Dear Community,
We are absolutely overwhelmed with the positive response to the new Filecoin whitepaper (opens new window), our upcoming token sale (opens new window), our video (opens new window), and the other info we've released (opens new window). We've been speaking with many of you, collecting feedback, and sharing our excitement. Thank you so much for the fantastic words of encouragement and support for the Filecoin Network. Getting here has taken a lot of hard work, and we are all very proud of the technology we are creating, the people we are bringing together, and the community we are building.
We have a few updates for everyone today.
First and foremost, the response has been huge. Thousands of prospective miners have applied to our Early Miner Program (opens new window). And thousands of people and organizations have registered on CoinList for the Filecoin sale. We expect this to be a tremendously large project, that will form a remarkably strong community, focused on improving computation and storage world-wide.
Second, we hear you loud and clear: you want many more details about Filecoin. Though it is not fully ready, today we are releasing the first public draft of the Filecoin Primer, a document that describes why Filecoin exists, how the technology works, what the network does, and so on. It includes important details about the Filecoin token economics. Note that this primer is a draft, and will soon be updated with more:
The Filecoin Primer
Third, many people have asked us for more technical details and a deep dive into the protocol. We will soon release more of our research works in progress, a research roadmap, and perhaps we will give some detailed recorded talks about our works.
Fourth, there is a lot of discussion on the legal work we are doing with the SAFT (opens new window), our token sale, CoinList (opens new window), and so on. The Ether Review just published a couple of podcasts we recorded with them. Check them out:
- Ether Review #70 — CoinList (opens new window)
- Ether Review Legal #3 — The Simple Agreement for Future Tokens (opens new window)
Fifth, the question everybody is asking is whether people MUST be "accredited investors" according to the US standard to participate in the token sale. So far this is the case. We have been working for months preparing the legal structure of our token sale, including exploring lots of avenues for a more inclusive sale, either through a Reg S offering, through a Reg Crowdfunding offering, or through a combined offering with an entity outside of the US. We want to be clear that we are not forcing the US accreditation standard to exclude anyone, but rather it is what we must do legally in the US to involve US investors. We hope to find a way to avoid excluding investors unnecessarily; at this time we do not have a better, more concrete answer.
Sixth, the original sale date -- this Thursday July 27th -- has proved to be too soon. We want everyone participating in the Filecoin sale to have ample time to review all the sale documents (including some we have not been able to release yet), to go through the verification and accreditation processes, and to get ready for the sale. Therefore, we've decided to push back the main Filecoin sale date to Monday, August 7th. We hope that with this new date participants will have ample time to dive into our technology, get all their questions answered, and get through the mechanics of preparing for the sale.
More details on the Filecoin Network and the Filecoin token sale will be released soon. In the meantime, be sure to follow our Twitter accounts for the latest updates: @MineFilecoin (opens new window) and @ProtocolLabs (opens new window).
Thank you,
The Filecoin Team