Hello, thanks for giving us feedback to work on.
No offense taken. My opinion is that these security concerns are very important, and this holds true for both traditional pension funds and any project related to blockchain and cryptocurrencies in general. Nobody wants to have anything hacked, not just pension funds.
Traditional pension funds are often fraud/scam targets and one of our goals in bringing them to the blockchain is to improve this. Of course this brings a new kind of risk, especially with recent hacks occurring in other ICOs and a vast history of other problems that have happened in the past.
But it is our team's responsability to address those risks by following a few important steps such as:

• Thoroughly testing the smart contracts that will be used in the pre-sale and in the ICO;
• Having security audits;
• Disclosing contract address previously and using ENS;

And after the ICO, before publicly launching our platform, spend even more effort and resources to assure security, hiring security specialists, promoting bug bounty campaigns, extensively testing the platform on test net before launching it on main net, gradually releasing our products to beta testers before releasing them publicly for everyone, and a lot of other measures that can be taken to reduce the risks to near zero.
The risk is not exclusive to our project, it exists in every cryptocurrencies exchange, in every ICO and in every system that handles users' assets. Even traditional banking systems are not completely safe against hacks, so it depends on the team's competence to ensure that the platform built is safe.

There is no official date yet. The reason for this is because we are currently working on the development of a demo of the platform and finishing the website and final version of the whitepaper. Meanwhile we are also working on establishing strategic partnerships. The date will be announced soon, along with the release of the website and whitepaper. It will be worth the wait, if we rush to set a date before finishing important work in progress we can get ahead of ourselves and don't present the project in the strongest way possible. Soon everything will be in place and the date will be posted here and in our other communication channels (twitter, slack, reddit, facebook, website etc).

Hi, thanks for sharing your opinion with us.
We are developing a platform for pension funds management and we are using the Ethereum network and its smart contracts as our backbone. What you said ("who knows what there possibly will be instead of the blockchain") could be pointed as a risk factor for any current project being built using Ethereum, not only pension funds. We don't believe the blockchain technology and smart contracts will be replaced by something else. It may become different from what it is today, as the developers are still working on it and bringing more functionalities in, but it still has a lot of space to grow and evolve and there are hundreds or maybe thousands of promising projects being built on it and improving the ecosystem. This technology is at the very beginning and has a brilliant future ahead. I agree with you if you are talking about crypto currencies current prices, it is very difficult to predict what the existing digital coins and tokens will be worth some years from now, so it would be risky to have a retirement fund with only current existing digital assets. But our project is not only about managing a digital assets fund, we are aiming in the long term market revolution. Our platform will begin with a proof-of-concept digital assets retirement fund but later will expand to traditional assets as the tokenization process evolves and smart contracts become more accepted in the "real world".

I can't name 5-10, but I will give you my Top 2:

1. Bitcoin - Problem solved: introduced the blockchain technology that allows solving the problem of double spending for a decentralized digital currency, and enabled all the other cryptocurrencies to be created.

2. Ethereum - Problem solved: combined blockchain and smart contracts solving the need for centralized entities in several market/businesses and introduced the concept of decentralized apps.

I am also curious about what people are going to answer here. I see a lot of promising projects emerging but a lot of them are still in development phase, so I think the two "coins" that really solved something at this stage are our two biggest cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin which is a digital coin and Ethereum which is a smart contract platform.

Hi virasog! Thanks for posting here, we really appreciate every kind of thoughts and feedbacks from the community, that's what is making our project more solid each day.
I totally agree with you, a good project can't just focus on short term profits and forget the challenges ahead. We are entering a very promising market, as it is worth more than 30 trillion dollars today, and we believe that Ethereum and smart contracts will play a major role in revolutionizing traditional business models in the few next years. I personally think that this kind of market, that currently lacks of transparency and is always being a target of frauds, is what smart contracts are supposed to improve in the near future.
That being said, it will also be very challenging as everything related to blockchain technology is still very new to the general public. But if you think about it, a smart contract-based platform with transparency and easier auditing will be advantageous even to regulators, not only to employers and employees. We won't spare any efforts to keep our mission on track and be prepared for future turnarounds.
Having the challenges we are going to face in mind, we won't sit and wait for the blockchain technology becomes accessible to the general public and wait for other projects to lay ground and make it easier for us. We want to be a part of this revolution and disrupt this market facing the challenges ourselves. That is the idea behind our first pension fund being at the beginning focused in the blockchain ecosystem and digital assets, before we are ready to expand to traditional pension funds and managing tokenized traditional assets.

Hello posternat, thanks for sharing your thoughts.
All you said is true, directly dealing with pensions requires a lot of efforts and resources to handle regulation issues. We have put a lot of thought in our business proposition (and we are still gaining new insights and ideas) and one of the team members, Vinicius, works with pension funds.
It won't be overnight that we will operate our business fully regulated managing traditional assets and being adopted by traditional retirement funds, but we have been following recent changes in traditional business with blockchain and smart contracts slowly moving towards going mainstream and we have drawn a realistic roadmap.
Our first important milestone is the release of our proof-of-concept which is a smart-contract based retirement fund which will not be fully regulated, but instead be used as a showcase to attract traditional funds to joining in. We are at this phase trying to contact potential early supporters (such as other blockchain technology companies) that could adopt this cryptocurrencies retirement fund to help us validate our model.
Legal and regulation issues will be handled in parallel with the development of the platform, and soon we expect to be hire specialized legal firms and also be backed up by traditional funds that have already gone through this regulation problems, and in the long term we will provide them a platform that allows better governance and transparency to manage their funds (we will not manage every pension fund that uses the platform). To provide a platform for pension funds will still require regulation, but it is not the same as directly managing pension funds.
Besides, selling annuities in the Annuity Marketplace is another product that we will work on in parallel and requires less governement regulations. When we release the final version of the whitepaper and set the token sale date some of the new ideas that we are working on will become clear to the community.

Hi, thanks for your question! I think this question is very important and should be answered in two parts: technically and legally.

Technically speaking, we are building a platform for general pension funds that will interact with different/custom smart contracts. We can have a smart contract for each fund, or even more than one contract for a single fund. Each smart contract will define the terms for the specific fund, with vesting rules, employer match, fees, calculus and assumptions, and every other thing that is current defined in paper documents / traditional contracts. So it is easy to have a custom smart contract for a private pension fund and a different one for a public pension fund.

Concerning regulation and legal issues, we can address the two types in parallel. Even though our experience comes from a big public pension fund, it might be more challenging to be adopted by public pension funds at the beginning because of bureaucracy issues. We will start with our own Auctus Retirement Fund as a proof of concept and, with help from legal advisors, expand our platform to meet traditional funds requirements.

Besides working on the development we will also shortly release the final version of the whitepaper and the website. Some of our potential partners still haven't received the current draft as we are waiting for the final revision to spread it around.

Everyone in the team is working hard, there is a lot to do because it is a very challenging and disruptive project, but each day we become more confident as new ideas and feedback from community come in.

Please participate posting here any doubts related to our mission and even critics because it is very important to us to keep it clear and get constant feedback from the community.

If you think of Ethereum as the Internet and one of the ERC20 tokens on Ethereum as shares of a company that might be the next Google, maybe yes.
Ethereum is a platform. The price increase is due to demand to develop or invest in projects built upon it. Protocol changes and platform improvements may lead to a price stabilization in the future, but a project using the network and generating profits may keep growing.
Of course I'm not talking about 2017, this could be a future scenario.

There was no pre-ICO and the only possible whales are people that registered multiple addresses during registration period, but they needed multiple cell phone numbers and multiple email accounts, since the registration used Civic app for verification.

It was not a secret project, it is an open protocol built on Ethereum that some other projects such as Aragon, district0x and Augur are already being built upon.

It was a very fair ICO model where they raised 24 millions distributed equally among everyone that was registered during registration period. We were able to contribute with a maximum of 6.67722 ETH (~$2k) for each registered address and got the ZRX token back in the same address immediatelly.
ICO price: 1 ZRX = 0.000169 ETH / $0.05

Interesting news: ten law firms and four legal institutions joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.
https://www.coindesk.com/legally-binding-smart-contracts-9-law-firms-join-enterprise-ethereum-alliance/
This may be a step towards blockchain and smart contracts going "mainstream" if smart contracts begin to be accepted as legal documents.
This is important for us as we intend to be soon used by traditional funds in a regulated way.

Pension rip-offs and scams are on the news everyday: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/11/pension-rip-off-young-job-hoppers-subsidizing-wealthy-savers/
It is our mission to help to improve this market with transparent smart contracts.

Hi everyone!
Later I will answer the last questions individually, for now I just want your attention because I have just updated our ANN in the first page (thanks to our designer Samir) and for those following our project, you will notice the addition of Raphael in the team, and I wanted to comment on that.
Raphael is a long time friend of mine and of the rest of the team and he is involded in this project since the beginning, but we were first counting on him as an advisor for his vast financial/business expertise. As he became more and more involved, he started contacting potential partners and advisors in Europe, and we have came to an agreement to include him as a full team member of the project, as he is playing a very important role facilitating our communication outside Brazil, and will also be of great importance after the token sale when we start contacting traditional funds and managing our own smart contract-based pension fund.

Thanks for your support! More info about ICO comming really soon, we are just taking it smoothly to avoid getting ahead of ourselves.

From their whitepaper: "Protocol tokens will have two uses: for market participants to pay transaction fees to Relayers and for decentralized governance over updates to the protocol."

Usually the projects are careful about describing the token utility to assure they can not be considered securities and avoid legal problems. So, they will not write anything like "buy this token and it will be worth a lot more in the future..".

The 0x protocol is a smart contract-based solution to allow peer-to-peer decentralized trading between Ethereum-based tokens. This could help to solve
some of the exchange problems we have been facing recently (hacking, governments closing them, servers down...) since the protocol could be the base for a decentralized application project and other applications that need token trading management. In the project I am involved (Auctus) we are following the 0x closely and studying it since it could be a very good tool to help us with assets management, and this is why I think it is a very good project and I will contribute on the token sale.

If the protocol is widely adopted, the need for ZRX tokens to pay for fees will increase its demand and thus increase its value. Since there are some promising projects already adopting it, I think there is a good chance of success.


In this case I will use Metamask, but both are fine. Metamask is very simple to use. They have video tutorials for both.

Do you wanna look at coding a service/product/tool for learning purposes? There are hundreds or maybe thousands of products being developed using Ethereum technology.

If you want to learn how to develop a smart contract code using solidity, you can start with the tutorials from the official Ethereum website:

https://ethereum.org/token
https://ethereum.org/dao

If you want to fund a business idea that could use Ethereum, think about anything that currently needs a centralized entity as an intermediary (such as Uber and AirBnb) that could be replaced by smart contracts. Here is a post about smart contract use cases: https://medium.com/auctus/smart-contracts-ideal-uses-cases-930a9ca6a02f

No one can promise you that you will profit from an ICO. As a matter of fact, if their website mentioned any warranty of prices going up it would probably be a scam. I usually support projects built on Ethereum that are developing some product that may make the technology better by facilitating adoption by general public. I contributed on Status and TenX ICOs because of their products and now the token prices are 3x and 5x compared to ICO price respectively and I am still hodling them.

But to give you a straight answer to your question, I think 0x is a good investment in both short and long terms because they have set their maximum raised cap as 24 million dollars for the ICO. They will sell 50% of the total token supply, so if they reach the max cap their market cap value will be 48 million dollars. I think their project will be worth more, because there are good projects already using the protocol. For example, here are some projects built on 0x and their current market cap value:
Augur: $246 million
Aragon: $100 million
district0x: $47 million
Melon: $45 million

Those projects are still developing their products, but once any of those releases a significant product it will increase the demand for the ZRX token and attract more projects to use the 0x protocol.

Again, this is only my personal analysis and I will hodl the ZRX tokens I buy for a long time, the same way I am doing with other promising projects.

I have contributed to the TenX token sale, so they will send me a special card (I think it is going to take until September for me to receive it).
I haven't used any of the others, but I really like how the TenX team is handling their project. They are frequently posting development updates in their blog and I think they are very transparent and have a very good governance concerning funds raised and tokens held by the team.

I can soon give you my impressions after I use my card for the first time  .

Sorry, I don't. I don't even know if they announced it here...
I have their website, if it helps: https://0xproject.com/
And they posted information about registration and token sale in their medium page: https://blog.0xproject.com/latest

Be aware of scams, because this ICO will not be about just sending ETH to an address, they will use the 0x protocol and you will need to go through their sale process in their website.

The registration period started two days ago and you need to install Civic app to register for the 0x token sale. I bet this is why CVC price went up 3 times in the last 48 hours (just because 0x is using it, but this is a guess). Yesterday the 0x team posted they already had 7,000 subscriptions for the sale, so there won't be any whales buying a big slice of the pie.

IOTA is not a new Ether, but it doesn't mean it is a scam. Ethereum is a smart contract platform on blockchain. IOTA doesn't use the blockchain technology, instead it uses a technology called DAG (the same behind Byteball/Blackbytes).

Ethereum is a platform for decentralized applications (dApps), in which you can easily create custom tokens, and there are a lot of projects already being developed on top of it.

IOTA has a different purpose.. It is a digital currency for machines/devices in the Internet of Things. They don't have transaction fees and you can make transactions offline in a local branch of The Tangle and later sync with the main network.

I know more about Ethereum than I do about IOTA, I haven't studied it a lot yet, so I can't tell you if you could have applications built on it or other Ethereum-like features. But I think IOTA is very interesting.

This is a presentation from their Medium page:
https://blog.iota.org/a-primer-on-iota-with-presentation-e0a6eb2cc621