Etheal’s post-ICO 2018 progress report and Q+A

Almost 5 months have passed since we closed our ICO funding round, and as 2018 comes to a close it’s time for a progress report on everything that’s happened since.

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Etheal

11 min readDec 18, 2018

Etheal successfully reached all major milestones in 2018

We’re proud to report that overall we have succeeded in meeting our milestones and goals for 2018. While in some cases this proved much more difficult than we originally anticipated, in others, we achieved above and beyond our original expectations.

Take a look at our progress report and Q+A, and see for yourself.

2018 was the year of ICO-ing and increasing demand

In our original lightpaper our first order of business after ICO-ing was to whip up demand for Etheal. Increasing popular interest in the platform is the first of three phases to solidify Etheal’s spot as a major player in the medical tourism industry and as a valuable cryptocurrency.

Timeline and learnings from our ICO

Originally, our Main Token Sale was set to close in April. We ultimately decided to extend this deadline, and closed on July 25th.

Here’s what we learned and what we would do differently:

We did not foresee the collapse of the market, and thus did not exchange all of our crypto tokens to fiat — however, we did raise enough to fund a one-year runway, and will not have to fundraise again in the near future
Scaling a service globally is a bigger and more complex task than we originally planned — we rolled up our sleeves and dug into it, and thanks to our infrastructure strengthening work we’ve managed to reduce server response times by one third
We’ve purposely kept our costs low, with a focus on real profit and not speculation or money pumps to tide us over — with this strategy, we want to make HEAL to be one of the most useful utility tokens

Milestones: Where we hit the mark, where we overachieved, and what’s to come

Here’s where we succeeded beyond our original expectations:

Our goal was to list healthcare providers in 5 countries by the end of 2018, but as of today we have listed medical tourism focused doctors and clinics in 93 countries
Reviews are one of the foundational pillars of any database (think booking.com, tripadvisor or yelp), so we planned to begin aggregating them in 2019 — however, we’ve brought this forward and aggregated 1,127 reviews in Hungarian which will be available in English next week, and translated to additional languages after that
Our goal is to build a global, multi-language site — we have engineered review submissions so that they can easily be translated into other languages
Our Brazilian site is also beginning to collect reviews in Portuguese, which will be translated into English and then other languages

And here’s where we hit the mark on our milestones:

As planned, the website is now available in 6 different languages (English, German, Italian, French, Russian and Hungarian)
The HEAL token integration, allowing doctors and clinics to pay for sponsored posts with tokens, has been available since September
One of our main obstacles has been maintaining and growing our healthcare database. Manually uploading a doctor’s page took about 25 minutes, which is an unsustainable amount of time. We are currently testing a new system which uses the help of hundreds of users to clean and refresh the database scalably. To date, this system has successfully refreshed 735 clinic and doctor profiles based on information provided by patients

What we’re working on now to increase demand:

We’re continuing work on building and maintaining our database as efficiently as possible
In order to better serve our visitors, we’re working on geographically scaling our website. Our current goal is to ensure rapid server response times everywhere in the world

What we’re working on now to increase supply:

Preparations for the next phase are underway, with the goal to increase site monetisation — to achieve this, we aim to increase search queries of doctors abroad through Doklist.com
The first page of doctor listing sites are currently under redesign, take a look at the current design here
We are also redesigning the homepage, you can check out the current design here

Etheal’s Future Vision

Etheal is pushing ahead with its mission to help millions of people find high-quality treatment and doctors at an attainable price. Many patients don’t realise that they can get specific treatment for a fraction of the price abroad — and even if they do, they often can’t find a trustworthy healthcare provider in another country, due to a lack of transparent global doctor review sites.

Meanwhile, the popularity of medical tourism, and ‘elective’ healthcare in general, is growing at an astronomical rate and Etheal is poised to be a significant global player on the scene.

Changing preconceptions about medical treatment abroad

Etheal is built on a real need, fueled by thousands of stories of patients in pain receiving exceptional medical quality at affordable rates.

Here are just two stories that illustrate preconceptions about healthcare abroad keeping millions from doing the same. And these are the assumptions we aim to change with a transparent database of credible healthcare provider reviews.

One man’s dental tourism adventure in Hungary

Hungary has long been a medical tourism hub, holding a spot in the top 10 destinations for years now. Despite its long-term establishment as a medical treatment destination, UK journalist Matthew Wilcher still described some trepidation in receiving dental treatment in Budapest, writing:

“At first I was a little apprehensive, imagining myself arriving at a back-street dentist in a dark corner of an unfamiliar European city, sitting down to have my teeth removed with a pair of pliers.”

After some research, Wilcher decided to go through with it. And after a successful treatment and enjoyable vacation, this is what he wrote:

“I saved myself a considerable amount of money by avoiding going private. I also skipped the queue and saved myself three months of agonising pain waiting in line for the NHS, with my surgery being completed the first weekend after I made the call to Nador. Three months on, and I have no troubles whatsoever with my wisdom tooth, so clearly it was a job well done. I also have the lasting memory of a fantastic few days in one of Europe’s most exciting and vibrant cities.”

Wilcher’s uncertainties and “back alley dentist” misrepresentations are exactly what we want to eliminate for patients considering options abroad.

Unexpected first-class medical treatment in Kampala, Uganda

A Hungarian friend of ours was travelling abroad in Uganda, when he suddenly had to undergo emergency treatment. Unsure what to expect, he feared the worst in quality and equipment in the unfamiliar environment.

But Kampala’s Mulago Hospital not only completely defied his expectations, it provided a treatment experience above and beyond that of most European medical establishments. He described in detail the professionality of his doctors, state of the art equipment and fast treatment.

First class facilities and up-to-date equipment was matched with fast and professional care

Solving a global problem with technology

These are just two examples that represent a vast need for a global transparent healthcare provider database.

Etheal’s mission is to bring credible reviews and information on healthcare facilities the world around, to help patients understand what they can really expect.

We do not consider ourselves technology maximalists, but rather “user maximalists.” This means that we want to solve a massive pain point affecting patients all over the globe, who can barely afford certain treatments in their home countries.

In order to reach our goal, we’ve built crypto and blockchain technologies into our solution in the following ways:

Crypto allows us to easily crowdsource database building and maintenance and also incentivizes patients to write reviews and rate doctors and hospitals
A decentralised blockchain powered platform allows us to build a completely transparent ecosystem

Etheal Q+A: Answers on everything from token value to future growth

How much will the HEAL token be worth?

In order to create a self-sustaining platform, building demand by doctors and patients for HEAL tokens is crucial.

In short, our three-phase timeline for building a working ecosystem of HEAL tokens looks like this. You can review a more detailed milestone breakdown here:

Raise demand in 2018
Increase supply in 2019
Open the marketplace in 2020

All hands are on deck to make this happen on a daily basis. Not only is our team committed to Etheal’s mission, but everyone is also financially incentivized to make this happen — we are rowing in the same boat as our investors.

Our advisors’, founders’ and teammates’ tokens are all vested over a 3-year period of time with a 1-year cliff. If the HEAL tokens value and demand grow, everyone wins, if it decreases, then everyone loses and the founders lose the most with a low token value. We’ve deliberately done this to ensure that everyone is invested in the long-term success of our project.

How does the bear market affect Etheal?

Funding: Luckily, we converted the majority of our crypto funds to fiat before the market collapsed, thus we have a projected runway of 1 year before we need to focus on fundraising again
Token value: The 84% fall of the crypto market from its all-time high affects every existing crypto token and coin, including the HEAL token. Naturally, a bull market would be preferable, but these are aspects that we can’t control
Daily operations: The weak crypto market and further decreases do not affect or influence our daily work and progress at all

How big was the biggest contribution?

The biggest token contribution that we received from one address during our ICO was 100ETH.

When we take into account hard cash contributions to the project-not counting work hours and alternative expenses-then the two founders have invested the most into Etheal/Doklist, investing several times the highest donation into the project.

This is because the project did not start from scratch — by the time the ICO opened, the site was working in two different countries, with 420,000 doctors and 127,000 services already listed.

What was the total amount raised?

Etheal’s ICO raised approximately 1800ETH, though its hard to give an exact sum as the final amount arrived across several months in EUR, BTC and ETH currencies.

How many addresses own HEAL token and who are the biggest owners?

You can always check the HEAL token holders and their balances here: https://etherscan.io/token/0x6bd26bb09c992e09d2156b48f723e56e52eead9c#balances

During the ICO we registered contributors from more than 50 countries.

Why did Etheal fork the HEAL token?

We forked the token as soon as soon as we identified a technical issue with the HODL contract, which transferred incorrect HEAL token amounts to 3-month HODL reward recipients. We were able to pause the token contract before anyone lost or gained any tokens unfairly.

From day one, we have built safety into the core of our functionality. As such, we used Minime Tokens in our smart contracts, in the event that any issues would come up in the future. Due to this foresight, we were able to successfully fork the token without any problems or consequences.

During the fork, we found issues in the open source Minime token code base used by several blockchain projects (including Golem, which is valued at $60M). We fixed these and sent a pull request on Github: https://github.com/Giveth/minime/pull/59/commits/e334da008b72460bc06ca1b7b022da0a23011471

Etherscan and IDEX were outstandingly responsive after the fork. Both of them updated the token address within a few days.

You can read more about the technical explanation of the HEAL token hard fork here: https://medium.com/etheal/technical-explanation-of-the-hodl-issue-618298ce5fa5

Where does Blockchain integration stand in the project?

We have already integrated Blockchain into our payment system. Now we’re working full steam ahead on bringing as much value as we can to our end users, who visit Etheal with the goal of quickly and transparently choosing a trustworthy doctor.

New features within the token contract are being planned, for example, the ability to fork without changing addresses. An automatic, blockchain-based crowdsourcing portal is also lined up in our development pipeline.

Recently, our CTO Viktor was asked to be a judge at the international blockchain olympiad.

What countries are you expanding to and how advanced is the tokenization of the company?

We are building the database in 93 countries, focusing on healthcare providers that provide services for medical tourists. In the next months, we will focus more on European countries, but as we gather more and more experience we might slightly change course.

During the 9-month HODL reward period, can we expect a point where there is meaningful token demand?

We are continuously keeping the 9-month long HODL reward period in mind, and working on raising token value in that time. In broad strokes, the steps we underlined at the beginning of the article under Supply, Demand and Monetization are necessary to achieve this.

When can we expect HEAL tokens to be present on a new exchange?

We could easily spend all of our raised funds on listing HEAL on 2–3 exchanges, as the listing prices are still very high, with some exchanges charging up to 7 figures. We do not expect that this would earn any long-term benefits.

While we reached the min cap during the ICO and the plans we promised to develop are on track, we did not reach the hard cap or even our soft cap. As such, we need to be careful about what we decide to spend our funds on.

Currently, we see the biggest potential return in developing our platform, rather than targetting short-term speculators.

When will HEAL tokens be listed on coinmarketcap?

In order for new tokens to be listed on coinmarketcap.com, it needs to achieve a certain amount of daily trades. HEAL tokens have not yet reached this quota.

SUMMARY

Milestones

Raise demand in 2018
Increase supply in 2019
Open the marketplace in 2020

How will reach future milestones