In this post, we will share some important details about the tokensale and the various financial aspects of our project many of you might find interesting.
We have managed to acquire funds in several rounds:
- during the private sale, we set a soft cap of $1M which we reached in the very first round — the purpose of this fund is to have the long term product development secured and to provide a solid ground for the public tokensale.
- in the private sale, we sold $2.72 M with the bonus tokens including — 26% being token swap deals, 65% cryptocurrency purchases and 9% FIAT purchases respectively.
Close to $2M was spent prior to the public tokensale launch, mostly on the campaign preparation (to reserve ad spots in various media platforms in advance) and to cover the operating costs of the staff and product development, meaning we have invested close to $1M personal funds into the project as well.
Although we have managed to sell ILK tokens worth of $800K on the first day of the tokensale, just before launching it — the general cryptocurrency markets have undergone a serious correction which made it unrealistic that we will be able to close the sale in a positive manner within a month. After consulting the matter with our biggest investors and the advisory board, we decided to extend the tokensale by two months with a new ending date being the 12th of December.
By the end of November, we managed to sell close to $9M, including bonuses (64% token swap deals, 31% cryptocurrency purchases, and 5% FIAT contributions respectively). The primary goal of token swap deals was to secure strategic partnerships which are able to contribute to the success of the platform.
In the beginning of November, the cryptomarkets suffered another major blow where the seemingly stable $6400/BTC price dropped to $3K levels within 2 weeks of time. This event further worsened the general willingness to buy and the markets fell into a state of total apathy.
Another event contributing to the eventual outcome, which was the release of the new SEC directive regarding exchanges and token sales.
These 2 events correlated in time closely and the combined effects convinced us that the best course of action is to close the tokensale by November 24 and offer an optional refund program. Although, only an insignificant value was refunded the sudden and drastic market shifts caused severe harm to our project since we couldn’t reach our funding goals — meaning we could not exchange any of the collected funds until the 24th of December. In order to keep the refund option open, even the funds we collected mostly at $8K/BTC and $6,4K/BTC levels had to remain untouched until the end of the refund period, where the exchange rates hit the $3K range.
Since our firm is unconditionally dedicated to deliver INLOCK, we released an updated roadmap, directing the project on a trajectory which manages long-term sustainability and enables dynamic growth — the first 2 milestones have already been delivered:
- the Tokenmarket opened on the 15th of January
- Superposition was released shortly after
We have announced several partnerships already and more to follow, as they are typically signed with strong NDA-s we can only share them when all parties give their consent.
To operate INLOCK services it is unavoidable to keep a certain value of liquidity pools open on several exchanges to serve Customer requests in a timely manner. These pools are now successfully filled with the necessary funds — we have reserved about 20% from the tokensale funds for this very purpose. With this value buffer pools, Superposition is up and running for weeks now and there is sufficient liquidity to start the P2P lending service as well.
In conclusion, although INLOCK did not reach the softcap on the Tokensale, we have more than enough funding to reach most of our goals, and the team is committed to working hard to deliver. Since the tokensale was suspended and we offered a refund program where everyone had the chance to exchange their tokens back we are no longer obligated to strictly follow the original whitepaper, in which there were several parts referring to business development on a scale that is not within the sphere of realistic possibilities at this point of time. We will, however, update our new roadmap regularly with our achievements.
During the tokensale we have sold ILK tokens which represent value in the INLOCK ecosystem only — no company shares were marketed during tokensale or otherwise. Holding ILK tokens does not represent shares in the company nor any voting rights. We would like to express the fact that the token purchases are not considered as an investment in the company by any means — it only serves the purpose of paying the transaction fees for the services of the INLOCK platform.
The team is working on obtaining more funding as there were negotiations ongoing before the eventual closure of the tokensale, which we intend to continue and we are open to new opportunities as well. That being said the development continues, the team was extended with 2 new members both of them are excellent coders, therefore 10 developers are working fulltime on the project now, and we are onboarding more in the upcoming weeks!
