Reflection on advisors to aelf
Blockchain industry is still at the nascent stage. Most crypto projects, including aelf, lays out a grand vision to explore new advancement in the technical or commercial aspects of Blockchain technology. The whole journey is full of complexity and it’s like walking in the jungle without lights. I shared my view with a couple of friends before: running a crypto project is as difficult as running a start-up plus a public listed company at the same time.
Therefore, it is very important to have trusted advisors who has experience and willing to make useful suggestions to make the whole journey slightly easier. Let me take a few examples of how advisors are useful along the journey based on our experience.
Advisors help design sound and fair token sale plan: For most project teams, they are first-timer to conduct a token sale. And as you know, token sale is a very complex process, including writing whitepaper, ensuring legal compliance, design a suitable token sale plan, introduce helpful investors, and etc. There are no golden rules on each of the step and the key is to have the best structure tailored to specific project. As such, we are so grateful to have Vincent from FBG capital, Liam from Alphabit and Kenneth from Dentons to accompany us through the token sale journey. Vincent and Liam are respectful investors in the field. Their investment portfolio includes a large number of international and successful projects globally. Therefore they played an important role in providing feedback to our whitepaper, and more importantly the token sale structure. I have explained in my previous post that we decided to offer one flat price to all investors without any discount. This is not typical as many projects do offer tiered discounts either to encourage early investment or large ticket size. We agreed on this arrangement due to Vincent and Liam’s observation of how the market behaves and our belief that this is more beneficial to long-term alignment. Kenneth has been really instrumental in helping us to form the legal structure for aelf and ensuring compliance with respective regulations. I can never over-emphasize how important it is to have a sound legal foundation so that our team can focus on other aspects of the project.
We invite new advisors to bring new experience and resources to compliment the team’s strength, just like the aelf team is expanding itself to enhance the team’s capability to deliver, both technically and commercially. The team is really grateful to have Michael Arrington onboard as advisor. His reputation and connections in the global tech community has opened up so many possibilities to aelf. We are building the world’s first decentralized cloud computing network, where we expect to see many applications running on it. The key to success is to have strong awareness in the tech community and attract right applications and developers to innovate aelf. Silicon Valley is one of the most innovative area in the blockchain space, and Michael is one of the best to help bridge us with Silicon Valley.
For aelf, advisors are essentially part of the aelf team. We talk to each other regularly, at least weekly. They are putting their time and efforts in making aelf a great project. For example, Vincent and his team has been diligently introducing interesting projects and developers to us for collaboration. Kenneth is keeping us updated on ever-changing regulations in crypto space and advice us to take necessary actions.
All in all, we have benefited a lot from the advisors we have chose. We have been selective in choosing advisors, ensuring it’s a mutually beneficial relationship. We will continuously looking for advisors along the way and this is one of the exciting part of the development of aelf.
Disclaimer: These are some reflecting points based on aelf’s own journey. This is not a complete list of what advisors can do to a project, and advisors should be tailored to specific project needs.
