An update from Incent
Sydney, 15 July 2017
G’day,
So ends another frenetic week and in pausing to take stock, I am well aware that I owe you all an update on where things stand, how we got here and what we are doing about it. In the future I look forward to doing this by AMA or Interview but right now I need to choose my words with the utmost care and cannot afford to be drawn. I can only hope you understand. Firstly, and with respect to the most recent unpleasantness, I can only say 3 things at this point:
- A third of our crypto assets are not currently under our control.
- A NSW high court injunction would render their further movement a criminal offence.
- We are doing everything we can to secure their return.
Clearly, none of this is ideal but having spent the last 10 days, working up and through a damage limitation and recovery strategy, I feel like we are pulling out of the dive. The purpose of this note is to to share with you all why I feel this way.
Team
So, it’s a jolting moment when one’s Technical Director is, literally, no longer present, particularly without any succession measures in place. But, it’s important to remember that at this point Incent’s technical team is bigger than one man. Matt and Nadia have been with us for nearly 2 months, Bok is alongside and Sergey has rolled straight into the TD role. Also, Jins’ technical background has enabled him lean-in, secure and shore up our technical infrastructure. So while it’s a fact that a lot of IP walked out of the door with Peter, it isn’t like anything we were working on has ground to a halt. Further, it’s forced us to take a fresh look at our development path in the broadest sweep and this has been a wholly positive process.
Further, the arrival of Mary Powell as GM and Compliance Officer could not have been better timed and together with our legal and accounting specialists, I feel that a close team is being forged in a crucible of pressure. This is not what any of us would have wished for but we’re committed, professional adults and we’re determined to come through this trial better and stronger.
Core
So far as the core product is concerned, we have made the decision to simplify the MVP — significantly — such that Incent is bought via a web-app then distributed and traded via a mobile ‘kiosk’ app to and from a consumer’s mobile wallet app. These 3 components will allow us to get to market with an end to end solution in the shortest possible order and provide us with a foundation upon which to build the more advanced functionalities and plug-ins.
I accept that is a more modest entrance to the mainstream commercial market than we had originally envisaged but if we have learned anything over the last 3 months, it’s that sophistication doesn’t scale well, quickly. Beyond which, this MVP realisation removes all barriers to global merchant participation at the outset and gives us the tools to demonstrate the product to potential partners. So this is what we are going to do and we’re excited about it.
ICO Tech
I want to acknowledge the community angst swirling around our hosted ICO service, which stems from a decision I made back in December of 2016 to support demand for Incent quickly, using something we had already built, in a market I felt was set to catch fire.
I also want to assert that there wasn’t a lot wrong with this strategy; the ICO market has taken off and this tech provably boosts demand for Incent when deployed.
Equally, I recognise that our execution of the strategy — both commercially and technically — was poor and I accept that the impact of our failure to deliver what we had hoped to has been significant, on our reputation generally and your confidence in us to deliver our core mission.
Painful though this is to acknowledge, I am minded that history is replete with examples of things that didn’t go right the first time, so while I have hated presiding over such a bloody mess and understand that the course of least resistance would be to shutter it up and move on swiftly, I’ve felt compelled to weigh the strength of the original strategy against the complications we experienced in its execution.
And this process informed a decision I took a month back to re-build the code base, remove the dependencies, strip out the complexity and then look to open-source the lot, with a far simpler demand servo for Incent built-in.
If we follow through with this plan, the code would benefit from exposure to community audit, our maintenance costs would be zeroed and demand for Incent would still be supported whenever a new team deploys it. It would also lower entry costs for new projects wanting to launch projects on the Waves platform, which feels like the least we can do.
Anyway, while we are yet to make final deployment decisions, as I write this update the heavy lifting is well progressed. And what I can promise you is that whatever we decide ultimately to do, Incent will never again host an ICO on behalf of a client. On this point we have most certainly learnt our lesson.
Thoughts
So there you are. As I read this back to myself, it occurs to me that just 74 days have passed since the start of MobileGo’s ICO. How different life looked for us here at Incent HQ just 2 and half months ago…
But, d’you know what? Hard as they have been to endure, we are still here. Nothing has been done that cannot be undone, learnt from or improved. I haven’t undergone a change of personality or conviction. I’m still driven to deliver Incent’s core mission and despite everything, my team still has more resources and talent in place to achieve that now than we did last December. Viewing things from this perspective helps me to appreciate that the sky really isn’t going to fall in and that, in fact, we’ve only just begun.
Yours Aye,
Rob W.
