I’st “ping” after a successful Seed round

First month has passed since our seed, which surprised us all by ending within first 15 hours after starting on December 16'th. Many thanks to all of you who believed in this idea and this team.

This is going to be a first time we will talk to you on what has been going on “behind the curtain”.

All of our work during this month was about preparation.

So let’s dive right into the topics we focused on during this period.

I. Roadmap

We have been defining product development stages, which will most likely reflect in Token Sale structure.

We see 5 stages, progressively growing in difficulty, which will take us roughly about 5–6 years to complete.

Each stage will be autonomous, meaning that it will be able to survive even if we as an organisation would not.

Our actual wall, with parts of Roadmap

Roadmap will be one of the essential parts of whitepaper and most likely we will talk a lot more about it in future blog posts, discussing with you our chosen approaches.

II. MVP*

MVP = Minimal Viable Product

Other big area we have been focusing on was MVP — we have been defining the scope of it, finding the right people to help us build it.

For us MVP has a role:

• to showcase how might an actual decentralized VPN service work, give you insights into it, allow you to feel the essence of the future product, for both roles as VPN providers and as their users;
• To showcase accounting of usage, which will serve as the base for payments(no actual payments in MVP);
• To already create a decentralized network of VPN nodes (in this phase we will still have a single centralized element — a connecting server. Decentralizing this element is way beyond MVP level);
• To create a secure and encrypted connection between a user and a VPN node (so yes, you will have a full VPN experience when using it).

This is what we plan on building during MVP stage.

III. Technical roadblocks & testing hypothesis

We looked for technical roadblocks— things which might prevent us from delivering our promises.

During this phase — we have been meeting various experts, mostly people experienced in building and managing large and sophisticated computer networks.

The resulting outcome — we found various blocks, but none that are unsolvable by team of experts.

For example: when a VPN Node is under a router, it gets an internal IP address, which you can’t reach from outside. So if a VPN is built in a straightforward manner, your node will be out of reach for outside users. Thus you have to use techniques like NAT hole punching. This is not easy, yet possible and has been achieved by other decentralized solutions like Torrent.

We will be detailing this in much greater detail in our whitepaper and associated documents.

IV. Choosing coin model and dynamics

We have been discussing whether we should choose “Fee” or “Circulation” coin model. Let me explain what I mean by the two models.

In Fee coin model: Mysterium protocol will collect “burn” — a small fee for establishing each connection, this fee will accumulate at the protocol level(collection of smart contracts). Each Mysterium coin owner will receive predefined % of all burn generated by the whole network. Payments for the VPN service will occur in other coin e.g. Ethereum. As Mysterium Network grows, two things should happen:

• total payouts per coin will grow,
• value (price) of each coin might grow as well.

In Circulation coin model: each Mysterium coin owner, will be able to pay for the VPN services, but will not receive any burn sharing, as payments will happen using Mysterium coins. The value for coin owner will come from growth of Mysterium Network usage, increasing the need for coins, most likely resulting in growth of coin price.

This has not been decided, but we are leaning toward Fee coin model. If you have any thoughts on this — we will appreciate them greatly. Either contact me on our Slack channel, or just comment here :) Thank you.

V. Talks with ICONOMI

No promises there yet, but just want to let you know that we started talking with them. Goal is to understand whether we can work together on making this a more successful coin sale.

VI. Deciding how are we going to work together as a team

Nothing major here, just few elements I would like to point out:

• We tend to lean toward model adopted by cooperatives, where every active contributor is compensated with both: equity as well as payment.
• This leads us to team-wide vesting. As a team — all of us will be vesting our coins too. The earlier you join — the more coins you will accumulate. We started doing this from day 1(as there are no coin’s yet, we simply track each team member contribution up to date which will serve as basis for compensation in coins).
• Eventually we will develop a model where all of this is overseen not by the “management”, but by the mechanism + community itself, with each members interests aligned with organisation interests, fueled by shared ownership.

I guess this topic deserves a separate blog post :)

To conclude

Our first month — flew by, off course holiday season was also helpful with this.

This month gave us great clarity into:

• product, both pre’ and post’ ICO,
• things that need to be done before ICO and after it,
• scope and difficulty of it all.

Goals for coming month:

• Start building MVP
• Start preparing for ICO: content for the web (e.g. video explaining the concept), wrapping up discussions with Iconomi, decide on coin dynamics, etc..
• Start figuring out legal aspects
• Continue to search for “hackers”, specializing in networks who like the idea. If you know any — please send them our way.

If you are new to Mysterium Network, I would recommend starting with our intro blog post: Presenting Mysterium Network Vision: Decentralized VPN network.

Thank you for taking the time.