NetCents Technology Inc. to provide an update regarding technology advancements of the Company's cryptocurrency merchant gateway. The Company has made advancements in its key infrastructure and technology, ensuring the platform is future-proofed for continued growth and scale with a focus on critical areas, including scalability, automation, security, DeFi, and data analysis with a focus on platform cost reduction. Scalability and automation have been key focus areas around all technology advancements within the system.

In addition to utilizing microservices, the Company began dockerization, providing increased platform flexibility and optimization. Through dockerization, the Company implemented a container strategy allowing the platform to become cloud agnostic and automatically increasing and decreasing the Company's infrastructure according to current demand. Through these improvements and the implementation of elastic data models, the Company has optimized its capacity by over 25%, moving its infrastructure to a demand-based model.

This allows the company to continue its currency merchant and processing volume growth without the requirements of continually increasing its costly storage infrastructure and are expected to decrease the Company's overall costs. The enhanced capacity and addition of microservices, along with the ability to scale the platform infrastructure up or down based on demand, have given the Company the capability to add over 1,000 cryptocurrencies to the platform with minimal costs and development resources. While the Company can now add all these cryptocurrencies, it intends to continue its currency offering focus on leading coins with market depth, demand, and demonstrated history of driving large volumes of merchant transactions while keeping the platform streamlined and intuitive to use.

The capacity provides the ability to remain nimble and capitalize on emerging demand in a timely and cost-efficient manner. In addition to scalability and automation, the Company has focused its resources on improving and enhancing platform security using cutting-edge technologies in all aspects of the Company platforms. The Company has optimized its wallet workflow to minimize transaction costs and maximize the efficiency of the internal transfer and settlement of cryptocurrency using a hybrid architecture of solutions, including multi-party computation technology. The Company has also upgraded its software and hardware across all aspects of its infrastructure to increase its protection of the platform from various online cyber security threats ranging from phishing attempts and ransomware attacks to distributed denial of service (DDoS) exploits and Internet of Things (IoT) botnets.

In addition to online security, the Company has also shored up its infrastructure from physical dangers, including natural disasters such as fires and floods, civil unrest, utility outages, and theft or vandalism of hardware assets through a multi-cloud strategy, reducing potential business disruption. To make educated strategic decisions for the future of NetCents, the ability to access and interpret data is vital. Through the merchant gateway, the Company collects a myriad of data points on every transaction, payment, sign-up, and account update, providing incredibly detailed insights into all aspects of the business, overall market indicators, and merchant and consumer behaviour.

The Company has implemented an open-source data analytics platform to collate and interpret this data meaningfully. This insight allows all the departments within the Company ­ including accounting, marketing, technology, and customer service ­ to make critical business and revenue-driving decisions. As part of the data analysis initiative, the Company continues to add additional features and components to automate manual internal processes in relation to reporting.

A cost centre for the Company is the maintenance of its technology infrastructure. With these upgrades and integrations, the Company has reduced the cost and maintenance of this infrastructure by integrating various services and automating workflows ranging from settling transactions with liquidity providers, balancing wallets, and maintaining network latency for incoming transactions. These upgrades have decreased staffing time and resources to support the infrastructure, nodes, and servers.

In addition to short and mid-term platform advancements, the Company has also focused on future-proofing the platform. As well as the ability to add and remove coins on demand, the upgrades to the system open new possibilities for integrating DeFi protocols into the NetCents ecosystem. DeFi, decentralized finance, uses emerging technology to remove third parties and centralized institutions from financial transactions.

DeFi eliminates the fees banks and other financial institutions charge for using their services. Individuals hold funds in a secured digital wallet, can transfer funds in minutes, and can be used by anyone with an internet connection. The Company has identified several strategic key components that can be used within the NetCents ecosystem, which would allow merchants to benefit and earn yield from cryptocurrency utilizing DeFi protocols.