Informational Report on the Safe Network

The Maid Safe team, based out of Troon, Scotland, has an existing operative team with recognized cryptographic and software capabilities. As they convert their business model from one of a venture-backed software company to a coin-supported community, their opportunity for success (and largest investor upside) lies in their established comfort with the cryptography space, strong documentation, published industry recognition and foundational science.

I highly recommend the visiting the MaidSafe website at: http://maidsafe.net in order to go up the learning curve on this technology.

The largest challenges facing a successful transition and acceptable investor returns is the existing teams’ lack of strong product commercialization history, their ability going forward to attract outside development on their platform, and the ability to prioritized product development and launches.

Summary Recommendation: An investment in Maid Safe strengthens the technical abilities of the decentralized applications community, given the advance nature and operating experience of the company. A current lack of strong project launches with a focus on widespread adoption, however, will prevent Maid Safe’s products from gaining traction against other DA projects that are more focused on storage, messaging or data, unless address through new team members or new incentives.

Project Components
The following technical components of Maid Safe were assessed:

1. Current technology:
   Vaults: The potential of Maid Safe’s vault storage — distributed, redundant data lockers is the most advanced and viable of the Maid Safe portfolio. I was able to view a web demo of the vault actions, the redundancy layers, and failovers. Github instructions from the super-project vs. the vault only installation have not been fully separated, but was clear enough to complete and offline a vault for demonstration purposes. Some node functionality did fail during the demo. The commercial potential for a SaaS implementation of this vault technology is promising, especially with the possibility of an integrated suite of offerings such as messaging and data/file transfer.
2. POC distributed messaging app: Best proof of concept in the Maid Safe portfolio is an AIM- clone instant messaging app that, while not fully featured, could launch quickly and help demonstrate the value of the SAFE platform while encouraging data and storage around the messaging functionalities.
   Github repository, white papers, installation documentation: The IEEE Spectrum articles, published white papers and code documentation here exceed expectation and show a depth
   Intellectual Licensing LLC, Confidential Document
   of knowledge and commitment to research in the fields of security, routing and data storage.
3. Legal and Organizational Structure:
   Company and Foundation Assignment: As an incorporated Scottish entity (limited liability), IP and operations are being assigned to a Scottish non-profit foundation during the transition, with restrictions on its operations and profit-seeking capabilities. The transition does allow for favorable treatment of R&D expenditures and rights are being assigned from the corporation to the Foundation once the current investors have vested in the new coin or been otherwise bought out.
   IP Rights Survey: The current commercial and GPL license terms (see site/license) will need to transition to a full non-commercial open source license and the team has offered to make the transition to the most recent MIT license terms. IP portfolio monetization is discussed further below.
4. Business Considerations:
   License transactions: The current GPL license requires a 1% revenue surcharge, replaced in the new model by fractional transaction micropayments. The transition will allow for dynamic pricing by project contributors and more flexibility around types of projects that can be supported on the SAFE platform.
   Pre-existing investor obligations: New investment consideration should take into account dilution by existing investors and their share of pre-mined assets. It is recommended that some cliff or vesting period is placed on prior investors’ stake in order to provide stability to new developers and investors.
5. IP Rights Monetization: Certain IP assets that remain protectable within the project, most importantly the granted 2006 U.S. patent. The other international filings are helpful, but not key to either licensing or monetization (defensive only). A collective such as CODA could develop component vs. whole project offerings for licensing and group protection while earning Maid Safe a royalty and technical assistance fee for ongoing innovations and project support.
   Growth: The main levers for widespread adoption will be Maid Safe’s ability to promote developer evangelism, product marketing, improve their product launch track record, and create powerful incentives to launch on the platform.

David Irvine and Nick Lambert from MaidSafe to give the BitAngels a short presentation, which I recorded with Sam Yilmaz.

You can find the presentation in the BitAngels Google Drive Folder at this link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2R_eSvAkuXSazM4TndQeHJqanc/edit?usp=sharing