Earlier this year when Metadium hosted a private sale exclusive to a limited number of investors, we had no idea that there would be this much institutional interest. We were grateful and honored — it had validated our belief that we had something very special in the works. 38,000 ETH was raised in an incredibly fast two days, with 50% of the META tokens almost instantly sold.
We were amazed, excited, and we felt an incredible sense of relief that we were well funded to truly change the world through our protocol. It was never our intention to purposefully leave out the public, and we promise to do whatever it takes to gain your support in building a world where we are truly in ownership of our own identities.
We can say with confidence that we are currently the best positioned project to achieve this dream. We are incredibly blessed to have Coinplug, as our parent company and technology partner. With over 185 blockchain related patents and a wide variety of projects in its portfolio, Coinplug has placed itself as one of the global leaders in blockchain technology.
Metadium’s strategic partnership with Coinplug sets Metadium apart from other identity related projects, and that will be evident in the near future.
- COO, Richard Yun
Metadium’s ground-breaking technology, the META ID also played a major part in the enormous institutional interest. The META ID combines an individual’s mundane identity and virtual identity, a technological feat that has caught the attention of companies across numerous industries. This excitement and interest across various industries has kept Metadium, as well as its investors, optimistic on the possible real life use-cases.
We thought that a private only raise would help us to focus solely on developing the protocol and making partnerships, while drowning out the noise of volatile price action and people focused only on profits. However, without a community to support us, encourage us, and keep us going, things can get a bit mundane. We sincerely want to share this excitement and vision with you, the community that we need.
Through this article we hope to illustrate our vision and and be as transparent as possible with where the raised funds will go. There has been some serious misconceptions on our intents and where the raised funds will go, and we hope that you will understand that the decisions that we made were well-intended for the long term goals of a revolutionary decentralized identity platform.
As we have previously posted before (Metadium‘s Token Metrics — Curiosity Resolved), 50% of the 2 billion META tokens in the ecosystem were sold. However, we did not do a good job of explaining where the other 50% would be going. Below is the fund allocation from the private sale:
You’ll see that 65% (around 24,700 ETH) of the funds is allocated to research and development. We should have made it more clear on what R&D entails.
Much of the R&D funds will naturally flow back to community of developers that we plan on supporting and rewarding.
This includes:
- Hiring Developers and Researchers
- Grants and monetary support for exceptional dApp Developers
- Funds for the further development and improvement of the platform
- Technical and Social Research on Metadiuim & Decentralized Identity related topics
- And many other ways to support community members that contribute to the development of the protocol
Marketing is another allocation (15%) that we will be using to grow the ecosystem, raise public awareness, and ultimately accelerating the proliferation of a world where the people own their identities — not the government, not the banks, not the credit reporting agencies, but you yourselves. Whether you’re a token holder or not, this fund will be beneficial to the world.
If we analyze the token distribution more in depth, you’ll see that entire team only really holds 17% of the tokens. The allocation to Power the Ecosystem should have been explained in a more detailed way, and we apologize for that. The 12% will flow back to the community, similar to the 65% fund allocation for R&D.
This ecosystem allocation is planned will be used for:
- Incentivizing early actors in the ecosystem (service providers, attestation agencies and individual users)
- Identity Related Events & Trade shows (education for more actors to join)
- Digital Identity Advocate Activities (supporting the communities advocating for decentralized and digital identities)
- Bounty Campaigns for the Community (Brand Ambassadors, Content Creators, Community Service Volunteers, Educators, etc.)
- Bounty Campaigns for the Developers (For Security Issues / Bugs, as well as contributing to the open source repository for protocol improvement!)
- Supporting and Hosting Community Events such as Hackathons and Conferences
The 18.5% Company Reserve will not be used recklessly, rather it will be used where it’s needed the most to build the next-generation identity protocol that our world desperately needs. Ryan Uhr (Coinplug), Richard Yun (COO), and Jeffrey Song (CTO) have spent years and years fighting for decentralization and Justin Park (CEO) has joined the force, and we hope that the Metadium supporters will soon see that they will not, and have never put profits over this revolutionary movement sparked by blockchain technology.
We are aware that a 2.5% allocation for the crowdsale (Metadium Crowdsale — Get Ready) was disappointing to many, but hopefully you can now see the big picture and the reasoning for how the funds and tokens are currently allocated — to ensure that the community involved in our journey will be rewarded, and to speed up the adoption rate and proliferation of this dream and vision.
We will soon be announcing a bounty program (total amount TBA, but most likely will be coming out of either Marketing or the Power to Ecosystem funds) in addition to the 2.5% crowdsale allocation to show that we really are serious about community building.
So now it’s time to make a decision — will you support us in this enormous battle against the status quo?
P.S. An exciting partnership announcement will be made soon with a big player in the gaming industry!
With love,
Team Metadium
