It appears the market was shocked by the Escrow decline. Buying...

It appears the market was shocked by the Escrow decline.
Buying opportunity for me.
I haven't watched the video yet, some of the below might be covered in that.
Some items related to posts up thread:

- FLN quotes Gross Payment Volume as a measure of activity on their platforms. It is a bit like if Ebay posted total volume of sales. Like ebay, FLN take a cut of the GPV as well as other fees. So it is a reasonable proxy for revenue.

- Escrow GPV dropped sharply. Management put this down to cool off in the Chinese domain market, and skittishness as many users were reluctant to provide ID documents to comply with 'Know Your Customer' regulations to stop money laundering. My take on this is not that 28% of Escrow payments were money laundering, but that the hurdles to use the platform increased and it will take a little time for customers to get their regulatory docs in order. Imagine you went to sell a domain, logged on to your Escrow account and saw they would not process the transaction until both you and the buyer provided identity documents. In the middle of a transaction, you might decide to skip the escrow step because of the delays the ID steps would introduce. But a percent of those deals will be fraudulent, motivating the marketplace to return to Escrow.com and do the paperwork to avoid future fraud. For these reasons I think the drop will somewhat reverse next quarter. As for the Chinese domain bubble? Who knows what will take its place and whether that will generate Escrow.com revenue, but I am confident that there will be more online trade in future, a plus for escrow.com
In any case Escrow.com is a very minor part of the FLN business.

- The Freelancer marketplace saw GPV grow a scant 1%. This is a concern, as we should expect the value of payments on the freelancing platform to be growing more than this. Interestingly, the revenue on this side of the business was up 6% so either the lower GPV didn't impact revenue as much or there is a lag and we have yet to see the revenue hit. Management alluded in this and the previous quarterly that they had an issue with the "desktop funnel". As this presentation says it had tested well, I take this to mean the 'funnel' is the pages presented when you visit the freelancer site to post a project or become a freelancer. That would suggest that they tried to change some of the steps to increase sales conversions, that it looked good when they A/B tested the changes, but when they rolled the change out it resulted in a decrease that slowed growth in GPV. I don't know enough about the underlying components and how this works, but management commentary that growth picked back up when they fixed the funnel issue is heartening that this was a 'blip'.

- As I understand it, the $35m in cash on hand is separate from any money held in trust.

- I agree with comments suggesting FLN is being managed to grow and that profits are being poured back into growth. This is as I would want it, but it also is a concern if the GPV stumble is pointing to a bigger growth problem. I don't think so, but it needs watching.

- Blockchain might be a substitute for Escrow.com for a transaction that could be articulated as a computer program. I suppose a domain transfer could take this form, but not a sale of physical goods. I would be very surprised if FLN wasn't looking at blockchain transactions as a forthcoming feature on Escrow.com

- My criticism of management is that they have showed very poor judgement around transparency. If the 'funnel' issue is as I suspect a simple screw up by the web designers trying to increase sales conversions, and that they fixed it by reverting to the old process THEY SHOULD HAVE SAID THIS PLAIN AND SIMPLE! As it is, the market is assuming that for some reason FLN has stopped growing. Management must stop assuming the market is a sophisticated investor in start up technology businesses who can read between the lines, and spell out what has really happened on the first page in big letters. I suspect that someone high up in management insisted the flawed funnel change be kept longer than it should have because it was a pet project, and that is why they are downplaying the issue. State 'continued steady growth in the mobile channel and the reversal when the web funnel was fixed shows NO UNDERLYING GROWTH SLOWDOWN' if that is what happened.

- So for the reasons above, and the macro story that sees this business prosper over the coming decade, I have bought a lot more at 50c. GLTAH.