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Good day fellow Heliumites,
I have been going over every aspect of the blockchain to ensure no key areas are left unattended. There is quite a bit that comes with preparing for a launch so you will find this update to be comprehensive. To be clear, I am now running the network from the day-to-day perspective while @coins101 is going to be focusing in the background on Enterprise-related matters to Helium. This is / was his day job so he simply enjoys the business aspect without the hassle of the cryptosphere. He will be given this freedom to operate in the fashion that fits his commitment level given his importance to the project.
My leadership style is more community-driven for an Enterprise blockchain so I will be carefully managing that balance between full democratic community responsibility and dependency upon a core Leadership team with Enterprise experience. In the early days of the chain there will be more responsibility given to and direction set by the Leadership team. Over time I wish to see that relationship evolve to the community having a growing stake in these matters.
The Launch:
As we prepare behind the scenes for the launch many needs arise. Every so often I will be giving a ‘call to arms’ to solicit help from various talented community members. In terms of dates I will be abstaining from listing a fixed date on the launch of main-net as we have the luxury of not working towards a deadline. Once the network is ready for you all to join the proper announcement will be made. With that said I am aiming to have us up and running as soon as possible given we are playing a bit of catch-up right now. I also like the idea of being launched and semi-established before the next bull-run in the markets begin, which I believe we are not too far off from.
We have two developers now assisting Helium and there is a cost that comes with this level of talent. The Leadership team is currently paying the salaries of the developers for the launch which should cost the network 25,000K USD in total. Teela is keeping receipts of all payments to the developers and the Leadership team will be reimbursed accordingly post-launch. We also will need to budget for a minimum 4 month period post launch for paying our developers to maintain the network prior to governance model kicking into gear.
The cost to get us launched successfully should be around 100K+ HLM. Payment to key individuals in the launch process along with marketing and advertising will be the major costs. The multi-sig wallet being created to fund this will be known as the Treasury wallet.
The Treasury wallet is the remnants of the Bittrex holdings that will be converted into funding for the Helium network. The following address will be cut out of the ledger and then credited to the Treasury:
SdbyXf2f1xCy5zPQVgELigaZgMusvmJNuE — 432870 HLM
To the best of the Leadership teams knowledge the above address is controlled by Bittrex. In the unlikely event it is not the treasury will be creating an additional 250,000 Helium to cover any rightful claim against the 432870 Helium. Should no claim be made the 250K will be used to help pay for exchange listings, cover reimbursements, marketing, salaries and other costs. The above wallet has been confirmed as not being associated with Cryptopia.
Governance:
The community will have to organize itself for an approaching governance system that will become active four months post launch. It will require the masternodes and community to accept proposals which will be funded in payments direct from the Heluim blockchain. There will be a new sidechain channel preparing for this approaching deadline and a new committee will be formed to ensure this process is put into place.
The MN owners will begin to greatly influence the network four months post-launch and have near full democratic responsibility after twelve months post-launch. My goal is to allow the chain enough time to let the Leadership team build a strong base for both the Enterprise and Cryptocurrency-centric side of business before having decision making distributed to a new group of network participants.
Key holders:
Given the leadership team will be public faces there comes a higher degree of accountability and reputational risk for these members. The keys for the Treasury wallet are going to be held by a mix of Leadership team and community members and the wallet is going to be a 2 of 3 multi-signature.
The key holders for the Treasury wallet will be @rhinomonkey, @Teela and myself. It is worth noting that the Leadership team will be putting their name and reputation in the public space for scrutiny and accountability. If anything untoward was to happen with any of these funds at any time, the full weight of that position will naturally fall on publicly visible parties. Thus, in matters of dispute or trust a public facing community member is likely to be a more accountable figure than an anonymous contributor to the same network:
- After the twelve month mark a review of the key holders for the Treasury wallet will be conducted
Reimbursements:
I have decided to have @coins101’s 100K HLM loan held in ‘escrow’ in the Treasury wallet. Since I cannot verify what he spent the loan on and his lack of engagement with the community puts me in an unenviable position. I feel it fair to allow him to update everyone and validate the usage of the funds before the community signs off on this. The loan was made in good faith and to my knowledge the costs were put towards running conferences that Helium was a part of (the Helium Alliance, etc). I expect this to be a simple matter to resolve once he so desires to claim his coins.
Last fall a bounty campaign was successfully run and is owed upon launch, The cost is 1500 HLM and we will again be using bounty campaigns to gain awareness for the pending launch.
The listing we have on Cryptopia is the only cost I have incurred for us that I wish to be reimbursed for outside of payments to the developers. The 5-Bitcoin listing fee was paid from my Cryptopia account on Sept 30th, 2017 to facilitate the snapshot and give us an initial trading pair for launch.
I have made the decision to forego payment for the first year worked on the the Helium project (Jan-Dec 2017). In addition, all time I invest into the Helium network post-launch will be done for free (June 2018-onward). The funds will be better used to help the network grow and at this stage of my career I am not interested in taking a paying salary. For the work I have done since I took sole responsibility of the network day-to-day and getting us launched, the cost is 40K Helium. This will serve as the only formal payment i receive as one of the two original co-founders of Helium.
All reimbursements are to be paid back to in HLM immediately after post-launch from the Treasury wallet. This will allow the individuals who loaned the network funds in good faith to be recapitalized and made whole so they are not left waiting.
Helium redemption:
We will have an ‘import private key’ option within the Helium wallet which will allow the holder of Spreadcoin at the time of the blockchain snapshot to import their SPR private key and claim their Helium. Helium took its snapshot of the Spreadcoin blockchain at blockheight 1657200. If you held Spreadcoin at Cryptopia at the time of the snapshot then you will be getting credited with that same amount of Helium once we distribute the coins to them.
This ability to allow us all to import our SPR private keys into the Helium wallet was graciously put together by Graham. The technicalities of the process have been written out by him as to be transparent for us all.
“Step 3: Recreate the balance ledger by disbursal to the UTXO set of address-balance pairs
The uncompressed/compressed mismatch between Spreadcoin’s output and Helium’s input meant that I had to add importspreadprivkey, a utility to import uncompressed Spreadcoin privkeys.
The Spreadcoin wallet dumps SPR privkeys in uncompressed format, the privkey string always starts with 7. However, Spreadcoin internally uses compressed keys/addresses and does its own internal and unseen translation of imported uncompressed privkeys so that they reference compressed addresses (thank you so very much, Mr Spread).
In the context of the Spreadcoin wallet, all is fine but problems can arise outside that context; the rest of the altcoin world moved to addresses with compressed keys, paper wallet generators emit compressed privkeys as a default and that’s why some SPR users lost control over their coins by not realising that difference. However, it’s now obvious that if the privkey is known then it can be serialised as compressed or uncompressed to suit.
Effectively, Spreadcoin holders will be swapping a ‘7’ privkey (uncompressed SPR) for a ‘V’ privkey (compressed HLM) but the address stays the same. Which is nice.
The code takes a direct approach: importing a privkey fully recovers the very long private key which is then serialized in compressed form, resulting in the wallet registering a correctly-Spreadcoin-matching compressed address, thus facilitating disbursal directly from the published ledger-as-address-balance pairs.
Disbursal ultimately is a matter of importing the disbursal privkey to a disbursal account then iterating over the address-balance pairs, making calls on the node’s API to the effect
`sendfrom <disbursalaccount> <ledgeraddress> <balanceamount> “
Research-based community initiative
Helium has evolved to become more of a community-based project that uses input provided by contributors as a strength. The original whitepaper for Helium laid out an ambitious plan to create a second network layer for hosted Enterprise services via ‘Service nodes’.
The project has since moved on to consider several other potential solutions to deliver this network layer. Helium will once again be using the strength of its network participants to help evolve this design. Much like funding, some level of input from the community via proposals will be accepted to help assist in future development. The Leadership team will work in lockstep with network contributors who have this vision to bring various parts of a valid model to life within the network.. Taking in input from our Enterprise partners will also serve as a valuable resource for direction-setting.
Said another way, Helium will be much more of a research-based community project in terms of its development. Seeking input from a knowledgeable community is a healthy way to grow while keeping the notion of decentralization at the forefront. This also takes away some level of dependency on the Leadership team so the network can function long term without its core group.
Marketing and Advertizing:
Helium is undergoing a re-brand away from ‘Helium Pay’ to become simply ‘Helium’. This greatly reduces any legal frictions we may encounter down the road as Helium is a generic term. Given we are an Enterprise network it is crucial we keep our reputation free and clear of any confusion or legal encumbrances that may negatively impact our partners.
There will be a new website that comes along with this and marketing and advertising material to support the change where applicable. The following updates are being worked on to prepare us for launch:
- New website including branding
- New BCT ANN thread, graphics plus more
- New Whitepaper / Research model
- Roadmap for 2018 / 2019
- Press releases
- Featured stories
- Updated socials for Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, Discord and more
- List of conferences Helium is aiming to attend in 2018
- Marketing and promotional goods for Helium
Enterprise:
As of today the Enterprise work is a collaborative effort amongst the Leadership team. There are two separate initiatives currently underway that are looking to broaden Helium’s capacity in the supply chain sector. The Helium Blockchain Alliance initiative is being led by @coins101 and he will be responsible for keeping the network updated and aligned with those goals long term. The other initiative is spearheaded by myself and several of the leadership team members.
I will be announcing any formal partnerships Helium will be involved in once we are launched.
Post-launch, the work being done by @coins101 via the Helium Alliance will be merged closer with the work being done by the leadership team.
Lastly, for many partnerships to develop to their full potential a relationship between two formal companies will have to eventually exist. It carries far too much reputational risk for an established company to partner with a decentralized network nor sign contracts with an entity that has no central identity. The Leadership team will look to begin forming a legal entity /company for Helium to facilitate the Enterprise portion of the network.
Leadership team:
This group of people will act as the day-to-day operations for both the cryptosphere as well as the Enterprise world.. Should a member be seeking a paying salary then details on their role contributions and expected compensation are to be given. If approved, at what rate they are compensated will be dependent upon their level of contributions and the weight those contributions carry to the network as a whole.
In terms of titles, while no-one person truly owns a decentralized network, it takes a mix of leadership and collaboration to make it work. With @coins101 focusing on Enterprise and his identity private we have a situation to consider for the public image of Helium. With real-world applications being sought after for us in our business partnerships, how we are perceived is critical to our success.
I will be addressing myself as “Founder” for public record going forward. This sounds much more palatable and professional than trying to explain to a potential Enterprise partner that the other co-founder of Helium is @coins101 and he is somewhere in Europe. Let it be known that this projects vision is originally @coins101s and he will forever hold the title of co-founder within the Helium family. If at any time he wishes to take a public-facing role on the network beside me then the nature of the titles we use externally will naturally change back to the original.
Leadership team members:
Jason Cassidy — Founder
Richy James — Operations
@jsykes — Operations
Mark — Development
James Gonzalez — Business
Steve Wand — Communications
Chris Lovell — Community Guru
Jon Gonzalez — Business
Roland Alexander — Business
@coins101 — Enterprise
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Core contributors:
GHiggins
Rhinomonkey
Misanthropicrage
Teela
OnS
LightningCoders
RzeroD
Kristerv
One of the goals of the leadership team is to recruit more talent and grow its ranks so that Helium enjoys a solid foundation for management and community collaboration. Eventually a balance between paid members and non-paid members will exist, making the network more resilient. I would like to see the team size grow over the first year to accommodate any major changes to the talent pool.
Final note:
This has been a long journey that began for me near the end of 2016 when I decided it was Time to make something happen with Spreadcoin (or at least the idea of it as I had been pondering doing this for about a year prior). That kicked off a series of conversations with @coins101 which eventually lead us here to being on the eve of the launch of Helium.
Some challenges arose during the last year and a half and with help from some key individuals and support from the community, those challenges have been overcome. Many of you stuck with the project and have rallied behind me as I have taken command of this ship and steered us into calmer waters. For that support and trust I am very appreciative indeed.
I want to acknowledge all of the good work that @Richyjames has put in since the start of the year. We have worked together every day for countless hours bringing various pieces together and leveraging all of the contacts we have accrued in the industry. In addition to Richy’s contributions, Graham has continually gone over and above what could be reasonably expected of himself on the development front. Whenever a technical hurdle is encountered, Graham has been willing to find a way past it and is always willing to impart valuable knowledge upon the community.
Lastly, I have one more juicy tidbit of news to share with you before officially signing off. Many events have taken place behind the scenes over the last half year as leadership was transitioned. As a result of this we now have a few big surprises to publicly announce to you all once we have entered the post-launch phase without hitch — stay tuned. Looking forward to a great launch and an even better post-launch experience for Helium!
Until next time — @KarmaWolf
