Mysterium Network Seed Round: high risk matched with high reward

Hello & thank you for coming here.

We believe Internet should be a place where anonymity and freedom is our right, not a privilege.

But as the world stands today — this is not the case, there is enormous amount of spying, tracking, blocking, data-mining, all done without our knowledge. As an example — UK recently banned End-to-End encryption. This trend is not stopping — it’s accelerating. I suggest — let’s protect ourselves.

Can we do something about it? Oh yes we can, off course not everything at once. My current aspiration is help provide more freedom to the Internet users. I am not alone. Since starting this project we find more and more people who want to join, it appears the problem is real and there are those who want to solve it (if you’d like to pitch in — give us a shout).

Team we have assembled — is both capable and willing to work on a solution. Current team consists of professionals coming from different fields. Up untill now we have been hired by various organisations (mostly closed & centralized organisations) in order to pay our rent, which leaves us less time for development of Mysterium Network. Yet we would love to be able to dedicate ourselves full time for this cause. That’s why:

we come to you with a proposal and asking for your help in return.

Seed-round promises

To get off the ground with this project — we need 4-5 month runway. By saying this I don’t mean to imply that Mysterium will make enough money to support a working team in 5 months. That would be misguiding. This is simply enough for us to properly get ready for a full scale Token Sale, which is planned for late spring. Instead of working part time and drastically lowering project success chance — we decided to go ‘all in’ ourselves and do a seed round — inviting you on board.

This Round will provide enough funds, to:

• Find complementary team members — After Token Sale, project will require team somewhere from 10 to 20 of full time contributors: ranging anywhere from big data analysts to network to UX experts. After this round we will focus on finding strong candidates complementing existing team;
• Research and define a road-map — ahead and put it into a whitepaper and other documents. Providing both: easy to read format and more in depth technical and business analysis;
• Develop a working prototype — early alpha version product;
• Design and define Coin dynamics best suited for Mysterium case;
• Define risks and asses their potential impact;
• Automate Token Sale — via combination of Smart Contracts managing various aspects like: Escrow, Coin creation, return of funds in case of failure, and other processes. Verify all of them with trusted entities;
• Define Legal framework;
• Provide community with complete Transparency during the process.

These are the promises of what we will do with funds coming from this this round. Now you might ask — what do I get as an investor for taking this risk?

Seed Round: 5x tokens compared to Token Sale in Q2.2017

We understand the risks of contribution in such an early stage. In startup world this would be Seed or Pre-Seed phase. People participating in such an early rounds — usually inherit two things at once:

• greatest possible amount of shares in a company ;
• greatest risk — because risk factors have not been eliminated this early.

We understand the risk, and we will do what we can to minimize them. If it reassures you — we stopped all our hired work for a few months to work solely on this project, so we took our personal risk, because we see a clear need in this solution and time is now. First of all — we need this solution ourselves (I wouldn’t trust centralized VPN services more than ISP’s), secondly — market research shows that need for VPN is increasingly a growing industry, expected to reach USD 46.26 Billion by 2020.

It’s a great industry to fix via decentralization, we are steaming forward and we call you to join us.

We understand your risks, so we want to provide you with adequate incentive for participating in this token contribution. Participating now will give you least 5 times more Mysterium tokens than participating in Token Contribution event in Q2, which means: contribution during this round will give you at least 5 times more Mysterium Coins than same size contribution during in late spring.

Examples always help illustrate the ideas. Let’s simulate couple examples. Starting from constants:

• For example imagine we will release 100'000'000 Mysterium coins;
• 18% of them (18'000'000) will be reserved to team for vesting and future development;
• 82% (82'000'000) — distributed to investors of TokenSale & Seed.

Case1: Seed collected: 50'000 USD, Token Sale: 500'000 USD

For this:

• Seed investors get: 30'750'000 coins
• TokenSale phase 1 investors get: 51'250'000 coins

Case2: Seed collected: 35'000 USD, Token Sale : 1'250'000 USD

For this:

• Seed investors get: 10'070'175 coins
• TokenSale phase 1 investors get: 71'929'825 coins

Case3: Seed 20'000 USD, Token Sale ph1: 330'000 USD, ph2: 100'000 USD

For this:

• Seed investors get: 16‘418’242 coins
• Token Sale phase 1 investors get: 54'180'200 coins
• Token Sale phase 2 investors get: 11'401'557 coins

All cases illustrate the difference in reward for a Seed participant compared to Token Sale stage participant. Seed participant gets at least 5x more tokens compared to Token Sale participant. Seed + Token Sale participants always get the same amount of coins (in this example it was always 82’000’000 coins), the only difference is in proportions, which are adequate to size of contribution.

Minimum amount and Cap

We capped the this Seed round at 6'000 ETH. According to our estimates this will be enough to deliver our Seed promises in high standards.

If we collect at least 2'000 ETH — we will still deliver Token Sale towards Q2. We will do it on our own — 3 full time dedicated individuals, preparing for Token Sale without hiring lawyers, without hiring other organisations to verify our smart contract code, etc.. But we will do it.

If we collect 6'000 ETH, we will have enough funds to hire outside help to achieve best possible result. In that case:

• smart contracts will be verified by outside entities,
• we will have a legal framework prepared by professional lawyers,
• we will gather a team of experts who specialize in niche areas like communications, design, UX etc.. Together we will make MVP (proof of concept) a better product, communicate Token Sale to the larger audience for better success during spring crowdfunding process;
• When evaluating risks — we will consult with different outside experts.

With this Seed Round we are asking for your contribution in order to build an Open and Decentralized VPN for the world.

Seed mechanics

Seed round will be handled by an Escrow Smart Contract (we are currently working on it) and we will post more info about it in the coming days, showing you the code, informing you how to participate, etc..

For now let me outline main conditions defining this smart contract:

• Seed round start date: sometime next week (we will inform you in coming days);
• Minimum amount: 2'000 ETH,
• Maximum amount: 6'000 ETH (our goal);
• When Maximum amount is collected before [end date]: smart contract will immediately stop collecting funds; Any new funds sent to smart contract will be returned automatically;
• If Minimum amount is not collected after [end date] — all contributors will be able to return funds when calling smart contract.

For more info visit Mysterium network website, or join our slack, information will be updated once available.

Final notes

Thank you for getting this far :) for us this means that you might also care about the topic of Internet freedom, as we do.

World is currently undergoing a very interesting transformation:

• on one side we have movement promoting openness, blockchain & decentralization;
• on other side we have growing control from people in power, growing data mining from corporations leveraging it for various purposes, ..

Two big trends and we live right in the middle of it all. Once we manage to build a Decentralized and Open Sourced VPN solution — user private data will be much more difficult to obtain, because there will be no single place to store it. This will not solve spying all together, but will make it hell of a lot harder to do.

We are moving forward and we would love to see you on board with us.

As always we are eager to hear your voice. What do you think? Do you like our chosen Seed settings? Does it interest you if so — why, if not — why as well? Do you have any questions? And finally — are you willing to give us a shot?

Also you can join our slack community, or just visit our website for more info.