Holo ICO, nearly halfway point update

We are nearly halfway into our ICO. To date our community has sent in 7,627 ETH from 570+ people in 60 countries in 750+ transactions with an average transaction size of 9.9 ETH. 33,641,201,197 HOT tokens have been minted. You can see the progress on the image below.

We are deeply grateful to everybody who has participated so far. We are humbled that on the back of 15 years of testing and evolving our ideas and getting ready for the world to be ready for them, 10 months of hard work from a core team of 30, a community of a few thousand people (our whitelist and mattermost are around 2,000 and our telegram is nearly 600) who have held over hackathons in 10 countries (Liechtenstein, Latvia, Spain, Portugal, UK, Scotland, Australia, Canada, Netherlands, and the United States) along with innumerable meetups and chat conversations, so many have gathered around our collective vision and brought so much momentum to it.

The halfway point is a great time to reflect, and for us there are some things we are looking to shift for the final two weeks so we can hit and exceed 15,000 ETH. First let’s take a little look at the choices that got us where we are today, and then a peek at what we intend to change in the next two weeks.

This is where our community and your support make all the difference.

Choices we have made to get to where we are today

As we collated the 11 things 150 ICOs all agree on, it made us think about where we differed from other ICOs.

• Perhaps the most notable is that we haven’t given discounts to anybody, because we want all our participants to be equal. We haven’t gone out of the way to attract larger investors, or whales, in either our supply design or our outreach.
• We have begun many partnership discussions but haven’t publicized or closed these, as we have been letting our relationships emerge over time.
• And we have been conscious of timing but have not let the timing of ETH prices dictate how we work and when we launch.

But you all know we are different. From how we raise funds, to the technology we have built, to the currency we have designed. We are innovators through and through. As we keep talking to many of you in our community, we continue to see how our similarities are greater than our differences, and this comes through in the story of how we got to today.

Living our values

We have focused on building an ecosystem rather than exclusively on fundraising which comes through in our outreach efforts (especially the massive European tour of our Director of Communications, Matthew Schutte), hackathons, currency design and our choices of jurisdiction. We put in lots of effort setting up our business before raising funds. We put product first, launching an alpha of holochain with a working API before raising money. We got our legals and operations organised, we have done an enormous amount of team building including having a coach within our core team. We have grown our community through hackathons, public Mattermost chat channels, and now through Telegram. We also have two security experts working as part of the core to make sure things run smoothly.

Mainly, we have stayed true to ourselves through the process, and as a team and community we have grown from the experience. Values only become valuable when they are lived and tested. If we said “all participants are equally valuable to us” but offered a discount the first time somebody asked, we wouldn’t be living the value we stated. And so it goes. Holo and holochain is becoming real and the team behind it is becoming real, too.

Our self-assessment

Would we change anything? We’ve talked about launching earlier and catching the 2017 price wave, but then again, how would we feel if our ETH was worth 1/3 of the price we raised at? We talked about simplifying the message and our communications, but taking 15 years of evolutionary thinking and synthesising it into 10 bullets takes time (and the process is enormously valuable). There are definitely things we will do differently next time, and that is the point. Holo is going to be the first of many projects, and it’s been an incredible test-bed to learn from.

During the initial hour it was exhilarating to see ETH come flooding in. We experienced immense gratitude as a team for all our contributions and humbleness to see the hard work recognised by the wider community. Soon the excitement gave way to the realisation that we are going to have to work for every ETH that comes into our wallets. And rightly so. There is so much choice out there, and we need to find the people that want to be found by us and bring them in to the world of Holo.

Adaptive changes for the next two weeks

To double our ETH intake there are some things we are looking to change over the next two weeks…

We are continuing Matthew’s outreach tour, continuing to try and reach crypto-influencers to tell our story, and looking for forums to let the world know about Holo and Holochain. We are talking to people who have Youtube programmes and to major crypto-news and video sites.

We are also starting to talk to crypto-communities, developers, miners, and traders. We are building off our foundation as a value-stable, mutual-credit cryptocurrency, and sharing the unseen reasons Holo and Holochain matter. If you know any communities who you can introduce us to, please let me know. We have a strong footprint in Germany, the US, the Philippines, and Australia, but there is always room to grow there and open space across the rest of the world.

We are updating our ICO rating listings, talking to some investors, finalising our incubator for dApps, and more.

If you know of anybody who can tell an audience about Holo and would be interested in our thinking and technology, please let us know. As our community, we would love your ideas and input, too. Please let us know your thoughts in comments below, on our telegram channel or on Mattermost. Some of you are very vocal. Please keep that up! And for those of you who are quiet, we want to hear from you as well.

Beyond fundraising

Building Holochain has always been about social structures like teams, communities, and ecosystems as much as technology. It is no surprise that while fundraising is happening, we are also working on the plan to deliver Holo alpha, Holochain beta, and more. Our roadmap isn’t just a pretty picture. Our team is already working on what needs to be done to have Holo running as soon as possible.

We are looking at the activities that need to be done across dev, growth, community, legal, finance, supplier management and administration, and have started hiring and working where we can get a head start. Moreover, we are planning a retreat for our core team so we can be in the same location for a week and accelerate our work in 2018. The retreat will happen shortly after the ICO finishes.

Finally we are also growing our community. So please keep contributing, participating, learning and challenging us. As we grow we want our community to grow faster and get more involved in what is currently core team work. Let’s keep pushing the boundaries together.