TOMO Community update January 7, 2018
Dear TOMO community,
Here is a short recap of what has happened last month at TOMO. After attending BlockShow in Singapore in late December, I (Long Vuong, CEO) flew to San Francisco and stayed there for two weeks. During that time, I had the opportunity to attend The Token Summit conference on December 4th and also had a booth and was a sponsor for the East-West blockchain conference on December 11th.
I met in-person two of my TOMO advisors based in San Francisco, Ms Min H. Kim, who is a very familiar face in crypto scene in Silicon Valley being the founder of Blocultural Studios and working for Tim Draper and Civic previously. She is now the lead of Biz Development and Growth at Bee Token which is a blockchain startup I personally love.
The second advisor I met was Chance Du, a general partner of the up and coming crypto venture fund Coefficient Ventures, who is an early supporter of our work. Chance not only has a deep crypto network in Silicon Valley but has strong roots and connections to mainland China. She will be a great help in the biz development and deployment of TomoChain to real-life use cases.
After I came back to the TOMO office, we closed our initial set of advisors with the additions of Androklis Polymenis, also known as “kLee”, a friend and a veteran in the crypto world who I knew since I first entered the magic world of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in late 2013; Le Ho who had was our first advisory introduction announcement last week; Shekhar Bhusannavar who is new to blockchain, but is a veteran in the FinTech and Biz Development. It is my plan to work with Shekhar to bring blockchain and TomoChain to the most potential region for blockchain and cryptocurrency growth at the moment, India; and Chelsea Lam, who is co-founder of token based startup Munchee and a very early supporter of our project. It is my pride that all of our advisors work very closely with me and provide tangible outputs to advance TOMO and Tomochain successes. Follow our blogs if you do not yet! Later, we will have more announcements introducing all of our advisors and key members of the Tomo team.
TOMO is still very much in a stealth mode. So far I deliberately avoid spending time and money on unnecessary PR and marketing but focus on designing and building our TomoChain infrastructure. Last month, we launched TomoChain’s Testnet and the demo TomoWallet which has the first of its kind, cross-chain smart-contracts that allows for atomic cross-chain transfers with near zero fees. In addition, TomoChain will support all Ethereum’s smart contracts with 2-second block-time and near zero fee transactions. We are still working on final design specification (technical paper) of TomoChain main-chain which will likely be based on Master Node architecture with Proof of Stake and Proof of Credibility consensus; and a decentralized governance system built on protocol level smart-contracts which will support an easy and fast child-chain deployment. I am very excited for all the works ahead, all the supports we received and the upcoming ICO.
On the upcoming ICO, we will start contacting parties who have expressed interest on our private presale interest list (in about a week) after we sort out all the legal details. We will likely hold a conference call with qualified investors so that they can meet the team and ask questions about our upcoming plan.
Biz development is a key priority and it is starting now. We want TomoChain to be adopted as soon as the main-net rolls out because we believe we have the product and technology to solve mainstream business problems right now; not a promise in two or three years. Interest in our project is growing very quickly at the moment and some people asks me “Why raise so little relatively compared to other projects?” This is an easy answer for me. My experience was shaped when I raised 75K$ for NEM blockchain in a community contribution round in 2014.
I left after the Alpha version was released at NEM and the project was worth around 15 million$ at that point in late 2014. Now it is a 15 billion$ project. The total mount raised does not correlate with the eventual success, in my opinion. It is more about the product vision, the technology and the team that can realize the vision. I personally believe in working to get the maximum value out of a project, not in obtaining the maximum amount of funding. An engineer/ contributor should work with TOMO and be incentivized by TMC instead of ETH or Bitcoin. We will have plenty to share along the way as we achieve our goal for TomoChain to become part of the critical infrastructure for the future Internet of Value.
Lastly, I am present in our Telegram group chat very often. Feel free to come by and ask if you have a question or two about our project. You can also email me at long@tomoapp.vn.
- Long Vuong
