Post-Crowd Sale update. Thank you!
The crowd sale is over. What’s next?
We moved away from medium! Please go to the official blog for the latest information, new content, and engaging activities:
The whole LTO Network team would like to start by saying thank YOU to our loyal community who made all of this possible! Our team has been building for over 3 years, while integrating clients and making adoption happen. We met a lot of supporting developers, organizations and users across the world — who became our friends and helped us along the way. But…
Raising money is not an achievement by itself.
Proving yourself over time — is.
We will prove to our community that we create value!
You can read all of our updates on our Website, Medium, Twitter, Telegram and so on — we put a lot of our focus and time on constantly updating the community on our progress. This article, however, is dedicated to the most relevant steps that we will take post-crowd sale. So let’s get to it!
Crowd sale and burned tokens 🔥
We are a revenue-making project. Based on the Docker-style business model (an article on this will be out in the coming days), we can survive for years and focus on making real adoption happen. This is why we initially aimed for a smaller raise — to make sure we leave more room for growth rather than extracting the full potential at the start. And yes, we have met the soft cap!
Our total hardcap was $5,2M for 42% of the total token supply, of which $1.4M was raised back in 2017, that enabled us to grow and scale this last year. Just before the crowd sale, we raised around $1.8M in the private round in November-December 2018. Not enhancing quick flips from (crypto) VCs, but by joining forces with dedicated partners.
In general, the team approached the fundraising from a product-developing perspective: build -> raise a bit ->build more -> find a product market fit -> raise and launch. And we are doing it!
The cap for the crowd sale was 72,500,000 LTO tokens (14.5% of the total supply). Based on the $0.03 price per LTO token and a $123,- peg per ETH (4,100 LTO per 1 ETH), the smart contract for the crowd sale was set at 17,683 ETH.
Staying open for 60 hours (11:00 AM Jan 14 — till 23:00 Jan 16), the contributions in total resulted in 7,990.98 ETH. This marked 45.2% of the crowd sale raise. Based on the small gas war bonus at the beginning, here are the numbers we’ve ended up with:
- Raised: 7,990.98 ETH (45.2% of the crowd sale raise)
- Tokens sold: 33,232,108 LTO (45.84% of the crowd sale offering)
- Tokens to burn: 39,267,891 LTO (54.16% of the crowd sale offering)
This means we are going to burn 7.853% of the total supply. The total (ever) available token supply will thus be 460,732,109 LTO.
But don’t forget about the bridge troll!
He will be punishing early private sale dumpers, protecting the community.
Overall, the burned portion of the crowd sale tokens adjusts LTO Network to the valuation the market determines for it. In retrospect, it implies that we have more room for growth.
We are determined to make adoption happen here and today!
Token distribution and listing
We have a mainnet LTO coin and an ERC-20 LTO token — so what’s the deal with that? If you are a crowd sale participant, you don’t need to worry about all the complications for now. But do read this article about the bridge:
Let’s make it short though. Seed participants swap to LTO mainnet coins to join the network. Private sale participants acquired LTO mainnet coins. That is one side of the bridge. These tokens can be staked, used to pay transaction fees in LTO, to be leased and used on the LTO Network blockchain. But not directly tradeable.
Only the crowd sale participants have the ERC-20 tokens. Those are the directly liquid-tradeable tokens. These are the same LTO tokens, but they simply exist on different blockchains (1:1) — however, everyone except crowd sale participants have to pay a bridge troll fee to trade the tokens.
You can read more about it here:
So what happens with the ERC-20 tokens?
LTO ERC-20 are getting listed on BitMax today, January 17!
- Trading starts at 08:00 EST — 13:00 UTC — 21:00 Beijing, Jan 17
- Only the crowd sale ERC-20 LTO tokens are directly liquid
- LTO ERC-20 tokens will be transferred automatically via the smart contract function to the ETH wallets you contributed from. It’s all in the code! This will happen around 12:00 (afternoon) CET time. The timing is set up this way to ensure that our trade opens on BitMax as a premiere listing, thus no small/illegitimate exchange is able to interfere — as there will be very little to no time to make trading possible on any other platform with volume.
We understand the importance of volume, trading, and so on — so we designed together with the BitMax team some encouraging competitions.
You can read more about them here:
You might have seen transactions going to the BitMax wallet already (blockchain, transparency!). These are trading rewards + a two-letter word we cannot pronounce, dedicated to ensuring liquidity of the LTO token. These are not to be market sold, neither are the ecosystem/foundation tokens, etc. You can find info about the metrics here (to be updated considering the burn).
As soon as the token distribution is over, you will be able to add LTO tokens yourself in MyEtherWallet. Here is a guide explaining how to do it.
Briefly: our goals. What’s next?
We will communicate our goals and plans more extensively in the next days, but you probably want to know now — so let us give a brief summary.
By the way, we do not intend to speculate with the raised funds at all, we find that practice to be a disgrace to the supporting community. All the raised funds so far have been liquidated into USD in order to facilitate the project’s development. We intend to do the same with the crowd sale ETH.
To start with, mainnet and wallet are live, anchoring is enabled!
- Tech: We’re finishing a developer-focused SDK for creating and running Live Contracts (there was a code review), updating the documentation on GitHub, open-sourcing the community nodes for integrators, working out the interface to make the interaction even more user-friendly, open-sourcing more and more and so on. And, of course, finishing up integrating our existing clients with the blockchain!
- Business: Our primary focus lays on having integrators and developer-companies join the network, who can act the same way like we do, by building pilots and integrating their products with the LTO Network blockchain (thus making use of the token economy). We are in talks with quite a few parties, so this will be a major part of our work going forward (it has already been, going well!). The AMA with CryptoArnie is a good place to learn from Rick, CEO of LTO network, about the business/adoption aspects.
- Token: with the premiere on BitMax, we are going to be expanding our token holder base globally. The functionality of the token is absolutely inherent with the technology of LTO Network, so client adoption and network growth are to be going alongside each other. We have more stats and info on that and will be making content on this as well.
1) Keep in mind that, unlike other projects which attach tokens only for fundraising purposes, we have a real token economy developed and through-through, which is a major driving factor of adoption as well. Take your time to read through it — and message us on Telegram if you have any questions.
2) Also note that we only start with LTO/BTC and LTO/USDT pairs. This was decided together with BitMax team to be a better approach in order to abstract the value of the LTO ecosystem from ETH’s volatility. - Community: we have always been saying that the community is the most important part of blockchain projects. We will be constantly engaging with you, setting up competitions, node installation instructions, and even business opportunities. Of course, this also includes regular updates on our progress. Expect to hear a lot from us, because we are here to stay — and we are here to create value!
We have all seen a fair share of (controversial) comments about the community building platform. While it does look like a bounty programme, it’s really not. It’s a complex organism that is intended to turn the community engagement into a governing DAO-style entity, and it takes into account a lot of factors. We are working out the final numbers, but let us re-state:
This is not a shilling machine — it’s a way to bootstrap community engagement and create an actual circle of collaborators working together on the same goal. It’s what ICOs were intended to be in the first place.
It’s not easy to grasp it now, because this is new, so give it time. We will work hard to change yet another narrative in the blockchain landscape and make this happen! If we missed anything in this “short” community update — please let us know, and we will communicate everything right away.
Again, thank you! We would love to have you stay in the community and support the project and each other — to see LTO Network grow and make adoption happen.
Community Platform
