Letter to our community

Dear Community,

I started developing TxHash over one year ago with the goal of simplifying the process of integrating applications to blockchains and other distributed ledger technologies (DLT). The first MVP was launched in September last year. On January this year, we focus on generating traction. We achieved a service partnership with IFTTT. Afterwards, we got featured on Product Hunt and then managed to grow our community on Telegram to 8k+ members.

While developing our product, we identified a big problem we were facing on our architecture. Blockchains, as permanent ledger storing units, have an intrinsic problem, the more they grow, the more difficult that becomes to maintain full-nodes. These nodes are essential to decentralization of the DLT networks (the core value proposition of this technology).

The architecture of most popular networks, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, does not include any clear economic incentives to participate and store a complete copy of the history of these ledgers (aka, running full-nodes). Instead, many nodes of the network run a “light” version of these ledgers. For mainstream user, wallets use centralized node points from companies like Infura or Blockchain, which provide high reliability, but go against the premise of decentralization. Further more, full-nodes are necessary to develop more complex applications, such as exchanges or some types of dApps.

We announced our plans to make an ICO and create a decentralized network tackling these problems: TxHash Network.

After many months taking time to properly setup our legal structure, we started to gather interest from funds and investors, getting very positive feedback at the beginning.

Unfortunately for our ICO, by the time we were ready the market conditions were not on our favor and the interest from potential investors vanished. We noticed this trend manifesting not only for our project but for the whole crypto-crowdfunding space.

For this reason, after evaluating several options and due to the fact that the crowdsale did not take place, we must communicate that we are halting our plans for the ICO.

As an entrepreneur, having dedicated over one year to the project and self funded myself this venture, I can say that some mistakes were made during the process and I would like to share my learnings.

• I had a belief that developing the prototype and showing our technical capabilities to launch an MVP was an advantage to make our crowdsale and overall project successful. I wanted to set a precedent in a time where everyone was raising money just with a pretty website and a whitepaper. The reality is that almost nobody really cared about our product for the ICO, this just delayed us and distracted us from keep growing our SaaS, and because of this we have compromised the future funding to continue the realization of our plans.
• We totally lacked of focus to solve one or a few particular problems. Instead of trying to be a platform to support the creation of any kind of applications, we should have rather started to solve specific problems and find concrete use cases. I tried and failed to find the right partnerships for this matter.
• The message we tried to express was not clear and our plans were too ambitious. Some people, including Youtube reviewers, were not able to understand the value proposition of the TxHash Network, and this was our fault. We launched two sites: TxHash.com as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to track transactions in DLTs; and TxHash.Network, which was intended to create an incentive network under the premise of decentralizing the architecture of our SaaS. Splitting the sites using similar names probably caused some degree of confusion.

There were some other problems on the execution and vision. However, I do not regret having tried to do this, I was very lucky to have found epic people to work on this, my team and advisory team, to whom I want to sincerely thank their support and commitment during all this time.

We are deciding in the upcoming weeks how to continue with TxHash.com, the platform has shown some growth and recently we launched pricing plans, but maintenance costs are increasing, for this reason the future is a bit uncertain.

Finally, I also want to thank to the members of our community who provided us with feedback to try to improve our platform. We all have learned a lot during this process and at the end this is the most valuable reward.

Diego Araos
Founder