Better ICO: Investors MUST be Protected

SlotNSlot team has finished proof-of-concept, and is developing a minimum viable product(MVP) to run on the Testnet(rinkeby). MVP will be available within July. A better, attractive product on the mainnet, however, would require the team more time, effort, and fund. SlotNSlot team plans to do fundraising as described below within August. Funds raised will be used for operations, marketing, and purchasing new game licenses, assets, and logics. For more detailed use of funds, refer to our Whitepaper.

SlotNSlot aims to put the platform on track, dismantle the team, and make the platform operate and improve autonomously. Any relevant codes for the platform will always be open to the public, and in the long term development issues and improvements will be rewarded with bounties. Any funds remaining at this moment will be utilized to maximize investor benefits.

In recent initial coin offerings(ICOs) around cryptocurrencies space, SlotNSlot found several problems that had been pointed out by the Ethereum community and society. The most important issue we’re concerned is investor protection. We’ll be utilizing some of methodologies used in the traditional venture investments to protect both i) funds raised by investors, and ii) investors’ token values.

Protecting the Fund

Yearly Cap

Last April, a dating DApp service had a scandal with using its funds, which soon turned out to be an attempt for hedging the volatility of Ether. Even it wasn’t verified as “exit scam”, this still laid negative perceptions on the project, and most of all, such huge amount of fund shouldn’t have been dealt in such way without investor decisions. SlotNSlot team will prevent this by having an upper bound on the fund that could be used in each year after crowdsale. If there was any need for more funds to be withdrawn to further develop the project, the team would request for an approval from the investors with a proposal in full details. After announcing the proposal for a period long enough to notify investors through our communication channels, they will have roughly 72 hours to vote on the proposal. Additional funds exceeding the upper bound will be approved with more than 50% of voters agreeing to the proposal. There may also be a proposal to increase the upper bound itself for more flexible use of the fund, which probably will require more strict investor agreement.
EDIT: Quarterly cap of 2,500 ETH will be used instead of Yearly 10,000ETH. (Aug 14th, 2017)

Transparent Use of Fund

Another huge problem in recent ICOs is that the investors never get reports about how their invested funds are used. There’s no way they can be ensured whether the fund is used as described in the whitepapers and business plans or it’s being exploited for private purposes by project managers. Unlike traditional business entities, there’s no enforcement to ICO projects to reveal their financial reports on anywhere. In some cases funds are split into multiple accounts for better safety, making it further difficult for investors to trace the use of fund. SlotNSlot project will provide a public webpage tracing how much of the fund is used in real time, and all the details of fund uses will be reported every month.

Investor Decisions

In any cases where project wouldn’t progress further including successful launch of actual platform, suspension of the project before launch, expiry of the predetermined period for the fund use(we’re expecting roughly five years), and shift of the project to an autonomous scheme, if there is remaining fund, investors will be asked to make a consensus on how to deal with it. We’re currently considering following options.

i) Returning ETHs proportional to the tokens held.
ii) Using all the remaining ETH to purchase and burn tokens.
iii) In case of switching to an autonomous project, use remaining fund as bounty for further developments.

Apart from these END-project cases, investors will be able to submit a proposal for voting with 10% of total tokens issued(anyone with less than 10% will need to persuade the community for support). With two-thirds(⅔) of token holders voting, and more than 50% of voters agreeing, proposals can be a decision to do either,

i) Consider the project as suspended. Proceed to further voting to decide how to deal with remaining fund. OR
ii) Change the “Yearly Cap” on use of fund.

*We’re considering a capped voting power per wallet, to prevent a single stakeholder having too much control over the whole project, including the team itself!

Protecting the Token Value

Foundation Lock-Up

After our tokens are listed and traded on exchanges, SlotNSlot team members shouldn’t be dumping the tokens to immediately capitalize and exit. To prevent this, the foundation tokens will be locked up for 1 year after the very first platform revenue is witnessed.

Preventing Damages from PUMP&DUMP

Recent ICOs have been pointed out that huge investors came out to be speculative to just pump their ETH and dump out the tokens. This would harm most of investors with their asset value. To prevent this kind of thing happening, SlotNSlot team is thinking of following methods.

i) Nick Johnson’s off chain auction-based crowdsale
ii) Investors (wallets) with more than 10,000,000 SLOT tokens receive tokens exceeding that number with lock-up over 100 days. For example, investing in for 30,000,000 SLOT would give 10,000,000 SLOT tokens as normal, and 20,000,000 tokens locked up for 100 days.
iii) Setting an upper bound on number of tokens transferrable in one transaction, up to 100 days after crowdsale.

Other Details on Crowdsale

Hard Cap

100,000 ETH. This is determined with a conservative margin to cope with unexpected costs in the project. As mentioned above, funds will be controlled with yearly cap, and any leftover will be refunded or used to maximize investor benefit.
EDIT: Hard cap is reduced to 40,000 ETH. (Aug 14th 2017)

Crowdsale Period

Crowdsale starts exactly 30 days after the publishing of this article.
Start date: [08:00 AM UTC+0, August 20th, 2017]
It will end either four weeks after start date
End date: [08:00 AM UTC+0, September 17th, 2017]
, or when 40,000 ETH is achieved.
EDIT: Period is extended for two more weeks, and the hard cap reduced to 40,000 ETH.(Aug 14th 2017)

Prices

There will be 20% bonus during the first 24 hours. Afterwards until the end of crowdsale, every ETH contributed would issue 10,000 SLOT.

12,000 SLOT = 1 ETH (first 24 hrs)
10,000 SLOT = 1 ETH (after 24 hrs)

We’re currently not so concerned with network congestion, but if it seem to be necessary we’ll be embracing crowdsale models suggested in the community.

Revenue Share

Platform profits will be stacked in a smart contract, to be distributed to token holders every 100,000 blocks mined. 5% of stacked profit will be used as buffer, 95% distributed as revenue share.
EDIT: Profit share model is still to be decided among several options by token holders’ voting, after crowdsale ends.(Aug 14th 2017)

Foundation Stake

Tokens equivalent to 25% of amount issued during crowdsale will be reserved for the SlotNSlot developers(i.e. 20% of total issuance). These tokens for the dev team will be locked up to the date 1 year after the very first revenue share from the platform is witnessed.
EDIT: Lock-up will be effective for 1 year after the end of crowdsale period.(Aug 14th 2017)

There’re other issues we’re concerned with such as

— hedging volatility of the fund raised as cryptocurrency,
— splitting the fund into multiple contracts for security,
— using third party services for crowdsale contracts and auditing, and
— setting minimum goal for crowdsale.

SlotNSlot team always aims to be a decent example of DApp project that prioritize the prosperity of Ethereum society. We’ll be pleased to get any feedback from the community and embrace as much opinions as possible. As a reminder from our first introductory post, we ultimately aim to achieve…

• a true autonomous DApp where the community rules the protocols and runs on itself
• a decent example of DApp that runs just as good as centralized counterparty, and
• a representative project that sincerely and diligently commits to the vision of Ethereum and DApps, by contributing to both investors and the Ethereum society.

Check out our
WebPage // Whitepaper // Github // Reddit // Youtube
Facebook // Twitter // Discord // Telegram
*we’ve moved from Hipchat to Discord
*SLOT Crowdsale starts on August 20th, 2017.