The shut down and the legacy
Dear followers,
We’ve got some important news for you. After long and hard consideration, the team, advisors, and some of the biggest investors have decided to shut down the Futourist project and redistribute the remaining assets to token holders. Details of the redistribution process will be announced in another blog post in the near future — we will focus on what happened and why in this blog post.
The past year
The start of 2019 was all but optimistic for our team and the project. With ETH price down below 100 USD per token and the CTO being absent for months due to a personal tragedy — the situation was serious and the future of the project was at risk. It became obvious that our runway became too short for a decent product launch.
The first thing we did is locking up the remaining assets and putting them aside — it would obviously be unwise for us to burn the entire investment and be left with no funds to bring the product to people. As you might know, in a matter of weeks, we’ve pivoted to a work-for-hire company, have successfully kept the team together and restructured it according to new needs. Very soon we were able to generate profit this way, enough to dedicate 3 full-time developers back to the development of the Futourist platform. At that point, we had let you all know that we are proceeding with the development in a self-funded manner while keeping assets locked until the crypto market bounces up to the levels where it was during the Futourist ICO. Those assets are still there to this day.
The market did not recover much and there is no sign of recovery in the near future. So, after almost a year of struggle and hard work, hoping for the market to recover, we’re now in a situation where we don’t see a way to pull off the go-to-market strategies which we have planned for the last 2 years. On the other hand, we can not continue working on multiple projects with such a small team. The focus and attention that a platform like Futourist absolutely needs at its early stages is just not there when you have to fight to survive. The last nail in the coffin came just recently, when 3 of our best employees got headhunted by large development companies.
What happens next? Open-source.
Two things will happen now:
- The remaining assets will be redistributed to token holders (details in a future blog post)
- The existing code-base will be published in open source under the MIT license and made available for anyone to take over
Two developers are now finalizing the Futourist web app, according to the plan outlined in the last development blog post . After that is done, they will adapt the admin dashboard to the latest database schema and publish the complete package online at futourist.com — the web app will serve as an example of the open-source implementation. The documentation will be written and published publicly for anyone to be able to develop a video review platform on top of what we’ve created. The content of the platform will be open-sourced as well — the existing place data and images, travel outfits, and place collections we’ve collected over the past year will be made public. Projects like the KYC platform we’ve developed for the needs of the ICO and others will be published as well, but might not include the project documentation. Please understand that the mentioned developers work pro bono past this point, for one reason only — to leave some decent legacy behind us. It’s not something we’ve ever wished for, but here we are now, and we will not just disappear. The deadline for all this is set for late November.
The future tourists
Futourist — the platform for a future tourist. From the World Travel Marketplace to the European Travel Commission, many loved the idea from the beginning. We received huge support from you — the community and the institutions from all over the globe. The vision of a new platform that would reward users for creating content and fairly distribute the wealth of the content industry was groundbreaking, inspiring and everyone believed it was a necessary feature in the travel industry. And they were not wrong — we still believe that a new platform will take over in the future, one which will appreciate people’s efforts, their content and will reward them in a meaningful way. And instead of monetizing every user’s breath, they will redistribute the wealth back to their users, who will further help the fellow travelers and grow the platform. It’s something unheard of in the tech industry, but we still believe once such a platform is successful, others will have to follow.
The redistribution — details coming soon
We have notified all exchanges about the upcoming redistribution and they are working with us to solve this matter as smooth as possible. As mentioned before, the redistribution process of the Futourist assets is going to be described in the next blog post. Until then, we recommend token holders to pull their FTR tokens off of exchanges and into their private wallets — don’t worry, there will be enough time for everyone to understand the redistribution mechanics and prepare for it. Stay tuned.
