Altcoins Talks - Cryptocurrency Forum
Archive => Beyond Protocol => Promoted section that are no longer active => General discussion => Topic started by: Freemind on January 03, 2023, 10:32:34 AM
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Firstly, I want to wish you and your loved ones Happy Holidays and a bright New Year. This year was a challenging one for the industry, our project, and for many of us personally. That having been said, it’s been an honor being in the trenches with you, fighting the good fight. The work we’ve done here, “showing up each day,” and consistently grinding through challenges and working to find solutions, is something which I respect and admire.
I am writing to follow-up to an emerging situation which I touched upon on December 11th in response to a few questions from a community member about the project’s present positioning and mainnet timing (see: https://t.me/beyondprotocol/363323).
In my reply, I provided a summary of the project’s history: I detailed our initial operating plan for 2022, which involved securing growth capital ahead of mainnet launch and ecosystem development, and recounted how depressed market conditions and the pullback of funding to projects at our stage interfered with timing. I detailed how at the end of September, we were able to secure a $12.5M funding commitment from GEM Digital to fund mainnet launch and ecosystem growth. I reiterated the mechanics of the funding arrangement, which is directly tied to market conditions. I mentioned how when we closed the arrangement, based on market conditions at the time, and a moderate forecast for what they would be over the proceeding 6-9 months informed by global economic projections, we developed an operating plan which contemplated the launch of mainnet at the end of Q1 2023. I mentioned how a little over month after this projection, our industry went through crisis with the FTX collapse. For us, this meant a significant decrease in price per token in line with other digital assets at our market cap and the exit of our market marker from exchanges until the exchanges can satisfy our market maker’s risk management parameters, which has yet to happen; this has lead to a material decrease in trade volume. I mentioned that as a consequence, we have been working with our institutional partners to identify a plan which would allow for the continuation of the operating plan we developed originally. Should market conditions preclude this, I relayed that we would notify the community as soon as we had more information.
Over the past couple weeks, after consultation with institutional partners, the conclusion has been a desire for us to slow down organically with the markets and continue to weather the storm vs. deploy scarce and costly resources to build into it to meet our March target. Although a bitter pill to swallow, this seems to be a universal practice in the industry at the moment. We count ourselves fortunate that we have the opportunity to see another day - many projects at our stage have been forced to shut down altogether.
So what does this mean for the project moving forward?
- We’re still pushing forward to mainnet, through it won’t happen by the end of March as initially targeted. Our $12.5M funding commitment from GEM Digital remains intact, we just can’t draw against at the levels we had previously projected due to current market conditions. As market conditions improve to allow for this, we will be able to achieve additional milestones on the roadmap, and notify the community as they are complete.
- We won’t “stay idle” during unideal market conditions - we will work to identify potential partners to help us move the needle now, whether those be in the blockchain or IoT ecosystem, or both
- We will evaluate alternative ways to gain traction, including launching pared down dApps expanding upon the existing use case work we’ve done, or in another vertical
- As always, there is no guarantee any of this will work, but we remain focussed on our mission and won’t stop fighting for it.
As I mentioned in my response to the community member, bleeding edge start-ups are hard. Crypto start-ups are even harder — it’s unclear if a lot of use cases make sense; and those that do will take time to be implemented and reach adoption. The good news is, the time is coming for blockchain-IOT solutions. When we started, I remember we had to fight our way into meetings with potential use case partners, only to be told “I don’t get it” or “this makes sense, but we’re just not ready yet.” Over the past year, bluechip companies have reached out to us to learn more about what we’re building. We remain committed to seeing things through.
Feel free to drop any questions you might have below. We also plan to host an AMA next week.
All my best,
Jonathan