Lately, TIM blockchain has been receiving a lot of well-deserved attention from community as well as scrutiny by community members. As always, we welcome everyone to do their due diligence, as we live in sensitive times where digital assets could be very lucrative but equally risky. At the same time, the questions and doubts raised in this process has contributed to FUD among some investors who could not be guided in right direction to seek answers and may have given to misinformation. As such, it is very important for us to provide right information so that our investors can make informed decisions based on facts rather than rumors. Below, we’ve tried to answer some of the frequently asked questions by investors:
Is TIM a Go-Ethereum fork?
Yes and No. We started from Ethereum codebase to build the BitPost prototype. We changed a few key elements, namely 3, to achieve performance architecture.
Next, we chose the coding language as Golang. It provided all the right features and optimization opportunities. We also decided to change only the required elements in Ethereum stack (under GPL licenses), which allows us to deliver the technology faster to the community. These required elements are being developed in private repositories and the plan is to complete integration by EOY (End of Year), 2018. The optimistic timeline is November 2018, but large projects can and may face uncertainties which may cause delay.
There are other benefits of using the Go-Ethereum library, and the foremost is ease of onboarding new developers. Ethereum has a large community of developers, where a lot many ideas are daily discussed, accepted and rejected as well. As such, the community wants the ecosystem to become capable enough to deliver on the expectations of the world. TIM has the capability to deliver on promises of large bandwidth. Therefore, the alignment in codebase is supposed to allow more number of developers to join TIM development efforts, either as supporters or as in-house engineers.
We will make code public on GitHub during mainnet while still ensuring that we keep core competencies intact by binaries for key libs. Currently, the code in GitHub is a Go-Ethereum fork. All other code and development is private at the moment. We have given access to external code reviewers and other influencers who are taking a look at it.
Why only 2 core developers and small team?
Prabhat and Vipin are two core developers of TIM. Prashant and Debajyoti assist in building peripheral support required for tech and non-tech demands. Prashant is well positioned in building the Blockchain taxi business through community partnerships with taxi unions and drivers, or as may be suitable. He has deep experiences in MSME financing and rural development. If someone knows the Indian market of Taxi community, this kind of experience provides you best positioning to work at grassroots level. We realize that a large project like TIM blockchain requires more hands, but that stage is expected to start from August when we complete the reference architecture so that App and API developers can start working on wallets and block explorer. The hiring for 10 extra dev resources is already in progress.
Why so many Team Changes?
We have a startup mentality, and someone truly said that a week of blockchain world feels like a year. We grew very fast during the Jan-May 2018 period, in terms of popularity, attention and community outreach. We made some mistakes like any startup would do. It was a learning process for all of us. First, we onboarded advisors without knowing that they are using stock photos from the internet even though they were well known real people in industry. This made us look like a scam. We offboarded them as soon as we realized that they were not the right choice for us. Some advisors and team members were onboarded without any formal contract signed, based on mutual trust and understanding while we were still working on formalizing their contract. Once the contracts were finalized, some advisors were not willing to sign the contract and wanted different terms than what was verbally agreed and initially negotiated. We had to take a tough call to offboard these team members and advisors. We feel that we have a responsibility towards our investors to make prudent financial and ethical decisions. Now, we feel confident that we have a very capable and stable team. We never used anyone’s name or profile or picture without consent. Anyone claiming otherwise is just being untruthful and we have conversation snapshots to prove otherwise. Having said that, we would like to put this behind us, take it as a good learning experience and move forward. We wish all the past and present team members and advisors well in their endeavours.
Are you US based Company & SEC compliant?
I-E Tech LLC, is registered in Delaware, USA. BitPost and TIM are brands of this US based company only. The regulations are changing more rapidly than ever due to growing concerns of and for investors. We have very reputed and experienced attorneys helping us in this area. The legal opinion has been that we qualify as a utility. However, in the interest of our investors and to make sure we are 100% compliant without any red flags with regulators, we are offering the ICO as Reg-S to non-US investors only. Similarly, due to regulatory requirements, we are not offering TIM tokens in China and Singapore as well.
For us, easy choice would have been to move out of US to some tax haven country. But easy choice is not always the right choice. We have nothing to fear since we have taken all the steps to be SEC compliant. We want to stay in mainstream market and legally operate in all jurisdictions.
Token Metrics — Changing & Confusing at Times
It’s quite simple actually. We are raising $19m. We have already raised 3000 ETH in pre ICO. We would raise the rest in private sale and crowd sale at the price of 15 cents per token. But it was always not so. Based on the advisory board recommendations, we reduced our cap from $50m USD (110m total tokens) to $19m USD (1.1b total tokens). The idea is to only raise what’s enough to operate and develop the technology over the next 3 years. By then, the ecosystem should mature enough to be self-sustainable.
The above changes left us with lots of tokens for a lower cap. Hence the unsold tokens from ICO pool will be burnt. To maintain similar distribution, we will burn an equivalent amount from other buckets of Partnerships, Team, Advisors, and TIM foundations keeping the lock in period as consideration. An example is explained below:
· If 60% tokens are burnt from ICO,
- 5% less, i.e. 55% tokens will be burnt from buckets which are locked for 1 year.
- 10% less, i.e. 50% tokens will be burnt from buckets which are locked for 2 years (except seed investors).
- 15% less, i.e. 45% tokens will be burnt from buckets which are locked for 3 years.
The exact sold amount will be known after private sale, due to the factors of bonuses, sales cost and ETH price. No token will be burnt from pre ICO and seed investors.
Two other questions about Token metrics:
1. What is “Seed Investor”?
The investors who helped in building IOT device from 2016 to 2017 are seed investors whose equity has been converted to tokens.
2. What is “Pre-ICO investor”?
The ICO is conducted in the format of Pre ICO>>>Private Sale>>>Crowdsale.
The Pre-ICO was conducted from 12th March to 24th March, including some flash sales before that as promotions. The Pre-ICO was offered for 30 Million Tokens (as per current metrics) at a price of 10 cents per token. 3000 ETH were collected during Pre-ICO.
We hope this article provides you the transparency that you deserve and right information to help you make informed decision. We welcome you to join our telegram (https://t.me/timcommunity) and check our AMA that was done on our YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWK1uNVm3fM). Feel free to ask any more questions you might have in our TG channel. Like any other community, we do not encourage any use of bad language, profanity and creating FUD to malign our project. We also encourage you to see the Alpha live on our testnet.
