The Day After The Crowdsale

Gilles Fedak
iExec
Published in
4 min readApr 20, 2017

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The day after the crowdsale finished, iExec will kickoff. It means that fund will be spent to ensure a rapid growth. The iExec team is committed to provide the best level of transparency, while preserving investors, trade and industrial secrecy.

This post covers our transparency policy with regards to progress update, budget allocation, team vesting. Less than 2 weeks after the ICO, we’ll publish the first report that summarize the crowdsale results, and implement the transparency policy.

Project update

  • iExec will publish a semestrial project update and budget report that summarize fund allocation and spending, objectives reached and divergence with initial roadmap.
  • iExec will communicate important event and information through periodic newsletter. Our mailing list already contains more than 3000 subscribers.
  • A large part of iExec development is already open sourced and publicly available on GitHub. The iExec smart contract API will be released as soon as it is stabilized and usable.

Use of Funds and Annual Budget Forecast

As explained in the White Paper, iExec costs are distributed between:

iEx.ec team. The largest part of the funding will be dedicated to establishing a world-class team (mainly developers and admins). With the maximum financing, we’ll be able to hire 15–20 persons up to four years.

Office and indirect costs includes costs of offices in both France and China, as well as other indirect, employment-related costs.

Marketing and communication activities are mainly focused on building a network of application providers, data providers and key computing infrastructure providers (Clouds, Miners). This includes two people that will work dedicated with sales and marketing efforts, one towards the traditional industry and one towards blockchain based companies.

Research program will be conducted in collaboration with the most recognized research institutes and universities in Europe (Inria, CNRS, ENS-Lyon, UPMC, Univ. Paris XI) and China (Univ. Tsinghua, Chinese Academy of Sciences). Complementary funding will be obtained through national (ANR, NSFC) and European (H2020) research agencies.

Contractors Security audits will be commissioned to independent sub-contractors: web design, security, etc…

Contingency is 10% of the total budget.

To supplement iExec executive teams, a board of advisors is being assembled in order to implement the best governance and decision making in the company. A semestrial budget will be proposed and presented to the advisors board for approval and made public to the community. iExec is a company incorporated in France with offices in Beijing Because expenses are to be covered in Euro and RMB currency, this implies that BTC and ETH funds will be hedged in fiat.

Usage of RLC Tokens

As described in the White paper the structure of the is the following:

Crowdsale: The number of tokens to be sold during the main sale will be limited to 60,000,000 (10,000BTC). Tokens are immediately distributed and token transfer are unlocked as soon as the crowdsale is finished.

The iExec team has committed to provide full traceability of investments by designing a smart contract that records each BTC and ETH. To our knowledge few projects have implemented this solution, and we hope that it will become a best practice for crowdsale that accepts several crypto currencies.

R&D, developer bounty, marketing. A special purpose fund corresponding to 10% of the crowdsale capped at 6,000,000 RLC (Max) will be provisioned for developers in the form of bounty grants, marketing actions, research grants to ensure the growth of the network after the initial development. After the crowdsale, a fraction of these tokens will reward initial development and marketing, in particular platforms which have participated to the marketing ICO.

Special contingency reserve: iEx.ec will freeze a reserve corresponding to 10% of the crowdsale, capped at 6,000,000 RLC (Max), to ensure the security of the blockchain. Obviously, the reserve will not be sold on the markets. Instead, the reserve can be used to recover from extremely serious situation that could endanger the whole project (DAO like). Eventually, this fund may be moved to a smart contract that can be unlocked only by a collective decision of all the investors (not yet developed).

Founders, team and early investors: A minimum amount of 12,000,000 RLC (Min) will be created, along with a variable part corresponding to 5% of the crowdsale, capped at 15,000,000 RLC (Max). When the crowdsale is terminated, the tokens will be distributed to the early investors who funded the project since October 2016 (around 50%) and the two co-founders (1,000,000 RLC). Although it’s a significant share for the co-founders, it ensures that the company and token holders have the same objectives. The remaining tokens will be transferred to the IEXEC BLOCKCHAIN TECH company and will be distributed to the team members during the lifetime of the project, once every six months, starting 6 months after the start of the project. This distribution can allow the recruitment of high profile specialists in development and marketing.

Although we didn’t develop specific smart contract time lock, co-founders commits to respect the following vesting policy:

  • Co-founders will communicate their ETH address for traceability
  • 6 months lockup period at the beginning of the project
  • Unlock 250.000 RLC per year

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