ICOToday Briefing for Advisors— 10/2/17
At ICOToday, we decided to write a weekly letter to our advisors describing in detail the past week’s progress and the plan for the upcoming week. The letter will be distributed to our advisors at the beginning of each week and will be published to our Medium blog shortly after for transparency with our community of supporters.
This Past Week
- Confirmed Two New Advisors: Nitin Gaur, Director at IBM Blockchain Labs and Ismail Malik, Founder, Blockchain Lab.
- Hosted a Meetup in New York
- ICO Consulting Groups: ICOBox and Coinpoint
- SEC and Attorneys
- Engineering Progress: Restructuring the Backend, Company Feed, Investor Feed, Multiple Team Members, Multiple Advisors, Token Smart Contract
- Security Considerations: Enigma Hack Analysis
New Advisors
This week we were pleased and privileged to welcome two new advisors.
Nitin Gaur, currently serves as Director of IBM Blockchain Labs — serving to device industry standards, use cases and working towards making blockchain for enterprise a reality. Prior to this role he was working in capacity of CTO, IBM Mobile Payments and Enterprise Mobile Solutions. Nitin lead the Application Infrastructure Portfolio of IBM Middleware before taking on MobileFirst Solution portfolio. In his 16 years with IBM he has achieved various industry-recognized certifications. As a technical leader Nitin has been involved in many enterprise project implementations and technical paper presentations at internal and external conferences . The range of the topics presented by him span from software architectures to improvement of management processes. Nitin, has been focused on staying close to customer and providing IBM clients with Solution to realize Digital Strategy with IBM Bluemix and IBM MobileFirst Portfolio.
Nitin holds MS in Management Information systems and MBA in Finance from University of Maryland.
Ismail Malik, currently the CEO of Blockchain Lab, has over 20 years experience in Technology related startups and entrepreneurship covering Asset Management, Cryptocurrencies, Mobile Payments in the City of London and Emerging Markets working with leading firms such as Vodafone, Cellnet and News International.
Ismail was the founder of the world’s first Blockchain Lab and first ‘DLT’ company within Level 39 in Canary Wharf (world’s largest Fintech accelerator).
Nitin and Ismail are joining Hoop Somuah as our advisors.
Hoop Somuah is currently the Technical Advisor to Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO. Hoop studied Electrical Engineering at Stanford, thereafter joining Microsoft where he has been for 13 years. In his time at Microsoft, Hoop has primarily worked on development frameworks and distributed systems architectures, starting with frameworks like .Net Remoting, Xbox Live and the Zune Marketplace. Hoop spent five years designing and implementing the cloud service backend for the Halo Xbox franchise where he drove “cloud native” engineering and the use of a virtual actor programming model developed by Microsoft Research.
As we continue developing our platform and planning for our upcoming token sale, we will rely on the expertise of our experienced advisors to help us in refining and iteratively improving our platform.
ICOToday Meetup in New York
On 9/30, ICOToday hosted an ICO/Blockchain meetup in New York. We saw great interest on Meetup with over 90 people joining the group and over 30 professionals in attendance. Our goal by hosting the meetup was to network with other ICO professionals and enthusiasts. Overall, we believe that it was successful. We received great feedback about our platform and confirmed that other ICO investors agonized over the extremely tedious and sometimes insecure process of investing in ICOs. Furthermore, we connected with a few blockchain attorneys that we have scheduled to speak with this upcoming week. We also met the founders of Trive, a company currently launching their ICO and coinmarketwatch, a data aggregator for cryptocurrencies. ICOToday was also warmly welcomed by those in attendance and many requested to be notified when we launched our public beta. We will be hosting more meetups in different cities in the upcoming weeks to meet new ICO professionals and evangelize ICOToday.
ICO Consulting Groups
We have been in talks with two ICO consulting groups for the last week: ICOBox and Coinpoint. Below is an analysis of both services.
Engineering: Smart Contracts, Smart Contract Management System and consulting.
Legal: Product Token Concept, Legal Structure, Complect of Binding Contracts and User Agreements, Token Purchase Agreement, Terms of Use, Privacy Policy and Consulting.
Product and Marketing: Writing the White Paper, Content Strategy, Social Media Marketing, SMM — Forums and Chats, Traffic, Media, Organization of Bounty Program, How to Organize a Pre-Sale and How to Work with Exhibitions and Conferences.
Cost of Services: 50 BTC upfront and 50 BTC worth of ICT or 240 BTC worth of ICT.
Engineering: None
Targeted message: Reliable and trusted brand messaging which will reach out and go viral among the targeted markets. We shall focus on points like Blockchain market distribution, Investors sources and market leaders in the ICO businesses. Written content and creatives are included in the message we deliver.
Official presence: Taking care of your official website in terms of appearance, content and call to action items is a must, we work with you to implement additional notes, change and optimize your site for the market needs.
Effective Press Releases: With wide network of partners and assets, we spread the content to the media channels. Main news sites, ICO sources, targeted social accounts and such will be exposed to the content we will release. Planned up to 4 PR’s every month.
Public relation: Via popular networks such as Facebook, Twitter and others, we manage your brand relations and reputation online. We focus on Engagement with the community, call to action and content spreading on these networks. The work is almost daily and contains the message, video’s and engagement posts. As you already operated on these networks, we will have to find a way to keep the work and improve it with our resources.
Additional: We never stop here and adding our secret spice. Professional network of influencers, advisors and market leaders will be contacted in order to comment and respond on your platform, in order to comment and share. With your assistant we will contact people in the industry as ICO
owners, popular investors and platform providers.
Consultation: Ongoing and nonstop consultation and advising for reaching the goals.
Cost of Services: $5000/month and $15,000 worth of ICT.
We are still reviewing and contacting other consulting groups. Our aim is to find a reputable and experienced consulting group that has previous experience launching successful ICOs. Although, the above companies offer attractive services, we believe that if we keep searching for the next two weeks, we will be able to find more service providers to compare.
SEC and Attorneys
Last week, the SEC called after we submitted the Corporation Finance Request Form through the Office of International Corporate Finance on behalf of ICOToday.
What they recommended
- Discuss the token with an attorney
- Use the Howey Test and the Section 21(a) report to determine whether the token is a security
- Have the attorney reach out to the SEC with any questions
All of these recommendations were expected and easily discernible from reading the news, SEC reports, and other ICO experiences. However, there was one piece of advice that we had not considered.
Important
If we offer tokens now without first contacting an attorney, we could fall under the “securities” jurisdiction of the SEC if our tokens are in fact considered securities.
Since we had not started distributing tokens to early investors, we had not violated any regulations. We fully intend to comply with the SEC’s recommendations.
Following the call with the SEC, we spoke with an attorney, who reviewed our website, white paper, privacy policy and other corresponding documents. He gave us feedback on what we needed to change in order to clarify that ICT was in fact a utility token and not a security. We are currently working through the feedback and will be speaking with more attorneys to verify.
Engineering Progress
Restructuring the Backend, Company Feed, Investor Feed, Multiple Team Members, Multiple Advisors, Token Smart Contract
Restructuring the Backend: The private beta’s backend was quickly built for us to have a prototype to test our initial hypothesis about the problem we were solving — were users interested in a solution to the problem we were solving? Two weeks after launching our private beta and we have validated our approach to the solution and received invaluable feedback.
We decided to rebuild our backed with security in mind to prevent the same scenario and attacks that ICOs such as Aventus and Coindash experienced. Two weeks later, and we are finished. We then added additional features in our backlog including the company feed, investor feed and multiple other features. We will be launching these features on 10/7.
Smart Contract: We completed the smart contract for our token sale and deployed it to the Testnet for further testing. We will be contacting a smart contract auditing company next week to ensure that our smart contract is extremely secure.
Security Considerations: Enigma Hack Analysis
Since one of ICOToday’s value propositions is security, we are taking steps to ensure that the we do not fall victim to the same hacks and scams as previous ICOs.
Enigma: $500,000 stolen. Domain, slack administrator account and mailing lists were compromised. The attacks used a coordinated phishing attack to get a hold of one password that they then used to gain access and pose as Enigma officials.
Solution: Use 1Password to secure all company accounts. This will ensure that no phishing attack will be able to get a hold of compromising information since the password would be unique each time. Furthermore, no critical information will be communicated through chats or social media. Instead, all official communication will be transmitted through the official ICOToday account on icotoday.io, where each official update will need to be verified through Two Factor Authentication. Therefore, utilizing our own platform to launch our ICO and setting a precedent for future ICOs.
This Week
- Finalizing the plan for the release of our bounty/referral program.
- Improving our white paper: incorporating the feedback we received last week, Adding Illustrations.
- 10/04: Meeting with Can Kisagun, Co-founder and CPO of Enigma.
- 10/02: Meeting with Peter Whalen, Clinical Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at Penn State University.
- Speaking with Ali Eatemadpour, Attorney at Eatemadlaw.
- Engineering: Finalize Bounty Program, User Login Optimization, 2FA, Fix Bugs on mobile, Test smart contract on Testnet.
- Plan for launch of platform updates on 10/7
We are excited about the upcoming week. We have made significant progress thus far, but we still have a lot of work to do. We thank you for joining us on our journey and look forward to hearing your feedback.
Best,
Joseph Kitonga
CEO, ICOToday
