Open letter to community: Hard cap, Individual caps & pre-sale results
Letter to the community
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Dear Community,
WePower has always been the company that is focused on the long term as opposed to quick immediate gains.
Yesterday we have released an announcement about the token supply and individual caps. We have received many concerns since about the individual cap amount, which we want to address today together alongside the broader context.
In the course of our token sale campaign, which has started in September 2017, we could have hardly expected such phenomenal community growth as it has been over the last few months. Looking at the growing number of whitelisted people and listening to our community’s requests, we have closed the whitelisting at a fixed number of 50,000 whitelisted contributors. Despite the closed whitelisting our community growth speed persisted.
The closure of whitelisting by itself did not mean that everyone who has been whitelisted would be able to participate in the token sale on equal terms. It was very likely that a single contributor could simply buy out most of the token supply just by bidding up the gas rate. We have introduced individual caps in order to mitigate this risk and have fair conditions for all whitelisted people. We did not want to leave anybody behind.
We have set these individual caps to be limited only to the first 5 hours of the token sale. After this timeframe expires, all whitelisted people will be able to buy the unsold token balance without any individual caps based on “first come-first serve” basis. We believe that this model provides an opportunity for both people with smaller and higher amount of capital to participate in the token sale. We know from the previously held ICOs in the market that not all whitelisted people claim their individual allocations. This is why we are confident that there will be an opportunity for large contributions as well. WePower team will be sharing live updates on the progress through the first 5 hours to keep you informed.
We are very aware that the 0.2 ETH individual caps were below most of your expectations. However, with such big community there was no other way to accommodate you all. Even if 100% of the token sale tokens were sold during the public sale, the individual caps would have been set to 0.8 ETH ($800 USD). From your comments on our Telegram channel after the announcement we see that even this sum would not have met your expectations. This is the reason why we have structured our token sale not around the individual caps per se but rather around a system that would at first create an equal opportunity for all and then a few hours after would turn into an open market. It is not about the caps, it is about the fairness.
We knew that a big and strong community will be a key driver of our push towards a greener future but we also knew that the strength of this community will be defined by its members’ commitment to the cause, not their wealth or interest in a quick buck. The 0.2 ETH does not represent an investment opportunity, it represents a contribution opportunity to a mission that we all have set out to achieve. This amount is equal for all of the community members with fair conditions to participate. We do understand that it is very different from a typical quick reward and gas wars fuelled ICO process common in the industry. But we also believe that fairness stands higher than the immediate returns.
The other strong concern was the 30 million presale round, which we ran as it was announced with the public pre-sale results. During the public pre-sale, which was closed in October 2017, we have sold tokens for 3 million USD at 1 ETH — 270 USD rate. Today the ETH raised in the public pre-sale is worth more than 11 million USD. During the private sale we have sold tokens for additional 19 million USD and only for strategic partners.
Having spent many years in the energy market we know that our ambitious goal to make a difference in the energy market would not be possible without the necessary support by the recognized organizations. The energy market is dominated by established energy companies. Only with strong partners we can open their doors and offer partnerships that can both benefit them and the community. Moreover, support of strong partners can assemble the necessary green capital to finance renewable energy projects facing capital issues today. The private pre-sale was crucial from a long-term perspective to facilitate WePower business model adoption.
During the private pre-sale we have carefully selected our partners. The contributors in the private pre-sale can be distributed to 3 groups:
- People from the energy market that can help develop the WePower platform and help business to expand by bringing renewable energy producers and partnerships with energy companies.
- Regular and well-known venture, private equity and crypto investors who have an extensive network and will focus on bringing more capital to the WePower platform, which is necessary to finance renewable energy projects.
- Thought leaders both in the real and digital world who will spread the idea and mission of WePower to ensure expansion and stability of WePower tokens.
Only together with strong partners and big community we can bring green revolution on a meaningful scale. When it comes to the energy business, scale really does matter.
In order to answer your questions, we are organising our Ask Me Anything (AMA) event tomorrow at 11 AM (UTC) via our Facebook page.
Let me finish by saying huge thank you to everyone who is supporting WePower right from the early days! The concerns you’ve shared prove us that most of the community has a huge belief in our vision for which we couldn’t be thankful enough.
Best regards,
Nick
