An open letter on Taylor’s current situation

Where we are, what we have and what are the options

As per our latest development update, you must have noticed we were growing and evolving. Apart from the new dedicated technical analyst, which is already working on creating, validating and tuning strategies for our signals, we also hired two full-time developers + one part-time freelance developer. This hiring would help us significantly speed up the development and improvements of back-end services, mobile app and other important things to achieve our short-term goals.

It turns out we have been hacked and lost almost all of our funds. We now have only about $25,000. To be honest, it doesn’t even pay this month’s bills. This incident forced us to stop, step back and think about the future.

Investigation and security measures

The investigation is going on, and we have good clues. Unfortunately, we cannot disclose any information until it’s done, but a few good specialists are helping us, including a forensics team.

Although we are all aware of the good practices, we confess that we may have neglected some very important details — we know that the devil is in the details. We’ve reviewed our security protocols and considerably increased the level of security on the procedures. We are confident that such thing will not happen again.

I’m deeply sorry. I apologize for all this. But we want to fix this and make it happen!

What we have

Right now we have:

• An all-star team with brilliant and talented people;
• A great product which is virtually ready for launch;
• A backlog of new awesome products to come;
• A strong and supportive community;
• Almost 5,000 users listed to use the beta app;

Besides, we are going to do a “Token Swap” and we are also considering a rebrand to help us leave behind this unfortunate episode. We still need to discuss the possibilities, but every single team member is willing to invest all the time they can to help us overcome this situation. We still believe we have a bright future! But there’s a natural limit since everyone needs to pay the bills.

Our options

While the investigation is going on, we’ve been scratching some possibilities. We decided to open some of them with you. They are ordered from the least to the most preferred.

1. Stop right now and open all the source code and resources

This option is the simplest but less wanted. We would be wasting all the effort and work developed over the past 12 months. I’m sure this is not what the community and token holders want. Besides that, we, founders and team, don’t want to give up.

2. Stop working full-time on Taylor

We would get another full-time job and work on Taylor in our spare time. It would considerably delay the roadmap, but we would still be working on it.

The bad thing is that we couldn’t guarantee a good level of service for support and maintenance since we would not be dedicated to it. We may also need to ask for donations to help us pay for the infrastructure costs and some freelance services.

3. Get funded by an Angel or VC

Although this is not what we wanted at the current stage, this may be a good option now. We have a good network of angels and VCs here in Brazil, and we may be able to reach some other funds out there — especially the ones focused on cryptocurrency startups. We are willing to pitch them our product, business, and plans; and we believe some of them may be interested in being part of our future.

But this is a long roadway. We may not get a deal for months. Meanwhile, we may not be able to keep building the product.

4. A survival fund token sale

As you know, there are about 2,000,000 unsold tokens from the token sale. Since we will have to issue a new token, we can try to sell, privately or publicly, at least part of these remaining tokens to create a survival fund. Of course, the terms of the sale must be discussed, but since it wouldn’t change the total supply, we don’t think it would negatively affect the token economics.

We already have all the systems and smart contracts done; Therefore it would be technically easy to do it. If we decide to go for a private sale, it would be even easier. This way we will be able to keep running with no interruption.

The goal for both funding options is to raise only enough to have a small and lean team to work for 12 months, paying for the basic operational and infrastructure costs. This time frame should be enough to release the app, acquire the first users, start gaining some traction and generating revenue.

Each one of the above options has pros and cons. But all of them are legitimate and feasible at this point. As always, we have been open, honest and transparent because to us that’s the only conceivable course of action. Now is the time for the community to join forces to help us overcome this situation.

We would like to ask your feedback. What do you think about the options? What you think would be the best one? Do you have any other idea or suggestion? We are all ears!

Thank you for your support.

Fabio Seixas
Taylor Co-founder and CEO