MIND AI is product-centric project. And, we are committed to developing a revolutionary new AGI engine powered by blockchain. We’ve reiterated this in the past, and continue to stand by it as our over-riding priority. This past January, we co-hosted the AGI Forum in Geneva, Switzerland where top leaders from state, academia, and the private sector came together to discuss the progress, social impact, and ethics of AGI development. It was at this event where we first released the first set of APIs that allowed outside developers to work with our core development team. We were also invited by IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) back in June, one of the most prestigious electronics engineering organizations in the world, and presented to its annual gathering in Bangkok, Thailand in June. At both events, we showcased our latest live demo of MIND AI reading and answering questions from the book The Little Prince with great success. It’s the least to say that it was a smashing success for MIND AI. Furthermore, our investor and advisor will be presenting MIND AI at the World Internet of Things Exposition in September, and we will be participating in the IEEE TEMS International Symposium on Innovation and Entrepreneurship in October.
Since then, we’ve decided to sharply focus on two areas — commercialization and equity fundraising. Based on the participant inputs from the AGI Forum especially, our team has decided to take time to rethink our product-market-fit (PMF) strategy, and prioritized the commercial aspect of development. Particularly, we studied the key trends in automotives, healthcare, and customer service industries and found distinctive market opportunities where MIND AI’s engine has distinctive and competitive advantages over any other existing AI solutions on the market today. That effort has helped us to redefine our R&D goals, development roadmap, and a new direction to better commercialize the MIND AI engine. Concurrently, we’ve been discreetly soliciting venture capital firms in order to secure equity financing. We’ve met with prominent VCs and strategic corporate investors, especially in Asia, and have made significant progress in all fronts. To that end, we will be making separate announcements with more specifics after we finalize our negotiations with prospective investors.
Now, let’s discuss OMAI tokens and the status of our listing plan. This is an area where many of our community members expressed most impassioned comments about us in the official Telegram channel. As you know, we’d initially planned to list the OMAI tokens around this summer at major exchanges. Based on that initial and preliminary plan, we’d also decided to partner with Bitsonic as a way to test the market demand for OMAI tokens and assess the potential size of available liquidity for our offering. During that time, we made certain announcements about then-anticipated token offering plan to our community based on our understanding and predictions about the state of ICO market and the direction of price movement for many top altcoins as well as Bitcoin in the market. Categorically speaking, we anticipated that the ICO market would fully recover and the alt-coins would lead the expansion of the overall coin market by the summer of 2019, providing an ample amount of liquidity and demand from institutional and individual token buyers (so as to allow MIND AI to offer its tokens in some form of public listings). In actuality, none of those predictions came out to be materially true.
For example, ICO (and so called IEO, which is just another form of public token sales offered by companies) has never regained its place as a reliable funding source for blockchain startups.
In addition, the altcoin market dominance, one of the key growth drivers of ICO, has gone down to nearly 48% from around 62% at its peak over the past 2 years.
The altcoin market dominance has gradually declined to around 30% for the past 2 months.
This means only one thing: ICO market is essentially dead at the current moment and there is very little confidence or liquidity available in the market. In fact, individual and institutional coin holders make more money if they were to increase their position in BTC. They would be far worse off if they were to direct their capital into ICOs primarily funded by ETH and BTC. The height of altcoin dominance and ICOs were in 2017 and early 2018, not today. Unfortunately, the timing of our OMAI token sales on Bitsonic was in the middle of the downward trend of altcoins and the death of ICOs. Under these circumstances, at this point, we have no choice but to hold off our token offering indefinitely until the overall coin market restores its confidence. Our decision to not pursue a public token sale and exchange listings this summer is based on our fact-based analysis of the current coin market. Simply put, we think it’s wrong and suicidal to risk your money any more than you should when you can do considerably better by holding on to your Bitcoin. So, this isn’t a shooting-from-the-hips, hit-and-run, short-sighted decision favored by most startups in our space. We want to be thoughtful and measured in our decision to fund our growth but also protect you from potential loss to the best of our abilities. Therefore, we believe it is critical to focus on the product development and equity financing now. That being said, we sincerely apology for our prolonged silence. It was intended to create more room for our team to refocus and restrategize in this turbulent market.
I understand many of the Bitsonic private sale participants have been waiting patiently for OMAI tokens to be listed on public exchanges, and we have not forgotten about our supporters. We have heard the complaints and are in discussions with Bitsonic to offer refunds to those who have participated in the Bitsonic sales of OMAI tokens. Once we have hashed out the logistics and details of the refund, we will issue another update on instructions for the refund on Bitsonic.
However, we will be conducting a public token sales and listing OMAI tokens on public exchanges in the future. We are also drafting additional rewards and incentives as a token of our appreciation for our supporters who do not request a refund of their purchase of OMAI tokens on Bitsonic.
Again, thank you for your continued support and please feel free to reach out to us at info@mind.ai if you have any questions.
Thank you.
Regards,
Paul Lee, CEO
