Sparkster’s transcript from Telegram AMA with Crypto Daku
Sparkster’s CEO, Sajjad Daya answered questions from Crypto Daku’s community.
1. How do you rate your tech team? How does the experience of your tech team stands out ?
The team have their strengths and weaknesses, but we have an extremely dedicated and hardworking team that give blood sweat and tears to Sparkster. I am extremely to them for all their hard work. We have an experienced team from background such as IBM, Accenture, Citi Bank, Wipro, Lockheed Martin, US Department of Defence, Cisco etc. Our team consists mostly of developers, but we have grown the team recently. As many of you are aware we are growing our development team in Cambridge, UK
2. I guess most of people in crypto know about Sparkster.
sparkster in 2018 was one of the most loved project, in 2019 we see it as one of the most talked about in negative sentiment. What do you feel went wrong? And if you had a time machine to go back- would you had done something different?
I think the fall in market, and our decision to delay unlock was the major contributor. I think some people entered the project for reasons other than our vision, mission and technology. Hence, I understand why some people are upset. The reality is that listing in a market where projects were falling 90% below ICO price is not in the interest of the project or the long term holders. Towards the later part of 2018 there were also serious legal considerations in terms of listing without utility. We are happy that we’re unlocking with functional technology, tokens that can we used in our network, and a healthy market.
3. Once you famously said about sticking with project for 300x.. do you think we can assume 2x to start with?
That statement has been misquoted and taken out of context. If I were promising such things, there would be many references, not just one that is quoted without any context. The statement can refer to many things, technology, customer acquisition, revenue growth etc. I do not speculate on price.
4. What have you done in last one year to justify your delay of token unlock & also on the product development side, following any roadmap ?
Actually we have done a great deal. We’ve released the no code platform for public use, which can be found at ui.invent.sparkster.me. You’ll find tutorials on our YouTube channel that show you how to use it. We built and deployed the Sparkster Decentralized Cloud, which has been released as an Alpha, and today we delivered a video of this. We’re partnered with ARM, a billion dollar company that was purchased for $30bn last year by Soft Bank. In fact we were the only blockchain company invited to speak at their conference, and this is what we demonstrated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR8YunRoXYA
5. What market do u consider healthy? BTC passing > 10 K 7 ether passing > 500 ? As we all know market is never healthy, it’s full of up and down.
Stability is what’s important. When people are in a position where decisions are made rationally, rather than emotionally, it’s an environment where people can make sound and rational decisions about entering our ecosystem.
6. Majority of people has account on Binance, Huobi like top tier exchanges. Would you consider listing them which give Sparkster real buyer?
I think those exchanges are a great place to list, for the reasons stated above — people actually use them on regular basis.
7. Now with market and everything best done by you… can investors assume good opening? How about market makers?? will you have 1?
We don’t control the market, nor do we control our token holders. We’re doing our best to serve our token holders to the best of our ability. While a liquidity partner will be present, we in no way are involved in influencing or manipulating prices.
8. Will these exchange list Sparkster after so much fudd? Will you pay listing fee to these exchanges?
I cannot speak to specific exchanges, but can say that paying listing fees is a standard and expected practice in the industry. It’s important to note that we are a unique project, bringing value to the blockchain space, demonstrating real world use cases and necessity for what we have built. Exchanges see that. As many of our supporters know, we are heavily focused on making adoption in this space a reality.
This is what this industry struggles with, but our focus as company is looking at how we can solve real problems, for real people in the real world. That’s one of the reasons we announced a no code algo trading product — this is a real problem. Our no code/low code product addresses a $23 Billion market, as per Forrester research. Our decentralized cloud addresses use cases in health care, collaborative VR, autonomous vehicles etc. More information about this will be released this week.
9. But most important? are we having unlock before 10th june ??
Yes
10. It’s the same videos. But I still watch it later. Why there’s nothing substantial enough in GitHub about Sparkster, I’m sure this project working for more than an year? Other cloud projects have enough commits n issues, what’s with Sparkster
We’re not publicly developing on Git, we place major releases on Git, which may be different to other projects. Our major releases correspond with our road-map.
11. What i can suggest:
Decent exchange
More AMA, marketing
Get damn good market maker
Certainly, so we will be unlocking before the 10th, that’s for certain. In terms of marketing, there’s a YouTube interview with an influencer coming this week, we have a customer announcement as well as an article explaining our efforts with regards to adoption. You’ll see more activity as the weeks rolls on, including more AMAs like this one.
12. Would you unlock the tokens without picking good exchange next week? If you are following current market sentiments towards Sparkster then people will dump this token to ground. Most of the investors are angry, want to just get rid of. Have you thought about it?
We are already have an exchange lined up. As for sentiment, all I can say is that we’ve delivered working functional technology, and that is what we promised to do. If people are upset by the long hold, I would encourage them to make rational decisions about where we stand today. We’re going from strength to strength. I’ll talk specifically about the algo product, because I think this is an important point. Very few projects are able to demonstrate a use case that can bring tens of thousands, maybe millions of CRYPTO users.
We’ve recently announced this as a major development, and use case for our technology. Why do I believe this is the case? Because investment decisions today are made based on emotion, and if we can take emotion out of the picture, and invest in successful profitable strategies, everybody wins. That’s why this product is not just about people who know how to create algorithms, but about changing the nature of the way people invest. This will create tens of thousands, if not millions of SPRK holders, which naturally has an impact on the market cap (no speculation here, just facts).
13. and market makers too.. you had some 1.8% fund i guess for mm right ?
Yes, MM will be present with the exchange listing. However, in no way are we facilitating, or encouraging any form of manipulation. Simply providing liquidity.
14. From a legal perspective is paying fees as a utility token legal? Have you consulted your lawyers regarding this. From what I know no utility token can directly pursue any exchange listing or pay fees. If they do they will be classified as security. Could you shed light on this dilemma
Yes, actually we have. An exchange listing simply facilitates people to enter and exit our ecosystem, and we have to pay for the hosting and operational costs of such a service.
15. I’m sorry about your personal loss. But is that a good sign of a businessman to bring personal issues in professional space? Also how incompetent is your team? Even today, except you, none is here to answer.
Sparkster have always been transparent and open to the community. So it made sense to inform them about Saj’s personal loss. Whilst Saj took some personal time away, Shabeer took over AMAs, entered the Sparkster chat to support the community and admin team. Saj and Shabeer are more forward facing, there is a team of people that have helped Sparkster come this far, we could not have done it without them.- Promised high yield of 30000% ROI. “Stick with us, and we’ll deliver 300x. Our platform is trule life changing” in the middle of public sales.
16.
- 10M TPS
- “In 3 months we will be exchange listed and have demonstrated 1 million TPS” — Saj-May-28
- “This is why we have a finished product, not an MVP” — Saj 2018-May-11
- Claim $8m investment repeatedly, on multiple occasion, in an attempt to distort the actual valuation of your company.
- Claimed $100m allocation request (and $200m allocation request in the email title “Final opportunity“), but continued to accept allocation, even reduced the prerequisite and increased personal cap
- Claimed VCs who wanted to invest 1 billion, Saj revisited this topic in TG on September 2018.
- “The fund is for market the product, global customer service team, build a sales and support infrastructure” — Saj, Amsterdam
- “Change the world, not in for the money.” — Saj, Amsterdam
You made many claims and promises across the various phrase of token sales, every of those claims has significant impact on an investor decision.
Given that those claims and promises are not beyond questioning, for those investors misled by your misrepresentation, or, felt overpaying after the discrepancies unfold that doesn’t match the prospectus specifications;
Is a refund on the card?
If not, explain why not? Because investors don’t want to give you money and thank you for that, it is better you say out the stone cold hard truth loud that you are in the the money all along.
1) We’ve been in development since 2014, with a staff of approximately 15. Calculate the overhead and labor costs, and you’ll see that $8m is very reasonable.
2) We proved that the technology is scalable — conducted a demo in June/ July 2018 showing our network was able to scale linearly without degradation to 52k tps. This is possible because between cells there is no synchronisation of state and this makes our network unique and distinct from sharding. Networks that are sharded tend to have a consensus layer where shards replicate state to maintain consistency across their network. Since our cells are truly isolated, our network achieves true parallelism and global state is arrived at from compute nodes that can interact between cells using an algorithm like consistent hashing to identify where that data is stored. We’ve proved our network can achieve 10M TPS, it’s just a matter of having sufficient nodes.
3) Yes, we will be listed within 3 months — of course.
4) We actually received over $1bn in allocation requests. We chose to exclude VCs so that our smaller token holders would be protected against the actions of VCs. We chose to limit contributions to 35 ETH so as many people as possible were able to participate. This is inline with our democratic values that are at the heart of Sparkster.
5) Changing the world is at the heart of Sparkster’s philosophy. We live in the information age and yet one percent of the population know how to code. We see that as an impediment to individual growth and prosperity. At the core of Sparkster’s mission is we espouse democratic values. We have created a no code platform that will revolutionise and empower people to invent and manifest their ideas in reality without inhibited and limited by not knowing how to code.
We have gone a step further on developing a low code platform — sparksters bringing an innovative, fresh perspective to the low code market by expanding our no code platform to code only when necessary — we unleash our developer potential while being able to deliver 10x improvements in productivity and reduction in speed and cost over incumbent players.
Our decentralised cloud addresses problems that today have no commercial or production solution eg. Why isn’t collaborative vr a mainstream thing, why don’t cars and infrastructure communicate with each other to keep us safer.
These are the world problems sparkster is addressing with our decentralise cloud.
6) Our SAFT was clear about our refund policy.
7) My other companies already have a global customer service team, in the US, UK, Romania and India, serving 19 languages. Expanding this platform to serve Sparkster is not a problem for us. To put this in context, for those who do not know, I own other businesses that employ, in aggregate, approximately 300 people.
17.
-Why did you speculate with ICO funds you received from us and did not sell our ETH asap post ICO to develop Sparkster?
- Why, after 1 year, close from nothing was achieved from initial roadmap?
-SYMPHONI rebranding Does that name ring a bell? Kindly focus on your answer which will show us your level of transparency & work ethic
- Why is it so hard to show us a video of Sparkster team working in their office
- Regarding your future “No code algo trading product” how could it be possibly better than all others existing algo already out there, or performing better than simple trading bots already allowing us to to trade as Top traders for a small subscription monthly fee?
- You previously mentioned that No Code Platform will be free to use for 1 year. Why hodling SPRK in that case?
- Are you not concerned your public post “Stick with us for 300 ROI” could make SPRK a security token?
- You claimed having invested $8M from your own pocket…from which previous company that amount came from?
- $8M For what result? How many users so far?
- Why did you canceled AMA, then refused to demo your product privately as planned to @OhHeyMatty (a solid OG dev and Youtuber in the space for a while) & @andrecronje (which is well known for his in depth code reviews in the space and his deep technical background) Simply not confident in your tech or anything to hide.
- Was your sudden decision to unlock tokens in April, a few days after after pressure of investors & a potential lawsuit, a pure coincidence. If so, what was the reason behind that sudden decision.
- Working on exchange listing for a year now, and an “unique opportunity” arises less than 2 weeks prior to unlock date by end of April, resulting in ANOTHER token unlock delay. How stupid do you really think your community is.
- What is the nature of your ARM “partnership”.
- Why did you try to be smarter than the market and sold more than $1.8 Million worth of ETH close from ATL since Q2 2017.
- What kind of serious project got such a poor GitHub & “End of Bounty Program” on its roadmap as a key milestone.
- Why no ICO audit & such a lack of transparency.
- Are you aware neither Blah blah…”Unique opportunity”… Blah Blah …”Having said that” nor Blah Blah …”NDA” won’t be enough to encourage investors to hold or to bring more users abroad.
Investors are more educated, this is not 2017.
- You promised Top 5 exchange listing, promised Market Maker & promised aggressive marketing.
Conditio sine qua non to avoid a Dumpfest & absorb selling pressure, from presale investors who got 50% more tokens/ETH compared to crowdsale, and from investors who don’t trust Sparkster anymore.
Even @diaryofamademan is no longer publicly endorsing Sparkster after so many red flags.
You now have a big responsibility, a lot of claims & empty promises for 1 year
Will you fulfil your promises.
1) At no point have we speculated, we always intended to liquidate funds as necessary.
2) This has already been addressed, we have delivered working functional products, customers, before the our listing.
3) Symphoni was the name of our project while we under development. Is there something wrong with rebranding? I personally prefer the name Sparkster, it fits better with our mission and vision.
4) We are being GDPR compliant.
5) How do you compare the performance of strategies in your existing tools? Backtesting is a major component, and being able to invest in those successful strategies is beneficial for everyone.
6) Our platform is indeed free for a year, however, if you create something say for the hospitality industry and wish to sell it other companies in that industry you’re able to charge for it, and take payment in SPRK.
7) No, because this has been taken out of context and used to malign and misrepresent us.
8) Naming those companies is of no value, but you’re welcome to ask my team how long they’ve been working for/on Sparkster to validate my previous response.
9) We began before there were any cloud tech for distribution, and much of it we had to invent. For example, databases in 2012 (when we began our research) were Microsoft and Oracle not dist database for the cloud. Much of this we had to create. We had to invest in research and the creation on many such components of the underlying architecture. Since 2014 we’ve had a full time team of no less that 15 people. So if you calculate overhead, wages, management staff etc, you’ll very quickly see where we spent our money.
10) We chose not to do an AMA with someone who was speaking publicly against us, that is our perogative.
11) I am yet to receive an actual lawsuit, and it’s not something that I am concerned with. We have delivered products and utility. The burden on proof is on those individuals, but given that I know how ethical we have been, this is something that doesn’t concern me in the slightest. I might add that people in that group are guilty of committing a crime — stealing mail from one of my properties. It’s interesting how those who claim we’ve committed criminal activity are indeed perpetrators themselves. If they do file a lawsuit, we will know who to take legal action against. I am sure the people in our community will want to join us for any damages they may have suffered from their fud.
12) Tokens unlock before 10th.
13) We are working with their research and development department and looking at use cases for our no code platform — you can see the video of what we presented at ARM Tech Con 2018 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR8YunRoXYA
14) We did what we needed to do to hedge risk.
15) This is something that members of our community are interested in. There are other points in the AMA that have significant depth. For example, why Platform UX and what does it signify. Well it signifies how we will develop product market fit. We also have multi Cell Network on our road map, and future integrations between the No Code platform and other decentralized networks such as NEO and Cardano, depending on their adoption rates.
16) Actually we have had an ICO audit, this is required for compliance purposes.
17) Not a question
18) I think you need to present evidence of such claims.
18. A million $ question — Is Ian Ballina still involved with the Sparkster? He got really bad reputation lately and projects ( and even exchange like Kucoin ) are staying away from him. We all know ( have his prima links ) he pooled thousands of ether for Sparkster which were never expected.
Ian is a token holder, like everyone else. At no point has he been an adviser.
In closing, we are releasing an article this week that discusses adoption. I highly recommend everyone read that article to understand where we are going and what we are doing. That being said, I will leave you with my thoughts on our philosophy:
Changing the world is at the heart of Sparkster’s philosophy. We live in the information age and yet one percent of the population know how to code. We see that as an impediment to individual growth and prosperity. At the core of Sparkster’s mission is we espouse democratic values. We have created a no code platform that will revolutionise and empower people to invent and manifest their ideas in reality without inhibited and limited by not knowing how to code.
We have gone a step further on developing a low code platform — sparksters bringing an innovative, fresh perspective to the low code market by expanding our no code platform to code only when necessary — we unleash our developer potential while being able to deliver 10x improvements in productivity and reduction in speed and cost over incumbent players.
Our decentralised cloud addresses problems that today have no commercial or production solution eg. Why isn’t collaborative vr a mainstream thing, why don’t cars and infrastructure communicate with each other to keep us safer.
These are the world problems sparkster is addressing with our decentralise cloud.
