An Update & Roadmap from Your Friends at Proof
This year we’ve done a lot. We have added 10,000 cryptocurrency users to our beta platforms that we launched in late-2016. We incorporated in Estonia and obviously tweeted a lot.
We also had a few hiccups: our largest platform of communication, our Slack channel consisting of over 1,200 partners, platform users and blockchain enthusiasts, was attacked during our token presale in September with spammers, scammers, and trolls. The spammers’ intentions were to trick our Slack community members into thinking false messages were coming from the core Proof team in order solicit members’ funds. Spammers also began leveraging our community to promote their scammy projects. After a week of trying to thwart these attempts, we made our Slack private and spent the next month mostly kicking out the “sleeper cell” scammers that remained. This was unfortunate because many of our most active contributors left due to ridiculous numbers of notifications and solicitation messages from Slack, our primary communication channel. We opened a telegram to the public, but that floundered as many of our core users from Slack simply didn’t use Telegram. Our most active 50 members still haven’t joined Telegram, maybe due to a bit of shell-shock. Also Telegram doesn’t have the multi-channel features that are needed for communicating coherently within a project like Proof. (Our Slack has 100 channels for different topics regarding Proof).
Slack is recovering, but it will never be the same, as people used to just come on in freely everyday with fresh feedback, ideas, partnership proposals, collaboration offerings, and more. Scammers realized a lot of blockchain projects were using Slack and really hurt a good thing. Now, people will always need to know someone within the community to get in. Slack is such a great platform, it just lacks the ability to block unapproved users’ private messages. We have heard suggestions to leverage platforms like Discord or Rocket and are considering such solutions.
Other hiccups include widespread rumors of South Korea banning token sales, during the middle of our token presale event. While some law makers have championed doing this, they never passed any legislation. Legally, South Korean token sale events remain, like in most places, in the grey. In the South Korean case: legal. However, when Bloomberg, WSJ, Forbes and Reuters are reporting that “South Korea has banned ICOs” based on bad interpretations of Korean text, it’s hard to convince people otherwise even though our core team is located in Seoul with clarification coming from top legal counsels here in the region.
We saw major slumps in token sale participation on the back of this news in September, and started receiving more messages about South Korean regulation than about our products or the Proof token itself. While this is understandable given the false information a lot of people received from reputable sources, this is a hiccup we still deal with to this day. It is, indeed, understandable why regulators are looking deeper into token sale initiatives here and abroad, as there has been a lot of fraud in the space, with one South Korean company raising $40m using fake names and then running with the money. They are now in jail.
During our token presale, another Asia Pacific country, China, did indeed ban ICOs/token sales. This obviously did kill much of the pre-existing token purchasing market, which was starting to see Chinese institutional investors come onboard.
Today, token sales are in a hangover state. Projects that raised $100 million or more on the back of little more than whitepapers have made little progress, funds have been unaccounted for, founders have fought publicly, and a lot of money has been lost. Scammy ICOs from professional marketing firms now reign supreme on token listing sites with up to a dozen token sales launching every day. In the middle of our current token crowdsale, we find ourselves operating in this climate. Our founding team contributed to many token sales in 2016 and early-2017, and don’t really see much out there these days of much substance. Many others have stopped participating in token sales all together.
People have asked us, with concern, what will happen if Proof fails to raise more than the current $1.9 million raised to-date in the current crowdsale? For any other early-stage startup in its second year of development and a 5-person fulltime team in a different industry, that would be a laughable question. We built our first 10 products in our first year with $0 in funding and had over 5,000 active users before we raised a penny.
While most projects that have raised millions to hundreds of millions this year during the great token sale bubble never released a commercial project baring the project’s name, most have little more than a whitepaper after a year or more of development after their token sales. We’ll see how that turns out for many of them.
For Proof, we’ve never defined ourselves by how much money we can raise but by the value we can bring to end users. The majority of funds that we raise are not meant for Proof as a company, but instead will be locked into crypto-fiat smart contracts. This can be done with any amount of money. The amount simply dictates the speed of adoption by crypto-hedge funds and the mass-market.
Adoption of these crypto-fiat smart contracts depends on how big the Ether safety buffers are, but this grows over time with the current model and fees built in to buying trustless crypto-fiat go to Proof token holders (hint, hint) as rewards. We are on schedule to have test contracts deployed on the main net by late December and integrated into our current platforms, while we will be launching the first production-ready crypto-fiat contracts in February, as outlined in our whitepaper.
Another area of our funding (15%), is geared towards helping out with the scalability of the Ethereum ecosystem. We need Ethereum to scale for mass adoption, which is obviously what we are championing. We are currently working on contributing to the Raiden project and integrating Raiden networks into our upcoming AMP solution to power the ability for thousands of Ethereum-based token trades a second. Can this be done? We’re doing it. More announcements regarding that coming soon.
Furthermore, in the bring-more-value department, we are excited to announce that we are launching two open source projects to our Github tomorrow. These projects will be game-changers in the ETH ecosystem, and we are very excited to collaborate with developers around the world to bring these projects into further maturity. These projects include:
- A generator for multisig wallets, presales, crowdsales and tokens, something this industry certainly needs for speed-of-development, security, and standardization.
- Token crowdsale platform, which will allow companies large and small to manage token sales, cryptocurrency, and marketing initiatives in better way. This is based off of code that we have used ourselves for our token sale, and includes an easy-to-navigate UI, optional KYC, built-in crypto-exchange, tutorials, 2-Factor authentication, client-side wallet import/export, and more.
We are amped to work with more of the Ethereum community on these projects and think we can get much larger companies onto the blockchain through further open-source development and standardization.
While we might not be able to afford to hire hundreds or thousands of the best developers in the world, our open-source projects hope to attract some of the greatest into the Proof ecosystem. Not to mention the founding team consisting of a few badass developers already present, if I don’t say so myself.
In the marketing department, we are collaborating with more projects working to get companies onto the blockchain and will have big announcements soon, as most deals must stay under-wraps until made public.
Additionally, we have been working with BLIP (Brooklyn Law Incubator on Policy) on legislation for the blockchain ecosystem, as we broaden our approach from tackling Ethereum technology scalability to also influencing future policy.
As for the tech roadmap, things haven’t changed much. Obviously, things change as the world changes, but as it stands today our goals are:
Feb. 2018: AMP goes into production
June 2018: Integration with all the major decentralized exchanges. (We are looking forward to the launch of EthFinex).
Sept. 2018: Real-time support mechanisms for participants using AMP
In regards to our business development:
Dec. 2018: 10+ mid-to-large cap companies tokenized and trading via the AMP
Feb 2019: Buffers in crypto-fiat exceeding reserves necessary to sustain the system.
I will top this post off with a video we created recently that I think truly expresses the mission and vision of Proof and what we hope to bring to the world. The tokenized economy is coming. May the Proof be with you.
