Engineering Heavy, Cash Light: Goodbye from BitBoost
We’re sorry to announce that we must wind up our official development activities due to insurmountable funding issues.
Last week we read in Messari Crypto about two interesting categories for describing crypto projects. First, we have ‘engineering heavy’ projects, meaning they have a good technical team, capable of actually building and shipping products. Second, we have ‘cash heavy’ projects that raised a lot of money in 2017. If you have money and engineers, you are heavy in both respects. If you lack cash, but not talent, you are ‘engineering heavy’, but ‘cash light’. This is undoubtedly the case for BitBoost.
BitBoost’s core team is comprised of engineers who started building a decentralised e-commerce marketplace on the Nxt blockchain. That was back in 2014, ancient history by crypto standards. In 2016 we moved to Ethereum, in 2017 we raised money through a token sale, and in 2018 we built the first version of our app for Windows, macOS, and Linux. We built beta versions for Android and iOS, and a web version as well. We reacted quickly to spiking gas costs on the Ethereum network by moving data storage to IPFS, creating an IPFS cluster, and building the code to let our users write to our IPFS cluster while preventing spam attacks.
However, BitBoost has always been ‘cash light’. We raised less than $1.5 million USD in our token sale. Since then, we have been paying for all our business operations with that money and, unfortunately, the crypto bear market has almost completely wiped out our resources in a very short period of time.
As a result, we are forced to lay off everyone and close the company. We are not the only ones to suffer this fate: it has been a real bloodbath out there. We are really saddened by this, not just for what it means to our team, but for our supporters and token holders. This crash hurts everyone.
Open Source Project
Does this mean the end of BitBoost as a project? Not entirely. The code and the Open Source Project are still there, and we are working to find somebody willing to help us run the GitHub page, keep working on the code, and continue to improve the product. BitBoost is returning to its pre-token sale stage, where all the work was done by passionate individuals working without financial compensation. Nevertheless, we have really advanced in terms of engineering since we began: we now have a functioning app based on Ethereum and IPFS, and we have solved a LOT of problems that we didn’t even know existed before. The blockchain is still in its infancy, and the challenges are still tough. But we feel that we have made significant advances with the support of our token holders, and pushed the envelope in blockchain-based e-commerce.
What will happen with our token, BBT? Of course, it will continue to exist. We are talking with our lawyers and long-time supporters to find a solution that protects token holders during the next phase of the crypto market, though unfortunately there are no guarantees.
So here we are. BitBoost is another casualty of this crypto crash. But we are not done, not yet. Before paid development ends, we will be setting up a GitHub for the open source code. The repo will be made public by the end of the month (December 2018) at the very latest. When ready, it will be here: https://github.com/Bitboost/BBM-Open-Source-Project.git.
The Medium blog will remain as an archive of all our posts, but we will shut down the company website and our social media channels to prevent anyone impersonating us. Closing the company will take some time, and we want to be as transparent as we have always been. We will strive to leave behind an open source codebase that can serve as the foundation of a new generation of e-commerce: permissionless, global, and free from middlemen.
Thank you, people. Long live the blockchain!
