The first day of the Delphi token launch has been a resounding success. Things have been unfolding beautifully in every way, but first things first, we have to take a moment to say:
Thank you.
We are both honored and humbled to be where we are right now, with a budding community taking a chance on our unorthodox little project and showing us such unbelievable support. These are still the earliest of days, but the passion here is real, and we know that some of you can feel it just as much as we can at this point. We have so much in the pipeline that we can’t wait to show you, but before going any further, let us say one more time: thank you to everyone who is now part of this journey with us. Let’s bring this vision to fruition, together.
A Quick Recap
The Fair Auction contract has been performing its job to perfection, just like you would hope for out of any smart contract. Since it was programmed to not accept any funds before the auction officially began, it was safe to publish the contract address beforehand. Then we got to witness the contract get stress-tested in the wild in the final minutes leading up to the crowdsale going live, when eager members of the community began trying to send ETH to it. It dutifully rejected the first 13 attempted transactions before finally going live and accepting funds. Every so often, a transaction or two has failed to send on the first try (due to insufficient gas paid), but users have been able to resubmit these transactions successfully whenever this occurs. Balances are being tracked accurately, and our test queries to the contract are reliably returning expected results. All in all, technically speaking, everything has gone off without a hitch.
Even better, the participation we have been seeing is everything we could have hoped for, in terms of distribution profile. We’ve written about why we think this is a big deal in systems like Delphi and Gnosis, so we’re extremely happy to see that we’re on our way towards an ideal outcome on this front.
It is incredibly encouraging how well things are going at this stage. We had modest expectations which are being exceeded in every way. We can only hope this good fortune continues as we move forward through the other phases of the Delphi Roadmap.
According To Plan
We’ve already said that we want to start small and grow from there, and it is truly wonderful to see our dream already starting to come true before our eyes. Our Fair Auction contract was designed with multiple big goals in mind: we wanted the contract to be as intuitive-to-use as possible, we wanted it to be universally accessible, we wanted to counteract any fear-of-missing-out (“FOMO”) that might encourage irrational market behavior or valuations, and we wanted to distribute funds in fair proportions to auction participants. Incredibly enough, we seem to have been successful across the board. We have seen widespread satisfaction with the contract’s overall user-experience, even among those who have never participated in any ICOs prior to Delphi’s. The terms of the auction were laid out transparently, and are exceptionally straightforward relative to many other projects’ recent crowdsales. So far, the few questions that we have received have been simple requests for clarification, which indicates to us that users are not generally confused by (or frustrated with) our auction process. The market is able to take its time to collect and assess the information it needs to in order to come to an informed decision on Delphi’s appropriate expected valuation, which it will gradually continue to do over the next two weeks. The token payouts being distributed in a ratio-based format means that users have the opportunity to evaluate their options on the matter before making any decisions. In fact, over the next 14 days, as more and more data becomes available to the market, the cumulative valuation of the project should grow more and more confident. It is entirely possible (or even likely) that activity levels in the Fair Auction could increase over time due to this phenomenon. This would represent the polar opposite of the “standard” ICO results, where earlier participation is strongly incentivized.
We are so happy that everything has gone according to plan so far, and that in every respect, operations are running smoothly. Our reasoning and logic is being validated in the real world, which is always highly encouraging to see. We think that it is worth taking a moment to reflect on the contrast between the results of the Gnosis crowdsale versus those of our own, as the difference is night-and-day. The community loudly protested the confusing Dutch Auction ICO structure at almost every opportunity, whereas our simple Fair Auction structure has been universally understood and well-received. The Gnosis crowdsale resulted in the actual user community receiving only about 2.25% of the total GNO token supply, whereas Delphi is distributing 95% of the DEL supply directly to the community. Despite the extensive effort and planning Gnosis put into trying to ensure the tokens were distributed fairly (and not sold out too soon due to “ICO FOMO”), their game-theory assumptions were proven invalid almost immediately and they were ultimately blindsided by how things turned out in the real world; in Delphi’s case, our assumptions and reasoning have been wholly validated every step of the way.
The Theme of Things to Come
We think that this is going to develop into a theme over the coming months and years. We expect our logic to continue being proven correct, because we’ve taken the time to actually seriously assess our competitors’ arguments, and to figure out what we think they are doing right and what we think could be improved upon in their approaches. We have done our best to remain objective in our analyses, and we have been very careful to revisit the assumptions that went into the conclusions we have reached. If our competition continues to underestimate and dismiss our project’s potential as they have so far, this will only make it easier for us to climb the trajectory we have mapped out and to achieve every goal we have set for ourselves. After seeing how well this first day has gone, we are more confident than ever in Delphi’s long-term success, and we truly look forward to proving to our growing community just how serious we are about this.
For those of you who have decided to join us on this wild ride, one final time: thank you for believing in the vision we’ve set out to achieve, and for trusting us to execute it properly. We will do so, and we will work hard to be worthy of your support. We also greatly look forward to showing off some of the stuff we’ve been working on behind-the-scenes over these next few weeks, and we think you’re going to like what we have in store.
