OST Explained

This article will teach you what OST is as a Company, What OST offers as a Company, How OST Token stands at and operates in the centre of all of this, What benefits there are for businesses using OST as well as for consumers and how real world OST use cases take shape with two of OST’s partners.

24 min readFeb 24, 2018

First and foremost, let’s get one thing explained before we dive in: OST’s ambition is to be the blockchain technology partner of choice for businesses of all sizes and levels of technical sophistication, enabling any business to create, launch, and manage their own branded digital token economy powered by the OpenST protocol (the underlaying code). They aim to make this very low entry barrier and very user friendly for any company through use of their SaaS; OST KIT, OST VIEW and OST WALLET (more on this later).

OST the Company

The whole OST organisation is basically made up of two large components:

The OpensST Foundation and OST.com Limited

OpenST Foundation is a non-profit organisation that ran the OST token sale, and looks after the OpenST protocol development, ecosystem, and overall economy developing around $OST. You can learn about the mission of OpenST at https://openst.org

OST.com Limited (formerly called The Simple Token Company) is a for-profit company building software and services on top of OpenST. It’s solutions will be launched at https://ost.com

From a governance standpoint:

Jason Goldberg is one of 5 board members of OpenST Foundation.
He is the CEO of OST.com Limited.
He is the only board member of OpenST who works for OST.com Limited. This is by design.

OpenST has contracted with OST.com Limited under a long term agreement to continue development of the OpenST protocol and to build software and solutions on top of OpenST as well as to conduct sales, marketing, PR, and more, to further the goals of OST.

They have monthly board meetings of OpenST and Jason Goldberg reports to the board of OpenST on how they are doing on topics such as product, sales, marketing, as well as token supply/demand.

OST.com Ltd will earn revenues for software sales and usage.

Now that you have an idea of how the organisation is constructed. Let’s look closer at what ost.com offers as a company..

What does OST offer as a Company?

As seen in their roadmap from February 2018, they have 1 product already out the door and will offer up 4 more products (so far); 3 of which are core business solutions/services (OST KIT, KYC & CAMPAIGNS):

OST KIT

OST KYC (already released and being used)

OST VIEW

OST WALLET

OST CAMPAIGNS

Long story short: They will allow any company of any size and any area of expertise to make their own custom Digital Currency in the form of Branded Tokens. But it doesn’t just end at token creation. Their toolkit will offer you the tools to create, launch and manage your token economy. They aim to do so in such a user friendly way (you have to think in terms of what its like to make a website using Wordpress versus coding one yourself; or using Shopify)) that it will require no in-house blockchain developers from the company that seeks to make their own Branden Tokens (BT’s). They will be able to do so using an easy access and user friendly web interface that lets them create their Branded Tokens and set up the rules for their own token economy as well as monitor that economy.

Well.. what IS needed then?

1: Become a Partner: Partner up with ost.com ; go to their website, visit the partner page and fill in the details in the ‘contact form’ to get in touch.

2: OST Tokens: Buy OST Tokens on one of the exchanges (more on why they are needed later on)

3: Access to ostKIT: As soon as the post-beta release of ostKIT is out (a user friendly web interface/dashboard to create and manage your own Branded Token Economy; again think Wordpress or Shopify) you get access to all the SaaS (Software As A Service) features and off you go!

Apart from that core business solution (which is offered as ostKIT) they also create and keep adding other solutions for businesses (mainstream as well as blockchain orientated ones) like their homegrown blockchain explorer to keep track of the Branded Token transactions (ostVIEW), their consumer-facing wallet for transacting within and across OST-powered Branded Token economies (ostWALLET), tools for running KYC and AML for businesses that want to run an ICO (ostKYC) and solutions for enterprise grade e-mail campaigns (ostCampaigns). The first two are part of the ostKIT ‘package’ and the last two are separately offered up as services. (check out their February 2018 detailed roadmap to read more on this)

Let’s talk more about their core solution (OST KIT)

OST KIT (the core of ost.com): OST.com, provides a protocol (the OpenST Protocol), platform, API’s and solutions for companies to launch their own Branded Tokens powered by OST Token as a master token. Again, all of this is presented in a user friendly web interface/dashboard that companies that seek to tokenise can make use of.

Part of their thesis is that most business will not be DAPPS (Decentralised Applications) but nearly every business could benefit from utilising a digital currency or being part of a digital currency ecosystem.

The closest competitors I’ve seen to OST are companies trying to get more companies to ICO and launch their own floated publicly tradable tokens on exchanges. That requires each of those companies to have blockchain developers working on their teams and to shift their business focus to supporting their fluctuating token economy. Meanwhile there are fewer than 13k blockchain developers in the world today.

They want to open tokenisation up to any company even without in-house blockchain developers, enable their teams to focus on their core technology and business while they take care of the blockchain infrastructure.

They also don’t think it’s realistic for 99% of the companies to have their own publicly traded tokens, which is what Waves is doing. Rather, they enable companies to build their tokens based on OST, and have it not on secondary markets.

How does OST Token stand at and operate in the centre of all of this?

From what you may have read, ost.com is centered around 1 core business solution: OST KIT (that runs on OpenST Protocol; currently at version 0.9)

That will allow business to create a tokenised economy and manage that economy in a very user friendly way and without the need for hiring any in-house blockchain developers of their own.

Let’s focus on how the OST token stands at the centre of OST KIT and what the exact utility of the token is.

As you may have read, OST tokens are needed for companies to easily create their own Branded Tokens (to be named BT’s here after). What is required for a company to do that is:

Sign up as a partner to ost.com
A supply of OST Tokens purchased from an exchange
Access to the OST KIT SaaS (Software As A Service) This is an easy to use web interface (a dashboard if you will) through which the company can arrange everything that is needed to mint their BT’s and set up their own Token Economy. (see the images below to see and example of the web interface and options)

And .. that ..is ALL! That’s right. That is all a company essentially needs to Tokenise through ost.com No in-house Blockchain developers required! You can focus on your business and your product (doing what you’re good at) and they provide the blockchain tech & solutions.

If it sounds like I have mentioned this numerous times now.. I have! And the reason is; I cannot stress enough what kind of easy access and user friendliness they are aiming for here; a simple web interface SaaS to tokenise for any business, any size, any background. Shopify anyone? Wordpress anyone?

As you can see by the pictures above that show examples of the web-interface; key features in OST KIT (alpha versions released early March 2018) include:

Management Dashboard: Control panel, graphs, trends, monitor your token economy, supply/demand, top users.
Token Economy Planner: Plan your token economy.
Setup transaction types for your token: Peer-to-peer, Company-to-customers, Customers-to-Company.
OST Price Oracle: Enabling transaction values to be set in fiat value, BT to auto-adjust.
OST Pricer: Enabling companies to collect commissions/revenue for certain transactions.
User setup, in dashboard and via APIs.
Airdrop Branded Tokens tokens to selected users.
Simulate transactions, in dashboard and via APIs.
Analytics.
Developer console.
Developer APIs.

Now.. let’s get down to some of the nitty gritty..

OST Tokens required you say?

OST is an ERC-20 utility token that act as a form of currency within the OST Ecosystem. As it stands now, any service offered up separately (separate from ostKIT) like OST KYC or OST CAMPAINGS will have to be paid in OST (not USD).

The crucial role that the OST Token plays in theOST KIT solution (tokenising for businesses) is the following:

OST tokens will be staked by the company that seeks to tokenise in order to mint their branded tokens and represent the value (in USD) of their BT Economy (like how gold used to back the USD)

Now is a good moment to point out the following:

Staking of OST to back the BT’s is done on the Ethereum Main Net (the value chain) (any staking of OST will remove that OST from the circulating supply)
Transactions of BT’s from businesses to customers and vice versa however will run across side chains to the Ethereum Main Net (the utility chain)

By having the transaction run through their own side chains instead of on the Ehtereum Main Net ensures that much faster transaction times can be achieved and transactions won’t suffer from any Ethereum network congestions (remember crypto kitties?). Multiple chains will be used to ensure a large scale high volume transaction throughput.

This is one of their key innovations; using open scalable side blockchains (blockchains that run parallel to the main blockchain network). OST tokens are staked on the public Ethereum Network against the Branded Tokens on side-chains.

The OpenST Protocol enables the creation of utility tokens on a utility blockchain while the value of those tokens is backed by staked crypto-assets on a value blockchain.

The “side chains” in question are scalable Ethereum-based blockchains with all the benefits of public Ethereum, but without the scaling challenges.

The OpenST Protocol is also ideally suited for DAPPS as they can run as Ethereum smart contracts, in parallel, with micro-transactions; ideal for machine-to-machine, and at high transaction throughput (at least 100 tx/s per side-chain) OpenST can transfer value from Ethereum to and back the side chains. But what happens to the OST that backs a certain amount of BT’s when for instance users transact amongst each-other or cross spend the BT’s in another BT economy? This will be further detailed in OpenST Protocol version 1.0

The branded tokens powered by OST are technically ERC-20 tokens but they are locked from being traded for anything but OST. So the more demand for BT’s, the more demand for OST. Users of the BT’s always have the right to the underlying OST supporting the BT’s.

Smart Contracts

So OST tokens are staked in order for the company to mint their BT’s. A company before minting their first branded tokens can set the exchange rate of OST to BT at any rate they desire, but once they set it, it is fixed and cannot change. That ensures that companies don’t change the rules on their customers.

So, let’s say OST is trading at $1, and you set your exchange rate to 1 OST = 1000 BT. Then, each of your BT is initially worth $0.001.

The price of the BT does not fluctuate on its own, as it is not tradable on secondary markets. So, each BT is always worth 1/1000th of and OST.

However, OST does fluctuate and could go to $2 or $10, or $50.

“Wait.. I as a company will have my Branded Tokens subjected to the volatility of OST on the market?”

Price Oracles

Although the ratio of OST to BT is set in the smart contract and cannot be changed, there are ways a company can ‘stabilise’ their BT’s USD value.

A few factors come into play there.

First, price oracles could be used to set prices within the company’s branded token economy so that even if OST goes up and down, the relative price of the good or service in the Token Economy does not change. For instance, let’s say in the example above that you allow your users to earn $.01 each time someone likes someone else’s product review. By setting the value of the service at $0.01 using the price oracle, it would start off at 10BT per liked review, but would auto-adjust to say 5BT per liked if OST rose to $2.

Get it? Ok.. one more example..

Say OST trades at $5 a piece and the BurgerMcBurger inc. has set their BT (McBurgerToken) to:

1 OST = 10 McBurgerTokens.

Then 1 McBurgertoken (at the time of minting) would have a USD value of $0.50.

So one day, OST goes through the roof on the open market and is now $50 per OST. 10x!

Luckily BurgerMcBurger inc. has made use of a price oracle that automatically adjusts their BT Economy: Before, a single burger costs 1 McBurgerToken but now it only costs the customers 0.1 McBurgerToken.

In that example, the customer who had 1 McBurgerToken from when 1 OST was still $1,- now has 10x the value in McBurgerTokens. Now is that a problem? For most companies seeking to tokenise there is no way around that in the current market conditions as most tokens are subject to volatility.

But it certainly hasn’t stopped the Steemit platform from doing very well. Being a tokenised economy, they have grown fast.

The other concept that can be deployed is price guarantee mechanisms. The company could sign up with a 3rd party to provide price stabilization to insulate its end users from price fluctuations. Imagine for instance if a user earned 100,000 BT worth $100, and then the next day it was only worth $50 or suddenly was worth $250. The user would either lose faith in the system and could start either hoarding or cashing out. With price stabilisation mechanisms, the company could hence insulate its end users from wild swings in the OST price. While the company uses some percentage of upswings as buffer for the downswings, as well as the company could retain some profits from OST increases.

So a 3rd party could “loan” the stake for a company in exchange for a monthly fee at a premium. e.g. a 3rd party could stake $1M worth of OST for a company, and provide price stabliziation and other services to them, for say $50,000 per month over 24 months.

It really depends if the company wants to expose their end users to fluctuations of crypto. Today probably not. But as more companies build on ost it will become more stable on its own.

What OST.com would love to accomplish is that any OST holder could sell a contract whereby he/she provides a stable stake for a set period. They charge a premium for ensuring a price, and they take on the risk/reward in exchange for that premium. And then, they could potentially even charge an even higher premium if they are willing to share the upside. Fully decentralised price stabilisation contracts for staking offered by any OST holder would be the ideal.

Another important thing to note is that any BT owner will always have a legal right to the OST that backs it. Branded Tokens will be interchangeable amongst customers (through use of OST Wallet)and BT’s can be ‘cross spent’ meaning if you have BT’s from Joe’s Coffee but want to spend them at McBurger you can as the underlaying value that is being exchanged is OST (you go from BT1 > OST > BT2) However, BT’s will not be tradable on any open exchanges as OST allows companies to easily mint BT’s but it’s not intended to launch and ICO.

OST.com has stated however that they are building an “ICO-on-ramp” so that BT’s could request them to unlock the trading restriction if they want to sell some of their tokens to the public and put a price on them, so in that way they can use OST as an on-ramp to their own ICO: First prove out their token economic model within the safe confines of the OST ecosystem and then potentially spin-out on their own after some time (but now I’m getting a bit ahead of things!)

In general it would be nice to enable end users of BT to participate in at least some of the rewards of OST rising because of the community support for the various BT’s, but at same time price stabilisation mechanisms could be used to guard against unintended consequences from wild swings.

Here’s a link to the official document on Stabilising Branded Tokens: https://goo.gl/vTs71j

So is unstaking OST Possible?

Once OST’s are staked against BT, any end user/customer who has earned or purchased or otherwise acquired one of those BT has a legal right to the staked OST against it. Any OST staked that are not backing up any such earned OST, could be unstaked at any time so long as the associated BT were also burned and removed from circulation. But wait, won’t that happen automatically in the staking smart contract that holds the staked OST? No, the smart contract holds only staked OST, while BTs are redeemed by minting. In order to unstake OST, a sufficient amount of BTs should be sent to the smart contract to initiate the unstaking.

Why would a company want to tokenise?

Create a branded digital currency to incentivise and reward users and encourage behaviours that are the growth drivers of your business, monetise micro transactions and customer interactions, provide transparency and audibility by registering every transaction on a blockchain, and create dynamic ecosystem within their community.

It offers benefits that mere Fiat based solutions can not provide (or at least are not feasible with Fiat)

Think of an app that is based around a community that either consumes content or provides content on that platform..

Let’s take Medium as an example..

If that company has it’s own tokens, members of the Medium community could provide value to the platform by either purchasing Medium tokens (to use for upvotes etc) or providing content to the platform (that will earn them tokens). This also creates a level of economy that is highly interactive and benefits both company and users/communities.

It enables these little interactions and micro payments (exchange and reward) between company and users that is not attainable (or at least not feasible due to expenses) with Fiat.

Why wouldn’t fiat accomplish that? Think of the transaction costs alone. It would not make sense to give someone $0,8 in Fiat with current slow transaction methods and fees.

With crypto it also creates a record that is immutable and audit-able (with OST KIT in a very easy way) that’s great for a business to monitor and manage that economy.

No hidden fees for the company as well, visa (for instance) charges a pretty penny which really impacts small business owners. Making it unsuitable for micro transactions. Crypto lends itself perfectly for that due to low costs, being borderless and very very low fees.

No transacting through middle men that need to be trusted (which is the case when doing a bank transfer from one bank to another, not even mentioning from one country to another).

There are also benefits of tokenising with use if OST versus ‘rolling your own’

Cost Savings: No in-house block chain development team needed (there still are very few across the globe as it stands currently); So no overhead cost’s in that respect. Also no costs to ICO (it takes quite a bit of money to run a successful ICO; OST’s was around 2 million USD)
ICO Regulations Tightening Up: Many mainstream businesses do not even seek to ICO because having a branded token does not require it. The ‘ICO to raise funds’ that a lot of companies engage in for their app-level token is flawed. ICO’s should be for minting protocol level utility tokens and not for fundraising. Regulations regarding ICO’s are already coming along and companies that ICO’d just to fundraise and App Token could be in trouble later down the line.
Easy To Use: Sheer user-friendly ness for mainstream businesses; They make it simple and easy to look like a pro even if you’re just an old school business that is trying to find ways to incorporate token mechanics into your business. So the business can focus what they are good at and OST provides the tech and the support to enable each company to tokenise and support their Branded Token Economy
Affordable: Any company of any size (and budget) can join in due to the “pay as your grow” system; you just start with what you need and, like AWS, as your business is driving more revenue/demand, you use some of that to acquire more OST to mint more BT and put more fuel into your economy. ALSO, select OST partners can also receive OST token grants to help fund their development and incentivise their project teams.
Partner Benefits: Early OST partners benefit by providing direct input into their features and roadmap, and helping shape the OST platform to ensure that it meets their unique business needs. Early partners also benefit from OST input on their products, token economics and blockchain technology integration.

Benefits for Consumers

The more companies building Branded Tokens on OST, the more consumers will benefit from using digital currencies in their favourite apps.
Consumers will be able to earn BT in one app powered by OST and spend in another. Imagine it as if you were able to earn airline miles from any airline and then spend them in any shop or app.
Consumers always have the ownership right to convert their BT from any company using OST to OST. You can claim your OST at any time that the BT are based on, they are yours. Imagine if you were able to at any moment in time able to turn your airline points into cash at the real economic value of them, and not at some made up mystery value by the airline.
Any consumer holding OST can always use it within any company powered by OST.

Let me drive it home that:

OST.com is building the complete blockchain toolkit for business. Their ambition is to be the blockchain technology partner of choice for businesses of all sizes and levels of technical sophistication, enabling any business to create, launch, and manage their own branded digital token economy powered by the OpenST protocol (the underlaying code). They aim to make this very low entry barrier and very user friendly for any company through use of their SaaS; OST KIT, OST VIEW and OST WALLET.

It is ideal for any business that employs an app (wether web based, desktop or mobile) as part of their business as they allow their rest API’s to be ‘plugged’ into that app to make use of the OST KIT functionality. So that, consumer facing side never ever has to even deal with OST KIT (that is simply the creation, launch and management toolkit for the business side of things). The consumers just need the OST Wallet (allows them to hold & exchange every branded token as well as OST).

They provide this whole toolkit as a service (think AWS think Stripe) so that no company ever has to build al these tools by and for themselves when looking to put part (or the entirety) of their business on the blockchain (e.g. tokenising their business).

Because it’s one thing to create token, but then what? How do you get those tokens to users, how do you manage users? How do you set up different transactions and set up the rules for your token economy? How do you monitor the parameters of your token economy?

You need tools to do so. So, more building from the ground up or just go with OST and have it all in one neat package. Create, launch, manage! And the ONLY requirement is that you buy OST. Because that is all that is needed to mint your Branded Tokens. The OpenST Protocol that OST KIT operates on allows value to be staked on a value chain (in this case OST Tokens on ETH main net) and have that value represented in the form of Branded Tokens on OpenST Side-chains (utility chains parallel to ETH main net).

It is literally as easy as 1,2,3. With the OST KIT𝛂 testing I had my Branded Token economy (minting and everything) set up in 15minutes flat. Yes, if you are going to incorporate this into your company’s app (plugging in OST rest API’s) then you will need a developer in order to do that. But seeing as you have a company app; you prob already have a developer on board right?

And it sure beats going down that road of having to hire multiple blockchain developers to work for months (perhaps years) to build all the aforementioned tools from scratch (rinse and repeat for every single business). The average of mainstream companies just want to focus on their brand and customers. With OST they can do just that and let OST take care of the blockchain tech on the backend.

Real World Use Cases

Alright, so you know the ins and outs of how tokenisation with OST works. But what about practical examples of it being used? How can a company benefit? For practical use cases, let’s look at two companies that recently partnered with OST.

Wooshii
For some of you that may not know Wooshii; it is a platform where clients and freelancers in video production can find each other and work on and manage a whole video project from start to finish within the Wooshii platform. Corporate clients include; Google, eBay, Virgin, Merck, and British Airways.

Wooshii Tokenisation Practice #1
Because Wooshii is primarily a marketplace for freelancers to compete for work, there is administrative work that is required outside of doing actual video production. There’s still a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes. For example, someone might contribute to writing a pitch, but not win the work. They will create there own Branded Tokens; Wooshii Tokens trough OST. Their tokens will allow members of the Wooshii community to gather recognition and rewards, which can then be powerful symbols of endorsement (more so than a mere like as each token has a monetary value).

Wooshii Tokenisation Practice #2
Finally, many video production teams will include members from different countries and the Wooshii Token can be used for quick and cheap cross-country payment processing.

Unsplash
For some of you that may now know Unsplash; it is a platform where anyone can download high quality photos to use for their projects, whether it be private of corporate. Photographers offer their work on there for free and (up till now) their work get’s valued in likes and downloads. Which can get them exposure and lead to payed assignments.

Now, we have to keep in mind that a Token (ERC-20) token is no more than computer code. As it stands now JSON Web Tokens (JWT) or Auth0 Tokens (both computer coded tokens) are used to secure API calls (API = Application Program Interface; a set of procedures, protocols, and tools for building software applications). Think of API calls like this: Every time you make a call to a server in name of an application, it counts as an API request or API call. Logins, saves, queries are examples of operations counted as API requests among other types of operations.

Now.. why am I going on to make the concept of API calls clear? Because in the case of Unsplash’s Tokenisation, we will see that and ERC-20 Token (like OST) can be used just like those tokens used to make API calls. And that opens up a whole new realm of possibilities. As we know from taking a peek at the ostKIT alpha preview is that developers will have access tot the OST API’s to integrate into their apps and/or website. So they’ll be able to call the OST API from within their app and/or website.

We know that Unsplash has 5.4 Billion photo views per month and 5 Billion API calls per month.

Now where are getting somewhere!

So old models, ad based models, are based on website traffic.

New models, blockchain models, are based on distributed events. 5.4 billion photo views per month, 5 billion api calls per month. Now… OST has not given out the exact details yet on what will be used or Unsplash, but it is clear now what application and utility OST can serve in the case of Unsplash; Tokenising, not just as a paywall, but per view, per download, per API call (now we’re talking, new economic paradigm!)

Demand, demand & demand

I hope that by now it is clear how companies of any size can benefit from using OST and how every solution creates real market demand for the OST Token. But the business making use of OST are not the only ones creating that demand. Oh no! I dare say that even, in time, the ones that will be creating the largest demand will be the consumers using the BT’s.

A successfully run ost.com will mean expansion of the network, meaning ever increasing number of nodes into that network (OST based Apps, DApps and Businesses) until it reaches an exponential growth. The beauty of it for a member company is that, at first they will have to buy OST to be able to issue BT’s to their consumers, but as the BT’s get more broadly accepted, used and demand grows, the company can stimulate further demand for BT’s rather than buy OST and distribute BT’s themselves.

And the beauty is, ost.com is doing everything they can to provide that network expansion. Partners keep getting announced each week (23 so far in no more than 8 weeks) and many more are to come from start-ups to full on enterprises. And they have stated that for a long time to come every OST Token that get’s collected as payment for services will be reinvested into the growth of the ecosystem towards thousands of OST use cases and billions of OST powered transactions. OST.com is currently also investing in projects that will help create more utility and demand for OST. Like recently, ost.com had invested in the company Unsplash (link: https://goo.gl/1PZe5z) in 80% $USD cash and 20% OST tokens. They are now a partner of ost.com as well and will provide a large customer base for BT’s.

OST Grants

Now the ost.com is (as mentioned) a for-profit company. The OpenST Foundation is a non-profit organisation that also distributes what is known as ‘OST Network Accelerator Grants’

That goes like this:

27.2% of the total OST supply is being reserved for the OST Accelerator. This was purposefully planned out to provide for a $18M seed program to support promising projects developed on OST.

OST Accelerator grants are intended to support app developers and companies whose contributions benefit the entire OpenST ecosystem. Some examples of the types of OST Accelerator grants they envision could include:

To some of the first Member Companies who wish to launch their own Branded Tokens powered by OST. This could help them fund their development and implementations, incentivise and reward their developers, and provide some warm-up tokens to their users to spur the initial adoption.
To developers working to build on and expand the capabilities of the OpenST protocol.
To developers creating software modules to help companies manage their token economies, such as KYC-as-a-service, analytics, monitoring, notifications, and economy visualisations.
To designers offering proposals for wallet skins, token branding, and other user experience enhancements.

OST Accelerator grants can be provided to companies of all sizes, even startups with just an idea. Grants can be provided to the company, project teams, or directly to individuals in support of their contributions.

The OpenST Foundation will approve OST Accelerator grants on a regular basis. Criteria for issuing grants will be published openly and transparently by the Foundation, as well as the ledger of grant recipients (unless there is some agreed upon confidentiality with the specific project). All OST Accelerator grants will contain long term vesting schedules and conditions appropriate to the specific project.

They also plan to post developer bounties that will be provided through the program, and Member Companies could also propose developer bounties through the same platform in the future.

They currently have a rather sizeable pipeline of OST Accelerator proposals under review from potential Member Companies.

Lastly some numbers

Maximum Supply: 800,000,000 OST
Current Circulating Supply: 272,889,439 OST
Company workers, Founders, Early Backers and VC’s are all on vesting schedules

On that subject, ost.com has stated:

“We will publish the vesting schedules for all key participants, openly and transparently (and in smart contracts). Founders are all on a 3 year linear vesting schedule (1/N per month over the term) from the time they began working on the project, except for CEO Jason Goldberg who is on a 4 year linear vest). Advisors are all on a 2 year linear vesting schedule. Early backers are all on a 2 year linear vesting schedule.”

The release of the early investor vesting schedules will be about 1/12 a month. The following breakdown is on the following schedules: 5.61% for early backers, on a 3 year vesting schedules. 10% for advisors, on a minimum 2 year vesting schedules. 10% for the founding team, on a minimum 3 year vesting schedules. Vested grant distributions are released in the first 5 working days of the month. So the slow release of the vest (which is all fixed and conducted by smart contracts so no one can tamper) is why the circulating supply will increase a bit up until about en 2018. By then the staking of OST by companies will reach a point that the circulating supply will be diminished further and further from that point on.

They are very transparent about it and I suggest everyone takes a look at this google doc that they have published about it (they will keep it updated on the regular to reflect more business coming in) HERE’s the link.

Thank you for reading!