Swarm Market is now PolySwarm!
TL;DR: Swarm Market is now PolySwarm and token sales will open on February 6th, 2018 at 19:00 UTC. We firmly believe that both of these changes will result in a better decentralized threat intelligence platform.
Why Rebrand?
We’re glad you asked:
- Our vision for PolySwarm is larger than Boolean malintent determinations. “Poly” is evocative of the many areas of information security that PolySwarm aims to disrupt via decentralization. Beyond 1.0, PolySwarm will expand into distributed bug bounties* and malware taxonomy, rewarding Experts for providing malware family metadata.
- When we had chosen Swarm, we had not anticipated the rise in prominence of projects also named Swarm that — unfortunately for us — occupy varying degrees of overlapping mind share. Perhaps most confusingly, PolySwarm will explore using Ethereum (core)’s Swarm — alongside IPFS, FileCoin, Storj, BitTorrent (which also uses the term swarm) & others — as a basis for providing decentralized artifact storage. At the end of the day, decentralizing the threat intelligence market is unique to PolySwarm — and we think the name should be too.
*No, this won’t just be “HackerOne but on the blockchain” :) We believe blockchain is naturally applicable to some aspects of bug bounties. Stay tuned!
PolySwarm ❤ Puerto Rico
Swarm Technologies Inc., the company behind PolySwarm, is incorporated in Puerto Rico, a US territory that we think is a great jurisdiction for all companies building the new decentralized economy.
Prior to incorporating in Puerto Rico, we had explored a number of options for the PolySwarm Nectar (NCT) token sale, from Swiss foundations to Cayman trusts and were taken aback by the complexity (legal & governance) inherent to some of these offshore constructs.
Ultimately, we chose Puerto Rico for these key reasons:
- Development from Puerto Rico allows us leverage Act 20 tax incentives. This is a win for token purchasers: more funds will be directed at developing tomorrow’s decentralized economy for threat intelligence.
- Foundations and trusts present a “decision tax” relative to a traditional corporate structure. This “tax” would be liable to slow development and impact project agility. Conversely, Puerto Rico will allow PolySwarm to maximize funding allocation toward technical development and community engagement without the legal loopholes inherent to more complex structures.
- As an American-owned company, operating in Puerto Rico is easy and similar in cost to maintaining a Delaware corporation. In addition to the “decision tax”, trust and foundation structures carry legal cost that is only ameliorated at scale.
- Although we had incorporated in Puerto Rico before Hurricane Maria, the disaster strengthened our resolve to launch PolySwarm from the island. We look forward to PolySwarm’s growth and our ability to offer help in a modest way by creating desirable technical jobs for the local community.
If you’re part of a startup looking for a great place to get started, we’d love to chat about Puerto Rico and how we think its a great jurisdiction for tokens.
Token Sale Timeline
Like most in Puerto Rico, Swarm Technologies experienced infrastructure-related setbacks. We were fortunate to experience only minor setbacks, but nevertheless this made us revisit our aggressive initial token sale schedule.
In light of the aforementioned rise in Swarm-branded projects and our desire to publish a prototype PolySwarm market before a single token is sold to public, we decided it would be best to postpone public contributions to the PolySwarm token sale until February 6th, 2018.
The PolySwarm team will be accelerating our outreach efforts to information security professionals, enterprises and end users. Specifically, PolySwarm will be represented at the following upcoming events — please say hi if you are as well!
- Nov 9th: Perigord — A Secure Platform for Developing dApps, presented by Max Koo @ the San Francisco BlockChain Collective.
- Nov 20th: Smart Contract (in)Security, presented by Paul Makowski @ San Francisco BlockChain Collective. A recording for this talk will be posted this week.
- Nov 28th: The PolySwarm team will be attending Consensus: Invest.
- Dec 4–5th: The PolySwarm team will be attending the Latin American Bitcoin & Blockchain Conference.
- Dec 4-5th: The PolySwarm team will be attending Token Summit II in San Francisco.
Whitepaper Updates
Finally, we’ve received a lot of great technical feedback on our whitepaper, thank you reviewers!
We’ve updated our whitepaper to clarify several items including the autonomous nature of Experts’ Workers and to add details concerning our token sale.
Please drop us a line with any comments, questions and suggestions.
We look forward to seeing you in our brand-new Telegram channel!
