Come for the IDO, Stay for the Tech
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Last week on the 17th of June 2019, we completed the first ever Initial DEX Offering (IDO). It was a crazy busy week after the launch. We are excited that the world found out about Raven Protocol and we thank the community for coming on this journey with us.
We couldn’t have done this without support from everyone in the Raven, Binance Chain, and Binance DEX community. Congratulations all around to our success. The ecosystem is strong. Thank you to other founders in the Binance Chain family who showed up to support.
The IDO was launched on Binance DEX and it was a massive success:
— $500K was raised in < 1s
— Our TG grew to 28K members (up from 2K)
— Twitter grew to 14.5K followers (up from 2K)
— Trading volume grew to $3.3M on launch day (up from $0; first listing)
— # of wallets holding RAVEN grew to 1,836 (up from 0; RAVEN-F66 was a new token)
Some things could be improved:
We did have some user experiences that weren’t optimal. Remember that neither Binance, Binance Chain, or Binance DEX had anything to do with the IDO. Raven Protocol Limited introduced the IDO and executed it on a very short timeline (3 days).
1) KYC was required to participate in the IDO. We received 2,108 KYC applications, but some users thought it wasn’t needed as the requirement came from the Raven side. We spelled this out clearly in the terms and conditions here and here.
2) It was unfair for smaller investors. The point of an IDO is for projects to get their tokens into the hands of many users. Smart investors leveraged knowledge of the Binance Chain / Binance DEX public API. In a race with smaller investors, bigger investors won. Next time doing something via a lottery format would be more fair.
What’s the impact of the first IDO?
The next IDO (which I’m hearing may come sooner than you think) will be armed with learnings from the Raven IDO. The speed and iterations on IDOs will be fascinating to watch. We are confident it’s going to be an important piece in the evolution of blockchain fundraising. Many projects will still use equity, private token sales, and IEOs as tools for their fundraising.
Despite the user experiences that weren’t optimal, we can successfully call this experiment a success. The community really showed huge demand for Binance Chain and Binance DEX.
In the end, we hit the goal of the IDO which was to get RAVEN tokens massively distributed into the hands of users. You know about us now and believe in our mission. All 1,836 HODLERS :) Thank you to the community for being part of this crazy initiative to push the industry forward.
To celebrate, we will airdrop a small amount of RAVEN tokens to everyone who successfully completed KYC. Please stay tuned on the timing.
The Future of Raven Protocol
We’re super excited that so many people found out about our focus on AI training. This is fundamentally a distribution framework that we’re building from the ground up. It takes time to get right. Conventional methods took several years to gain adoption.
Our unique value proposition:
Raven performs AI training where speed is the key.
Raven is the answer to ever increasing compute demand for Deep Learning. We developed a completely new approach to distribution that speeds up a training run of 1M images from two weeks down to a few hours.
Existing deep learning distribution methods and frameworks have come a long way, no doubt about that. However, it still needs gargantuan servers for the speeds at which demand is increasing for AI. Data and model parallelism have been used to optimize this, but it creates inherent latency in the network and is not scalable beyond a certain limit.
We solve latency by chunking the data into really small pieces (bytes), maintaining its identity, and then distributing it across the host of devices with a call to action: gradient calculations.
Have a read from a technical stand point on why Raven has an advantage to solutions people are using today: https://medium.com/ravenprotocol/comparative-analysis-raven-protocol-v-s-conventional-methods-a94b795c2f8c
We’re gonna continue to stay heads down and build. As we work towards open-sourcing part of the framework and collaborate with developers from all over the globe, it’s important to ensure what we’re building has a seamless experience for our users. If you’re an AI company, we’d love to talk to you and squeeze you into our private beta coming Q1 2020.
Want to talk to the founders of Raven?
Drop us an email: founders@ravenprotocol.com
Join us on Telegram: t.me/ravenprotocol
Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/raven_protocol
Read our Q1 2019 Update:
https://medium.com/ravenprotocol/overnight-success-raven-protocol-q1-2019-update-ed7dcffa5565
