MaidSafe and project SAFE moving forward

Here we outline the steps we are taking right now along with everything else we are doing to ensure integrity and security of the project continues well past launch. This represents a bigger step that is part of a longer term plan that will unfold over the next few weeks. We hope to make a few announcements as we move towards Alpha and during the release cycle.

tl;dr We are pulling in an advance on future earnings and using this to grow the team and hopefully the community. There is a cost to us, but a worthwhile one in my opinion. It’s necessary and advantageous at this time. Please see the podcast interview that accompanies this post as well (thanks @fergish) The podcast link is also in the forum here

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Thanks for the post @dirvine
Will you continue to actively look for funding during this sellout period?

Best of luck

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I cannot access blog.maidsafev.net…

Should be blog.maidsafe.net (no v) :wink:

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I clicked your link dirvine… Your blog is not working, at least for me.

Well, I get it through my mobile connection… I’ll try to solve my net issues later… :slight_smile:

strange, works fine here.

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Yes we always will, but on our terms and that of the community (we need them as much as they need us :smiley: ). We do not know how many coins we will sell, it’s in our interests to finely balance that with the payback. As I said this is an expensive thing for us to do over the period as these coins are possibly very undervalued right now, so using this advance is not great, so the least we use perhaps the better. We will evaluate as we move on, but I expect some announcements soon to improve market cap etc. Lets see though.

Main thing for us is complete transparency where possible and here it is possible :wink:

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Try clicking this perhaps (it’s the link in hypertext)

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For any folks who maybe have issues accessing this here is the text.

MAIDSAFECOIN ANNOUNCEMENT
As those of you who follow MaidSafe’s progress will know, 2016 has been a very productive year so far. Further to the successful test of the SAFE Client in February, and the iterative series of network tests that have taken place since, progress has been visible to all close to the project. Making a stable droplet network available for app developers last week is another positive step and provides a platform for developers to start coding apps against. To increase the speed of momentum in development, and to ramp up network promotion the company needs more resources, and we now turn our attention to our short term funding.

To enable us to grow SAFE as aggressively as possible the decision has been made to make best use of the 24 million MaidSafeCoins that the MaidSafe Foundation currently holds. The Foundation has these MaidSafeCoins as a result of a technical issue with the Master Protocol (now Omni protocol) that resulted in an over issuance during the crowdsale. These coins are, and have been, calculated as part of the safecoin market capitalisation, though they have not been put into circulation. The existence of these MaidSafeCoins has been known about since the crowdsale, and what to do with them has been discussed amongst the broader community on the SAFE Network forum. Various proposals have been made, including sending them to a burn address and thus destroying them, using them to seed the network, and so forth. Until now it was unclear how to deal with the situation to best effect for the project and the community.

The Plan

The MaidSafe Foundation will advance these 24million coins to MaidSafe.
The sale of 19 million of these will be conducted sensitively over a period of time to minimise the impact on price.
MaidSafe will use the proceeds to further invest in the SAFE Network, drive community engagement and support developers.
5,000,000 of these coins will go directly to bounties, community projects related to launch, PR, branding, marketing and outreach programs.
After safecoin goes live, MaidSafe will prioritise paying back the the 24 million safecoins from MaidSafe’s own core development awards. MaidSafe will be able to prove this cryptographically.
For the avoidance of any doubt, 100% of the proceeds from this strategic sale will go toward furthering SAFE and will be reinvested entirely straight back into the community.
Why is this Needed?

Those that have been involved with the SAFE Network since the days of the crowdsale will know that while the sale was very successful from a community-participation perspective, it was less so from a funding standpoint and didn’t give MaidSafe the necessary resources to fully accelerate development. The anticipated $8 million (£5.5m) and 3 years of running costs actually equated to $2 million (£1.4m) with the crash in the mastercoin price and fall in bitcoin price taken into account since that time. This information is available in Maidsafe company accounts as filed at Companies House in Edinburgh. Some of the dynamics of all this were chronicled at the time in an article by Adam B. Levine, entitled MaidSafe: A Wildly Successful Cryptocoin Debacle, which is recommended reading for anyone who wishes to get a balanced picture of what happened and why it was problematic.

While very careful financial management, through limiting expenditures and growth, has enabled the team to squeeze over 2 years from the funds, the lack of sufficient financing has restricted our ability to scale the team and consequently has extended the anticipated development timescales. This is an area we now hope to build quickly as we have developer job applications at an advanced stage and we feel the technology now needs to be accelerated. The recent tests allow us to begin creating a plethora of demo apps and increase API awareness for third party developers. We do anticipate spending time with developers in outreach programs and developer awareness events. This is also the time to increase substantially marketing and PR activities.

With development progress now plain to see, we have been turning our attention to raising additional funding in recent months. We have explored and continue to proceed with a couple of avenues that include EU Research funding and both institutional (.i.e. venture capital) and crowd equity investment . While we do see the potential value of finding the right institutional partner who can also bring technology partners to the table, economic uncertainty is reaching the venture capital markets resulting in lower company valuations and slower deal cycles.

With all this taken into account we believe it makes better sense for the community as a whole for MaidSafe to use a funding source that is close at hand, and one that keeps MaidSafe completely independent, with the ability to freely negotiate with the correct partners as we progress the launch of the network.

Use and Repayment

The funds will be used to:

Accelerate the ongoing development of the network.
Support the development of third party applications.
Raise awareness of the network amongst potential end users.
MaidSafe will repay these coins directly by reducing our core development reward. In essence, MaidSafe are proposing an advance against the core developer reward, which will be used exclusively to further the network.

Through hard work as well as prudent, public and conservative financial handling, and support of an incredible community, the SAFE Network’s functionality has been demonstrated through the public tests and we remain very excited about the potential of the technology. The funding raised by this solution will allow the fastest, most effective means of fully launching the network, while retaining full administration of the project in the hands of those who have proven their dedication to carry it through.

Thank you once again.

David Irvine

This and other topics were discussed on the SAFE Crossroads podcast hosted by John Ferguson. The podcast is available on Soundcloud.

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It’s a Trifecta Tuesday - Dev update, David update and Fergish podcast. Stop it now I’ll collapse from all the excitement!

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That’s what I wanted to suggest too. With a little more (honest!) PR the price of MaidSafeCoin should at least stay stable, making a slow selling possible without too much interruption of the market. Some might see this as a pump and dump scheme, but I would fully disagree with that.

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“MaidSafe will repay these coins directly by reducing our core development reward.”

I didn´t get this part. Why would you reduce the core development reward @dirvine?

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There’s a difference in what you quoted and what you asked :slight_smile: I think that’ll answer your question.

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Selling could be minimized further by paying old and new developers(partly or whole) in MaidSafeCoin, but I’m sure you have thought about that already.

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Basically it means we repay these from “our” payments for core development. So this is basically a loan against our future income, but should not affect anyone else working on core development. It’s more fair like that, plus I am very keen to use 5million of these coins to boost the community dev and outreach activities. We have been poor at shouting about the project but that will change very soon with a lot more PR and outreach (like Qi did in Beijing this week).

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No, I was aware we are talking about Maidsafes development reward, not the software. I still believe the payments shoud rather be increases than decreased (well or hedged…you name it).

I didn’t mean that, I was mentioning the difference between everybody’s rewards and Maidsafe’s rewards from core development :slight_smile:

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Sure @Melvin, as I said, I was aware this is about paying the devs, but I don´t find it acceptable to diminish the rewards even if they receive a payment in MSC instead (if I understood correctly, now).

I think “reduced rewards” is confusing. My interpretation is that MaidSafe Ltd have been loaned MaidSafecoin which they will sell to fund development, marketing etc, but that they will pay this loan back (to MaidSafe Foundation) by keeping less of the developer rewards that they earn. Meaning the rewards are the same, but that less will remain with MaidSafe Ltd until they have repaid the loan.

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Sounds very sensible.

Keeping the powder dry on the PR front was definitely the right idea too. I know some are/were keen to shout about the potential, there is nothing like showing it working in a demo - a small push will be all that is needed and the word will spread rapidly.

I suspect there are a lot of people waiting to see if maidsafe can pull off a working network. I also suspect the excitement will go into supernova when they realise you have!

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