Airdrop 3 Has Been Cancelled

After thorough consideration of the impact of the last Airdrop, we have decided to cancel the next Airdrop event which was planned to begin on the 7th of October.

Here are our reasons for our decision:

Lots of Fake Participants

In the last Airdrop, we noticed a high number of fake participants who participated and met all requirements but did so using bots and stolen accounts. Due to the low entry barrier, it was easy for everyone (real people and bots) to participate and tasking for our team to vet and correctly eliminate fake participants.

Participants’ Low Interest in The Project

We have seen that new community members who joined through the last Airdrop are not particularly interested in the project and our mission — They are mostly interested in exchanging the received tokens for other currencies. While this is rational behaviour, we no longer believe it is in the best interest of our team to distribute a significant percentage of the project’s native tokens in this manner and condition.

Legal Uncertainty & Risk

While airdrops are a great way for bootstrapping a blockchain community, great care is required to ensure they abide by securities regulations of jurisdictions across the world. Using geofencing technology, the last airdrop explicitly restricted participation from several regions where airdrops may be deemed a security. However, geofencing techniques may not be enough as they can be worked around.

What Next?

We have successfully distributed tokens to all members of our community who had token balances on Ellcrys Suite. A total of 18M tokens have been distributed to almost 4,000 addresses, we intend to distribute more in the future via simple, effort-centric, legally compliant mechanisms that will require an understanding and active participation in the project.

Effort-driven Airdrops

We are going to introduce other forms of means for distributing tokens and incentivizing community engagement and participation through activities such as bug hunting, testnet mining, code and documentation contribution and application testing. With this mechanism in place, members of the community will earn new tokens by providing meaningful contributions that directly impact the project.

Delayed Exchange Listing

We have decided to not officially pursue the listing of Ellcrys Network Tokens on any ERC-20 exchanges (centralise or decentralised). Instead, we will continue to channel available and limited resources towards the development of the protocol with the goal to swap allocated ERC20 tokens on our mainnet. We will only begin to actively work with exchanges when the main network is close to launching and the tokens are ready to be swapped for the native coin and used to fulfil their purpose on the network — to pay for storage and compute resources provided by node operators.

Development is Ongoing

Our development team has continued to build the next version of the protocol using the feedback we collected from users of the alpha client and network. We are currently working on a new network client which will include a new consensus system that supports fast transaction finality, high throughput and new general architecture. The next major version of our network client and protocol is expected to be released in December 2019.

Final Note

Some of the decisions we have executed may be contentious, unpopular or not the norm in crypto-space but they are ultimately for the best interest of the project and members of our community. We are especially grateful to everyone who continues to contribute, provide useful feedback and show their support.