Looking back 24 hours
I have always had this idea, of a world where the individual is in control over his/her data all the time. When I became involved in Lisk (initially) and after that co-founded ARK, it was clear to me that a decentralized identity management system (a classic use case for blockchain technology) is something that I should focus my efforts in. This was two years before actually starting working on Persona.
Back in 2017, Dan and Ioana’s company was accepted in the first corporate startup accelerator ever run in Romania (I was part of the organizing team for this accelerator, while working for one of the world top 10 financial groups), and the idea they were brought to work on, was a digital identity system over blockchain. They started to develop what was called at that time “Keychain”, during the next three months they worked and they finished the MVP, which was an ERC20 token. As an organizer, I was very close to them and we were discussing how to develop the application. When the accelerator ended, with our lessons learn (about why a digital identity system would never work properly as a token), we decided to pursue further the idea, but built it on it own blockchain. Soon it became the foundation on top of which anyone can build any kind of interaction some person might have with a third party.
We needed a blockchain platform to fork so we decided to go with ARK because of its capabilities (not because I was one of the ARK co-founders).
When we decided to do the TGE for Persona, we focused strictly on awareness. So the conditions for the tokens that were allocated for the team are: we keep the minimum number of tokens and we vest them for a period of time of three years, split into yearly payments as following: — 10% at Genesis; — 30% after 12 months; — 30% after 24 months; — 30% after 36 months. Also, another important aspect is that we asked ARK to act as escrow and to keep the funds until we launch the main net and the contributions are distributed.
The TGE was over, we did not reach the level of success that we aimed for, in regards to the amount of funds raised. This was intentional on our side, because we did not want participants that are looking to make quick an extra dollar, but people that believe in our vision, knowledge and execution skills. Taking this into consideration, we believe that the purpose of the TGE was achieved.
Still, the major issue face by us, as cofounders, has been an insufficient communication to the community. And we reached to this point by being too focused on the product and less on Marketing. The pile of work to be done got bigger and bigger and we have strived to deliver, in spite of internal challenges in matter of technology and recruitment. We applogize for the way we handled our community and our actions, our sustained effort and time will prove it was a mishappening, and not a habit.
As of yesterday, May 9th, we have launched the mainnet and the Persona wallet, but this brought a new challenge. The number of tokens marked as total supply was significantly larger than the initially communicated amount.
On the Persona website, until yesterday (when we published the wallet links to be downloaded) the total number of tokens sold was 36,776,104.
The figures in the “progress bar” were calculated on the amount of the transaction with the CoinMarketCap value. But the bonus was not added to this. As we have stated on multiple occasions, in order to keep everyone safe from hacking their contributions, all the addresses were generated offline and we were parsing the addresses to see the contribution and to take the snapshot of the CMC value and later we were adding the bonus to to initial amount.
On the mainnet explorer ( a copy/paste from the already existing testnet explorer) The Total Supply was a large enough number to allow us to play with it. Even if we reseted the mainnet a few times, since the config file was an edited file of the testnet, we did not modify the amount until the last moment, when everything was in place.
And the total, right and legitimate number of tokens is 83,182,490 Persona Tokens.
Part of the community has stated that us that we have created extra tokens for ourselves. This is not the case. We are building Persona because we believe in this company and not for sake of free money.
So far we have not used the TGE funds for the development and we are keeping our commitment to use these funds when we meet the milestones of the development.
Moving forward, our plan is to:
- Bring more developers on-board (work in progress)
- Launch the ID Mobile Application (IOS almost done, Android is work in progress).
- Start developing Persona on ARK v2
- Work together with our already involved partners to see how they consume identity (this will take place on testnet) (to be started once the new developers join the team)
- Have a regular presence to RegTech, Fintech, Blockchain events (work in progress) .
We are now distributing all tokens and believe that the transparency of the distribution will be clear to all investors and all possible doubt eliminated.
We would like to thank the whole community for being here, discussing and debating each point and hope to see the same level of involvement throughout the company’s life.
