Dear community,
We’ve never worked so hard, so focused, and so inspired than during the past one and a half years or so. During that time we have fallen in love with the decentralised and blockchain technology, and found a way to apply our expertise, backgrounds, and existing technology in that space to produce completely new infrastructure, tools, and opportunities for application developers and data owners.
Our team is incredibly grateful and humbled by the encouragement and attention we have received during the past months. The support, not only for our platform, but for our mission to build a decentralised real-time data economy, is truly inspirational and an unforgettable benchmark in the evolution of data infrastructure. While our ambitious goal leaves us with a long journey ahead, this early success is a huge leap in making that dream a reality.
Thank You.
We made our first public blockchain-related appearance, demo, and pitch at EDCON in Paris in February this year. Since then we have developed our idea and roadmap further, published the white paper, presented at various meetups, launched R&D collaboration with Golem, done quite a bit of interviews, built Ethereum integrations into our Engine product, gathered funding from early supporters — and finally — completed the crowd contribution phases of the Streamr DATAcoin token launch. And this is just the beginning!
Token Launch in Retrospect
Overall thousands of people have visited our websites, signed up for the product, emailed or instant messaged us, and joined our community chat for technical and visionary conversations. 1369 people made it into the contribution periods in total, including 33 private precontribution participants, 120 public precontribution participants, and 1216 crowd contribution participants.
The hard cap of 30 million CHF (Swiss franc) equivalent in contributions, including all the contribution periods, was successfully reached. The proceeds have been earmarked towards research and development of the Streamr protocol and the technology stack.
All the phases saw way more demand than there was supply. The public precontribution period was registered full in 25 minutes after opening on September 14th. The crowd contribution period began on October 12th with a 24 hour exclusive period for small contributors, all enjoying guaranteed participation. After the exclusive period ended, and larger contributors kicked in, the period was full within 90 minutes.
Some experimentation and novel choices took place in the implementation of our token launch. Our pre-contribution period was the very first project to launch on the new Bitcoin Suisse ICO Platform. Our crowd contribution period utilized a hybrid model of passing KYC/AML on the platform, while executing the token creation and distribution traditionally via whitelisting approved participants on a smart contract. We also experimented with two separate contributor tracks: one for small cap contributions up to 5,000 CHF, and a large cap track for contributions up to 50,000 CHF. This split structure allowed for optimisation of manual work processes involved in each track. It enabled us to set a minimum contribution as low as 500 CHF equivalent, while still keeping the high KYC/AML standards we chose to enforce. From the contributors’ point of view, this helped to implement a smooth process for both tracks.
Streamr may have been the first ICO in the world to enforce full manual KYC/AML checks on all participants. Doing so is a tradeoff which affects contributor experience, privacy, and the legal safety of the project and its contributors. It increases the threshold of participation, and decreases the associated legal compliance risks. For overall long-term benefit of the project, we decided that this would be the most future-proof way to carry out the token launch.
What’s Next?
Within the next few weeks, the following will happen: Bitcoin Suisse will distribute the precontribution tokens, and once everything is done and checked, the tokens will be released for transfer. Devcon3 is just around the corner, and we will be speaking there. Henri will present in a P2P breakout track, and Risto will share the stage with an upcoming project that builds on Streamr. We are an Ecosystem Sponsor for the event, as a minor but immediate way of giving back to the Ethereum community.
We will continue work on our roadmap, and to step up development, we are hiring! Please let us know if you’d like to work on Streamr and/or blockchain/decentralised tech in general, and are skilled in frontend development (React, Redux), backend development (Java, node.js), smart contract development (Solidity), devops (Docker, CI tools, test frameworks), P2P networks, or cryptography/security research. We’d also like to find a community manager. We are based in Zug, Switzerland, and also work with an external team located in Helsinki, Finland.
We have received some inquiries about if and when the token will be listed on exchanges. Listing a token is completely up to the exchanges. Watch this space for announcements in the near future! Meanwhile, you might choose to be proactive and let your favorite exchange know that you’d like to trade the token!
We will continue building partnerships and collaborations in the space. We recently joined the Trusted IoT Alliance, an open source software consortium which aims to create a secure, scalable, interoperable, and trusted IoT ecosystem. Founded by industry leaders such as Bosch, BNY Mellon, Cisco, Gemalto, and U.S. Bank, the consortium seeks to standardize an open source blockchain protocol to support IoT technology in major industries worldwide.
We also have a nice little surprise up our sleeve. Please stay tuned.
Stay Safe
Before, during, and after any popular ICO, scammers emerge. Please do understand that there are no second chances to participate in the Streamr contribution periods. Any communication which indicates that Streamr DATAcoin tokens are still available is a scam.
Streamr official channels are: our website, this blog, our Twitter, and #announcements channel on our community chat. No other trustable channels exist. Beware of a known scam on Telegram!
See you at Devcon,
Best regards,
Henri
