News Alert: MaidSafe Sells $6 Million of Bitcoin 2.0 Software in Five Hours

Nikki

Following article is republished from http://launch.it/launch/maidsafe-sells-6-million-of-bitcoin-20-software-in-five-hours

Seeking Fair Solution to Overwhelming Demand, $2 Million of Crowd-Sale Tokens Re-listed for Bitcoins

Published On: 04.22.14 6.51 pm
TROON, Scotland, April 22, 2014 — MaidSafe (http://maidsafe.net/), creators of blockchain-like technologies that can decentralize nearly every aspect of the Internet, including all Web services, today announcedthe sale of $6 million of its software token, safecoin, in five hours, a record for any kind of crowd-sale. The initial $6 million was comprised of $4 million in Mastercoins (the sale took place using the Mastercoin Protocol) and $2 million in Bitcoin. Noticing the disparity, MaidSafe CEO David Irvine partnered with large buyers to purchase the last $2 million for Mastercoins and relist them for sale—under the exact same terms and at a fixed bonus award of 40 percent—for Bitcoins.
“This is the first sale of this magnitude by any company or foundation using the Mastercoin Protocol and it appeared that Mastercoin purchases were going through more quickly than Bitcoin purchases (which needed to be converted to Mastercoin), with no value fluctuation risk as the terms of 17,000 safecoins per Bitcoin were set and adhered to rigorously,” said Irvine. “In order to be fair to the Bitcoin purchasers, we bought the final $2 million with Mastercoins so we could have a more orderly, fair chance at getting safecoins to everyone who tried to get in the first day. “We realized that some people who, attempting to arbitrage the price of Mastercoin and Bitcoin, had only five hours to do so. Our larger concern was that Bitcoin holders might get disproportionately disadvantaged because of the two-step process to completing transactions on the Mastercoin Protocol,” Irvine continued. “We assumed the sale would take the entire 30 days. Never in our wildest dreams did we expect this much demand in the first few hours.”
David Johnston, board member of the Mastercoin Foundation, acknowledged the difficulties of rapidly converting Bitcoin into Mastercoin during the fast-paced crowd-sale and said that he and other prominent Mastercoin holders would assist anyone who purchased Mastercoins in the past 24 hours with securing safecoins at the originally offered terms through the conclusion of the crowd sale.
The safecoin tokens are generated and protected by the SAFE (Secure Access For Everyone) network, and facilitate the wide array of applications which can be developed using them, from decentralized cloud storage to secure websites that cannot be attacked.
The total number of safecoins available to be purchased by the public is 429,496,729 (10 percent of all safecoins that will ever be created). The crowd-sale began today at 9 a.m. GMT and will continue through the final sale of the allotted safecoins, approximately $8 million. The price per safecoin will remain fixed throughout the sale at 17,000 safecoins per Bitcoin. Irvine noted that all participants will be given the maximum bonus of 40 percent extra safecoins for a total of 23,800 safecoins per Bitcoin.
Upon the completion of this crowd-sale, the value of existing safecoins will be approximately $24 million, with the remaining 70 percent of a capped number (like Bitcoin) of safecoins to be “farmed” (analogous to mining, but created by contributing resources, such as storage space) by anyone who wishes to add value to the network.
The initial tokens will utilize a proxy token, the MaidSafeCoin, which will be recorded on the Bitcoin blockchain. When the full SAFE network becomes operational, MaidSafeCoins will be swapped for safecoins on a 1-to-1 ratio.
About MaidSafe Founded in February, 2006, with the intent to decentralize the Internet, MaidSafe has been working on Project SAFE for eight years (longer than the Bitcoin blockchain has been in existence).  Based in Troon, Scotland, the 14-person team has received a total of $5 million in private investment to date, and it will be using the not-for-profit MaidSafe Foundation (http://www.maidsafefoundation.org) to control issuance and manage the funds generated during the April 2014 crowd-sale.
The MaidSafe platform is designed for third-party application providers to create their own application environment and removes developer risk for startups. Self-authentication allows for everyone to be in complete control of all data, beyond encryption to include physical access. In essence, nobody knows where any data is located, thereby providing completely private and unilateral access by individuals.
The network lets users manage any information completely free of any third-party involvement. Users can store, share, chat and publish 100 percent under their own control and knowledge. For more information, visit http://maidsafe.net.
References MaidSafe white paper: https://github.com/maidsafe/Whitepapers/blob/master/Project-Safe.md Metaquestions essay: http://metaquestions.me/2014/04/12/safecoin-why-its-safe-and-what-it-means-for-us-all/

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News Alert: MaidSafe Sells $6 Million of Bitcoin 2.0 Software in Five Hours

15 thoughts on “News Alert: MaidSafe Sells $6 Million of Bitcoin 2.0 Software in Five Hours”

  2. dacoinminster says:

    My favorite part: ” . . . the sale of $6 million of its software token, safecoin, in five hours, a record for any kind of crowd-sale”

    Making history here, folks 🙂

  3. nmak says:

    definitely from the looks of things. I was watching the start at 6pm Australian time and had never previously bothered to setup my mastercoin wallet & btc. I was shocked with the result within one hour I had to literally drop what I was doing to come configure a wallet and send my Mastercoins before everything blew apart. Took me another 3 hours to figure the process out and I believe I just barely made :-).

    I was so totally amazed I couldn’t SLEEP TILL PAST 2AM Just watching the damn fund raising. And I thought previously I had a whole week to still send my few mastercoins that I collected last year out of luck and mostly reading up on J.R linkedin profile 🙂 and making up my mind on the last day. I check today morning and I seem to have made it, just…!

    1. DominikZ says:

      Glad you had it figured out. Certainly the process could have been easier, but apparently lots of people figured it out. I don’t think anyone prior to this would have believed it would happen so fast.

      1. svk says:

        I keep seeing Mastercoin staff saying things like “I don’t think anyone prior to this would have believed it would happen so fast” and “we we’re overwhelmed by the popular support”, but that is highly misleading! The fact of the matter is that about 10 people, most likely BitAngels or Mastercoin founders completely overwhelmed their own crowd-funder by offloading >50 000 MSC, catching their so-called partners off guard.

        It was a great opportunity for them to get rid of their illiquid MSC and maybe eventually make lots of money, but in doing so they screwed over quite a few “little people” wanting to invest and also their partners Maidsafe..

        Disclaimer: I did try to invest either MSC or BTC

      3. svk says:

        my previous disclaimer was meant to say:

        Disclaimer: I did NOT try to invest in either MSC or BTC

  5. I invested using my Mastercoins not only because of Maidsafe being amazing; but 0.2 exchange rate and the temptation to actually “trade” using Mastercoins was a no brainer; obviously many many many Mastercoin holders felt the same.

    However the whole pump and dump could of been avoided if Mastercoin had liquidity. Why Mastercoin cannot get itself on an exchange is beyond me,

    http://www.masterchest.info being down the for entire sale was not that cool either.

    1. DominikZ says:

      There is an exchange masterxchange.com and there is a distributed exchange built into the protocol. Of course liquidity is a problem in nascent markets and the issue with getting more exchanges is that these meta protocols use a much different interface into trading systems then what the crypto exchanges are used to with bitcoind clones which means that the integration costs are higher and require more hand holding.

      1. hookercookerman says:

        you make valid points; thanks for reply;

        masterxchange.com is not exactly cryptsy or BTER or Kraken etc; distributed exchange is very cool but thats only going to be for large exchanges in my book; as its slow and cumbersome by its very nature.

        You are right that are more dev ops issues regarding mastercoin; its not just a simple bitcoind clone and the infrastructure will need to be different; thats why I thought there was a mastercoind golang implementation (where did that go?); if you give someone one executable with the same config options as bitcoind I would be certain their infrastructure would not even have to move to accommodate Mastercoin.

        However there is now install-msc project which I am sure will go a long way to making this happen; just go to cryptsy whomever and say here is $25,000 and access to our devs and it could actually happen.

      2. DominikZ says:

        Well it’s a little more complex if you allow me to take you down the the rabbit hole.

        So the dev’s that were supposed to work on Go went over to Ethereum a few months ago. And regarding the install the issue that crops up there is two fold:

        1. that installation is using libbitcoin which is a not the reference implementation of bitcoin, and a lot of exchanges would need additional staff capabilities to manage this from an operational standpoint.

        2. while the installer automates the install, there is no one executable for rpc api integration and we have different pieces handling different functions (i.e., sends, check balance, check consensus, etc.)

        Now a lot of this can be fixed with developing relationships with a few exchanges and this is what we are working on. As you suggest, perhapns there needs to be a larger subsidy (currently 10k USD) for an exchange to take on this task.

  6. svk says:

    “The BitAngels people are offering to give people a portion out of their original purchase so that all people can be satisfied. Keep in mind that it would be highly illogical for shoot someone to shoot themselves in the foot, and the greatest incentive is to make sure that a good, solid community is brought together around this concept.

    http://www.reddit.com/r/mastercoin/comments/23qf0z/prominent_mastercoin_holders_would_assist_anyone/”

    This confirms my suspicion that the BitAngels were behind the massive MSC donations. While on the face of it it’s admirable that Johnston is offering to help those who missed out, it doesn’t change that the fact that he/they ruined the the fund-raiser for most everyone else, and most of all their partners in Maidsafe who were thrust into a very uncomfortable situation.

    It’s not illogical at all to “shoot one-selves in the foot” as you say if there’s a massive profit to be made. Taking profits is not illogical, although in this case I’d argue it was immoral and “unfair” to everyone else. But hey, this is crypto-land, profit-taking at everyone else’s expense is what we’ve come to expect.

    Through PR spin this also makes it look like the fund-raiser generated lots of interest through MSC, while in reality the “massive interest” was due to a small group of <10 people.

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