Due to the changes with the Props Project, we will be making some changes to the Listia benefits program. We will do our best to make this transition seamless for the community, and the plan is to continue offering the same benefits you have access to today! Here is what will be happening in the near future:

Props on Listia will be rebranded. We’re not 100% sure on a name yet, but if you have any ideas, please send in a suggestion via support ticket! Through this transition, we plan on making a branding change, but the ways and amounts you earn will be very similar to what you experience today.

You will keep your existing benefits. The benefits you have right now will persist through this transition.

Issuing Pending Props will stop. Once we are ready to transition to our rebranded benefits program, we will no longer issue Pending Props for actions on Listia. You will make progress towards your benefits for performing the same actions and at the same rate of progress. We will have more updates on the exact date that the transition happens.

Claiming Pending Props will be supported for at least 120 days. The Props team has committed to supporting Pending Props claims into an external wallet for at least 120 days from August 13, 2021 after successfully meeting the required conditions. After that time period, they no longer plan to support issuing Props Tokens, so it is important if you want to claim Props Tokens with respect to Pending Props balances, that you do so promptly. Claiming Pending Props will not affect your benefit levels on Listia.

We’ll have more updates as we iron out the details of the transition so stay tuned! Thank you for your patience!

Listia started working with Props in 2019. We had seen the potential of sharing value with our users, through a cryptographic utility token that accrues status, benefits, and a financial stake in the success of our network.

And indeed once we launched Props on Listia, in 2020, we experienced a material increase  (more than 12 percent) in user engagement. Users really love earning these new benefits as they use the Listia platform. It was a welcome change to the existing XP (experience points) system that was in place previously.

Today, Props announced that it will not continue its Loyalty Program into 2022 and has plans to end support for the Props Protocol. As large holders of Props Tokens, and as managers of a community of Props holders, we are disappointed to learn this news. We will need to adjust Listia’s loyalty program as a result, but users will continue to level up and earn benefits on the app without Props Tokens – more on this coming soon. Our goal is to make the transition on the Listia apps as smooth and seamless as possible. Everyone will keep the benefits they have worked so hard to earn. After spending several years working with the Props team and receiving this news, we have some thoughts we want to share with you in hopes that those impacted will better understand and in the spirit of ‘lessons learned’.

1. The Props Project could have been successful but seemed to be hindered by regulatory issues:  
   • They suffered a burden a startup should never take on: reporting and qualifying changes at the level of a mature public company. This handicap should not be under-estimated and made integrating newer features on Listia challenging.
   • Props product development process suffered from a long approval (called “qualification”) process, often taking months and requiring enormous legal bills, to plan and approve new functionality.
   • The Props team could not bring to market products that they spent months building, like per-app tokens that are associated with the success of each individual app’s performance (think social tokens or community tokens for apps). We were excited to bring this to Listia, but did not get the chance.
2. Product Development: The handicaps mentioned above proved detrimental to running a tight product development process of “launch, measure, iterate.”  It’s very difficult to run a productive team in a competitive market under these conditions.
3. Path to full decentralization: The goal of Props’ Reg A+ offering was to be a bridging mechanism, with the project reporting to regulators during early centralized stages, and then stopping once a sufficient level of decentralization was reached. But regulation seems to be moving away from this as well. 

As a result of the Props announcement, Listia may lose a potential upside value in Props and a portion of the increased engagement. But we appreciate that the Props team did its best to tackle the regulatory challenges and constraints with creativity and determination and left no stone unturned. The new loyalty concept on Listia is here to stay, and accruing status and benefits for engaging with the marketplace is one of the more popular feature launches on Listia in some time. So we are grateful that the Listia marketplace has significantly changed for the better because of Props and want to assure the Listia community that we will do our best to ensure a smooth product transition.  

It is our hope that the experiences shared with you here about the Props project were valuable and enlightening.  Hopefully regulations will eventually change to embrace new blockchain technologies and support similar projects in the future. Please stay tuned for more product updates coming soon as well!