Our treasure hunt has begun to pick up steam, being featured in multiple countries across the world. Now in another huge step forward, we will be offering a special Treasure Qoin Sweepstakes, with $1,000,000 of QUP to the victor!
At a future date, after enough Treasure Qoins have been discovered, we intend to hold a grand sweepstakes available only to current Qoin holders. Your physical NFT Qoins will suddenly link to entirely new locations on the Internet, and one of those locations will be a rewards page for our eventual $1,000,000 winner!
First, one of our most recent Qoin treasures hidden in the windy city!
Another recent hide close to home in the mile-high city…
This Southern California secret is above ground – no digging or dirt required .
¡Si vives en San José esto debería ser fácil!
I truly cannot believe this Qoin has not been found yet…
As of Memorial Day, 2025 – these are the Qoins that have not yet been found. Good hunting!
Also an extra bonus from a Reddit post earlier this month: to help enable our Ventura County treasure hunters, I have posted another clue below:
Starting a revolutionary company sounds glamorous, until you abruptly are knee-deep in the anything-but-glamorous details: code that just will not compile, algorithms that do not yet exist, a Discord server that is either too quiet or too chaotic, and a calendar full of work shifts and other business responsibilities that have nothing to do with your ultimate dream. But perhaps that is where it always begins: in chaos, under pressure, with only a spark and a vision.
For us bootstrapping a groundbreaking startup, especially one that bridges technology and crypto, the reality is raw. We’re a tiny team. Some of us are in logistics, some in communications. Others are computer programmers or enterprise-level sales team leaders, business owners or project managers. None of us have the luxury of full-time focus on this mission. Every hour we spend on our project is borrowed – from sleep, from personal time, from sanity. Since the QUP project represents an entirely new method of line management, no one has expertise in everything we’re building. We learn as we go. And that represents both the thrill and the torment.
Learning on the Fly
When you lack the resources to hire a team of engineers, you become one. When there is no budget for a UI designer, you become that too. YouTube tutorials, Grok and ChatGPT strings, and any relevant open-source documentation you can find become your university. You learn how to write your first line of back-end code while debugging your fifth API error. You wrestle with questions like “How do I secure this endpoint?” while watching walkthroughs at 2 am. You learn to code not because you want to – but because no one else is going to do it for you.
And that extends to your algorithm. Maybe it started with a basic idea: a function to filter, to recommend, to score. Then it grew. It had to scale. It had to evolve. It had to work inside the very application you’re still creating. Building the algorithm means balancing theory and data and limitations you didn’t know existed until last week.
Crypto: Hype, Hope, and Headaches
Then there’s the crypto side of the business. No longer are you just building software – you’re also shepherding a coin, a token that represents the heartbeat of your community. But community will never fully maintain itself. You need engagement. You need transparency. You need momentum.
That means multi-weekly posts across an ocean of social media platforms, constant updates, and creative ways to keep people interested even when your real focus is elsewhere – like fixing the back-end of your app so the thing doesn’t crash when more than five people log in at once.
The irony is that the crypto is never meant to be the endgame – but simply the ecosystem that supports something bigger. But you still have to sell it, explain it, protect it. And yes, fight off the scammers. Because the second you show up on any radar, someone wants to exploit you. You become paranoid. You encrypt everything. You wonder who you can trust. You learn that security isn’t a layer you add, but a mindset you adopt.
The Struggle for Focus
Perhaps the hardest part of all is not the technical hurdles or the lack of time – it’s trying to keep your vision intact when you feel pulled in every direction. There’s the coin, the app, the community, the branding, the fundraising, the bugs, the feature creep, the PR, the legal concerns, the impostor syndrome. You simply cannot do it all, but you have to try anyway.
And through it all, the most important thing – your application, the product you actually care about – gets delayed, pushed down the roadmap, because survival always comes first.
But we keep going. Because creation, though difficult, is the only thing worth doing. Because that impossible app? It matters. The idea matters. And someday, when we look back, the sleepless nights, the patched-together solutions, the makeshift team – that will be the legacy. That will be the proof that even in the most uncertain of beginnings, something real can emerge.
QUP Corp and DrinQUP are the brainchildren of Chris Barringer, CEO and founder of QUP Corp. Chris, originally from Denver, Colorado, dropped out of high school in 12th grade and worked in a factory to support his family. While at work, he taught himself computer programming and realized that both he and his family would benefit from this new professional direction. He took the G.E.D. and went to Westwood College of Technology for Computer Networking, taking 21 credits a term to achieve his associates degree in only one year. Afterward, in an interview with the board at Denver University, Chris successfully argued that his life experience was already equivalent to a Bachelor’s degree. He got in the EMBA program in 2018 and graduated summa cum laude a year and a half later with an Executive Master’s Degree. Chris’ childhood and early adult life are fascinating examples of thriving through extreme hardship. He will be featured in upcoming blogs (www.qupcorp/blog) so stay tuned!
Chris is a driven, relentless creator, thinker and dreamer who has surprisingly realistically shaped visions to improve society and the world that we live in. DrinQUP is a very small “proof-of-concept” style step in a much, much greater plan that we look forward to sharing with you in stages. Here is our current 2025 road map , and stay tuned, because if you want to see a healthier, happier world, I believe you will be very excited to see the expansions benefitting your everyday life within the next few years.
This previous weekend, QUP Corp’s CEO and two of our biggest crypto holders all met for the first time in New York City.
Tensions were high – at least for our esteemed CEO who was about to receive his first-ever tattoo to demonstrate his immutable future as head of QUPCorp.
Meanwhile, our two other guests were both long-time tattoo enthusiasts but were each flying in from foreign locales to see the big Apple for the first time – Mitchell from Canada, and Mikko all the way from Finland. Mitchell and Mikko got matching tattoos on their calves, and Chris took the tattoo plunge with a half-sleeve:
Visit our website www.qupcorp.com and check out our blog (coming soon) to see the rest of this story!
QUP Corp officially unveiled our first flagship application – DrinQUP (www.drinqup.com) in the first quarter of 2025. To introduce this project, which has been years in the making, we recently created a “white paper” (click on the word to access the document, or just go directly to www.drinqup.com/whitepaper). We would love for you to look it over to gain a better understanding of what we are trying to achieve.
What Exactly is DrinQUP?
DrinQUP exists to eliminate the need for people to wait in physical queues (aka lines). With our application, not only can you place your drink order without moving from your seat, but you also can choose to move forward in the queue if you are in a hurry and even be rewarded if your wait time is affected by events beyond your control. DrinQUP improves business efficiency, creates an interactive customer database to improve service and decreases the possibility of confrontational or uncomfortable situations when people are forced to play the waiting game together.
You can load the free DrinQUP app on any smart phone, tablet or computer to interact directly with participating venues (such as bars, nightclubs, concerts or sporting events). DrinQUP uses a unique algorithm (patent pending) to simplify the drink ordering process and completely eliminate the need for you to stand in line as you await your beverage.
The “QUP coin” is a crypto utility token that powers these transactions from the background. If you are already into crypto or interested, you can purchase QUP coins from online crypto exchanges such as Coinbase Wallet or Phantom Wallet. QUP Corp, the DrinQUP app, and other company products do not directly sell this coin to you or purchase it from you, as we are not exchanges ourselves. If this still sounds confusing, read our whitepaper or keep following these newsletters as I will be delving deeper into the intricacies of all kinds of crypto in future editions. If this is too much to take in or if you are just not a “crypto person,” fear not as the DrinQUP app does not require you to have any QUP coinage and can be run entirely with more standard means of currency, such as a credit card or PayPal.
