ customers.
This approach safeguards PLU from external factors, ensuring real utility for all—rather than being misused as a personal slush fund by a small group of entitled users.
While we’ve prioritised community feedback, it’s essential to clarify that Plutus is not a DAO or a committee-run foundation (those fail 100% of the time). Decisions are driven by data, focusing on the business’s long-term goals and the broader customer base in mind, which may not always align with individual short-term interests.
Moving forward, disruptive and entitled behaviour will no longer be entertained. Discord and other forums will become read-only with write access limited to verified members.
Starting with the pillars of our community: Jon and Ross! 😉
Embracing Progress: For those dissatisfied, we encourage recognition of the unique, open two way communication we provided during our early founding years and later growth phase spanning 10 years. As we now scale to millions of users, we can no longer cater to individual demands that conflict with the ecosystem’s success.
While we remain customer-focused and continue to offer unique features with a strong emphasis on customer service, we are shifting from a community-focused to a growth-focused strategy, targeting Web2 audience and businesses for scalable growth to millions.
We have provided an easy account closure process for those who do not agree with our direction, a forum for suspended users and policy violators where you will be welcomed to share feedback.
We’ve come a long way, scaling successfully as a self-funded Fintech (a rare achievement). Now, with funding, strategic and technical support from our Tier 1 network partner, we’re transitioning to mainstream adoption and preparing for next year’s growth phase driving more value to customers. This partnership (details later) will drive expansion, sustainability, and more key utilities.
While these changes may challenge some, they are vital to maintaining PLU’s intrinsic value and securing the platform’s health for years to come.
To everyone embracing this exciting new chapter—LFG! 🎉
Thank you for your continued trust and belief in Plutus.
Warm regards,
Danial Daychopan
CEO, Plutus
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