Hey Everyone!!!
I am new to the cryptocurrency community in general and am not very familiar with the typical currency development and adoption process, and being the "finance"guy that I am, I can just touch the tip of the iceberg regarding technical issues. As far as I understand, the ultimate goal of currencies like Bitcoin and Goldcoin is to achieve wide merchant adoption. Where do we stand in terms of such adoption as far as Goldcoin is concerned? I have tried to make a quick search and hardly found any retail merchants accepting Goldcoin; is that not planned to happen at this stage? If not, is there any visibility as to when wide merchant adoption should happen?
Hi Kaboria and welcome to the forum!

Yes, merchant adoption is extremely important. The merchant phase will be the second step in adoption following the distribution period. We must first distribute the currency to as many people as possible before there will be sufficient demand to drive merchant adoption.
We are already building these tools now. Last month, we invested several thousand dollars in developing a payment gateway for Woocommerce. This allows any merchant with a Woocommerce store to accept Goldcoin as payment. This gateway is the best I've seen in all of crypto!
You can test it here by buying the Golden Widget for 1 GLD:
http://coinbuilder.org/Simply fill in some random name and address and place an order. The 1 GLD payment will be used to fund future development.
Thanks again for the excellent opening remarks and I look forward to working with you as we take Goldcoin to the highest levels of excellence.