We would like to thank everyone for taking part in our ICO, which ends on December 17, 2017. We’re extremely grateful for the support our project received from people we had the pleasure of meeting in person, and even more thankful to those who shared our vision from just learning about the project online! However, as it currently stands, we have not been successful in getting our message across to the broader community and as a result we don’t expect to reach the soft cap of 25,000 ETH before the ICO comes to a close.
There are several external market factors that we could put this down to: the sharp appreciation in the price of ETH; the bitcoin market rallying even more significantly; and the Ethereum network getting clogged up by certain DApps.
Nevertheless, we take it upon ourselves:
- The hard cap was set too high at 300,000 ETH. We didn’t arbitrarily set it at this figure — having actually spent months working out a 3-year, step-by-step plan to bring in automotive and insurance market players to form a global network of real-world businesses. Instead, we should have chosen to raise funds in several rounds;
- The marketing campaign was poorly executed. We outsourced most of our marketing as the core team was busy working with big private investors and advisors on the actual product;
- The overall ICO market has shrunk drastically since we initiated the project due to ill-intentioned and unprofessional actors saturating the space. We should have taken more time to plan for such eventualities;
- The ICO was too short, with no pre-sale period — as we’ve learned the hard way, big investors tend to take at least 6–8 weeks to make an investment decision, not 20 days.
That being said, we still fully intend to deliver the product our token holders and future network participants deserve. We stand firm with our intention to disrupt the 1.8 trillion dollar auto industry for the benefit of the vehicle owners and users worldwide, in addition to businesses operating in this area (which also translates to hundreds of thousands of actual people working in the industry globally).
We want to regain the trust in our project, be honest about our mistakes and lead the way. Not for idealistic reasons, but simply because integrity is good for business. And we mean business.
The Announcement
- The smart contract of the ICO is a binding agreement that we’ve entered into with our token buyers and the ICO is continuing in accordance with the terms set in code until December 17, 2017.
- If the soft cap of 25,000 ETH isn’t reached, we will return all the funds to our token buyers. A detailed instruction will be posted soon.
- We will refine and share our vision for the network with the businesses in the automotive industry and beyond, growing enterprise-level partnerships before commencing a public sale.
- We will be back for a public pre-sale in February 2018 and a second coin offering (SCO) in March 2018. By then the network architecture and parts of the source code will be available on our Github page.
- We will scale the project down instead of going all out and universal from the start. Once the blockchain proves to be efficient with a smaller network of operating businesses in various regions, it should then be ready to gradually tackle global adoption (we’re exchanging ideas with South African and US auto industry and insurance companies, and hope to get other regions involved).
- The new hard cap for the SCO will be set at $12m as this amount reflects our basic funding needs for Stage 1 of development. Further rounds of funding (possibly, private and institutional) will be staged for upcoming phases of the network growth. To support the initial economy of the network, the token supply will be scaled down proportionately and distributed during the upcoming pre-sales and the SCO.
- We will reward token buyers who supported the current ICO with additional bonuses if they choose to buy them again during the forthcoming private and public pre-sales, with extra rewards for their contributions during the SCO (up to 15% on top of “old” bonuses — see the table below).
- VLB token distribution will correspond to ETH appreciation so VLB token holders will get more tokens if ether’s price grows, while being protected from a downside with 1 ETH = 650 VLB being the base exchange rate (we’re working on various technical solutions since simply pegging the exchange rate of VLB to the ETH dollar value would be costly in terms of gas, e.g. Ethereum network’s resource).
We will provide details of proposed changes in the near future, along with project development phases and the timeline for the private and public pre-sale periand the SCO in the weeks ahead.
Please note that we will introduce these changes to our Terms and Conditions and White Paper accordingly in the coming days. Until then, this communication should serve as a single point of reference.
We’re creating a new smart contract for the token buyers who participated in the ICO before December 17, 2017, and wish to receive their VLB tokens with additional bonuses right away (ETH appreciation clause also in effect, but with the precise terms yet to be determined). It’s as close as we could get to the current smart contract, which has been audited by security experts at Hosho. You will need to use the wallet you initially used in order for the new smart contract to “recognise” it. We will announce the new smart contract address prior to the end of the ICO.
We will be happy to answer any questions or provide additional details via our Telegram Channel 24/7 — don’t hesitate to reach out.
