Press Release: RootProject Pre-ICO Extended

July 18, 2017
via rootstoken.slack.com
By: Dr. Nicholas Adams Judge

Hey @everyone, A BIG announcement. Thanks for all your incredible help during the past ten days! We met our goal, in really, really difficult market conditions. We’re so proud of the team that’s come together and all we’ve accomplished. Together,

We’ve raised 122% of our goal, with a mean contribution of just 3.75 ether. I think we’ve made @wilcoxen happy
We’ve translated our material into a large number of languages
We’ve built a 720 person community here on Slack, making our first hires and brought some really dedicated volunteers together with incredible bounty campaigners.
We’ve generated interest among some very big names and powerful players
We’ve refined our message and learned from one another.

Anton, Chris and I are proud of our role in that, as well. But, we made one big mistake: In trying to adhere to the lessons Chris and I have learned the hard way from our tech start ups (release early, go fast, iterate) we underestimated the necessary time lag involved when organizing a campaign. We knew from shopping around the whitepaper that we had a powerful idea that a community could rally around. But we went TOO fast. You guys probably recall last Wednesday, the lull from the first excitement but the day before we got our material up on some listing sites, and started communicating our ideas better to the public. That made Thursday, Friday and today all the better. But we still were left with only three business days with this organization fully up and running.

It seems almost absurd to get such a team up and running and then use it fully for just three weekdays, only to pause until the ICO. So, Chris, Anton and I talked about it, and we’ve decided to extend the pre-ICO until the following Friday, the 28th. The team is in place, the work is being done, and why stop? Learning from our mistake – and concerned about BIP 148 – we’re also pushing the ICO itself back to Tuesday, September 5th, the day after Labor Day.
Important things to know:

We will accelerate the release of the tokens relative to the ICO. So, this delay will only push the release of the tokens back 4-5 days from the originally promised date. (pushing the ICO back a bit less than 4 weeks, but the token release date up three weeks, relative to the ICO end date).

We will remove the hard cap of $300k. If donations accelerate too much, we will close it down, as we don’t want to let a market-significant share of tokens be awarded a 50% premium. We want to have the time and resources to have a truly world-class ICO.
We’re going to keep working just as hard at it.

We will begin major development projects and more hiring now, not at the end of the pre-ICO. We’ve got some surprises in store when it comes to the MVP and its release date, relative to the ICO :

Let’s have an open discussion about this in our community: If anyone has any points they’d like to discuss please let us know.

Thanks for your support. It seems surreal to say this team didn’t even exist the Thursday before last. What we’ve done in ten days is incredible. I’m as excited for the next few months as any time in my life!

~Nick (and Anton, Chris Ashley, Zac and Alex)