In this post, we’ll highlight our progress towards the Mainnet release of the Betoken protocol. We will talk about fundraising, legal entity creation, security audit, and technical updates. And we also ask for help!
Our journey so far — a thick forest
One way to think about our progress is to imagine that you’re standing at the entrance to a thick forest that you need to get through.
You may have numerous paths to choose from, and perhaps 90 percent of them will lead you to someplace on the other side of the trees, while the other 10 percent will leave you going in perpetual circles. The odds are good that you’ll make it through, but you still have no choice but to pick one path at random. And even if you’re lucky, you’ll emerge in a slightly different place each time.
Building a business is a pretty similar process, and as we’ll see, this could be even more true for making a related business as well.
Bye bye VCs
A security audit is absolutely necessary for a successful Mainnet release, and it doesn’t come cheaply: the cost ranges between $10,000 and $60,000. This is why since Q4 2018, we have been talking with a great number of VCs in Asia, Europe, and the US.
To be honest, so far the VC path has been leading us into one perpetual circle after another. We contacted many VCs. Sadly, few have answered, and even for the ones who did answer, the process is too slow and expensive for us. There are many reasons for this, but the most major one is probably the plethora of legal issues concerning financial regulations.
We’re not giving up on reaching out to VCs yet, but we are tired of passively waiting for responses and wasting time for us and for you guys. That’s why we are making some big moves to get us closer to Mainnet without VCs.
Security Audit — We need you!
After comparing different solutions, we have decided to do the Betoken security audit using Solidified, an auditing platform with an excellent track-record of conducting detailed security audits for leading projects such as Melonport, Polymath, and WBTC.
We plan to pay for the audit out of our own pockets. Performing an audit using a single security expert and doing a bug bounty afterward will cost us approximately US$10,000.
While we think it’s a reasonable price, we are kindly asking our community to support this effort by making a donation. Any amount from 0.01 DAI to 10,000 DAI will be greatly appreciated. All of the proceeds will be used to pay for the audit.
You can directly send ETH or any ERC20 to this address: 0x332D87209f7c8296389C307eAe170c2440830A47
We plan to start the security audit at the beginning of May. Any donation before this time will be greatly appreciated. Meanwhile, we will use the last days of April to update Betoken with the integration of Compound v2 and Fulcrum.
Legal entity creation
Acting as the development team of Betoken protocol without a legal entity will expose us to huge risks. This is why we plan to create an LLC or a C-corp. We’re in contact with law firms to make this happen in the next coming weeks. Another solution will be to go through online services.
Final words
As stated before, we still plan to release Betoken on mainnet in June 2019. We expect the security audit to be finished by the end of May, and factoring in the time it takes to work out the kinks in the system, we think launching in June is a reasonable estimate.
We’re 100% committed to delivering the Betoken protocol and let everyone benefit from it. As a final note, we want to express our sincere gratitude to all of you supporting us since the launch of Betoken Beta on Rinkeby testnet in August 2018. Thank you for trusting us, and for being patient with us.
Published at Wed, 17 Apr 2019 23:59:09 +0000
