Do you already have a working prototype or just a whitepaper with pen?
For now it's just a concept. We know for sure it's achievable, however we don't want to spend time developing something that might end up being dead because of a lack of funds to support the project. That's why we are conducting an ICO with a minimal goal of 500 ETH
Hello and good luck with the project.
I Just finished reading your whitepaper and i have a few questions.
1. Which blockchain will be used to broadcast the messages between the users?
2. Are you developing your own blockchain? Depending on the answer, followup questions are about scaling and network clog.
3. Are all privacy issues tackled by the same chain? Addresses, Timestamps, Chat etc.
4. Your competitors are not clear in the paper, you mention Jabber; who are your main competitors? What about Signal, FrozenChat, ChatSecure, Wickr Me and others.
5. Could you please provide more information about the crowdsale. How will it be structured? You mention 500.000 ETH (max), is that the soft cap? Is there an escrow service?
6. What about the funds you will collect, is there a vesting period? What is the breakdown of the coins, how many will be sold during the crowdsale and how many will be kept by the developing team.
7. What is the total number of coins?
8. Talk to us about the team. About previous start up experience, about the CVs, work experience and education.
9. On your website the team seems anonymous since the surnames are not mentioned. Why do you need anonymity for such a project?
10. Have you received any funding from other sources? VCs, Angel Investors or some grant.
Please don't consider my questions as an attack. I need the information in order to understand better and possibly promote it on my blog / social media
I look forward to your answer,
I'm glad you asked all these questions. They all are very good points we wanted to talk about but didn't found the right place to include. I'm gonna try to answer the them the best I can, do not hesitate to ask for more precision !
We will be developing our own blockchain to process interactions between users. Everything regarding the messaging protocol and privacy issues will be managed by this blockchain. As mentioned in the whitepaper, we'd like to run a few hundreds (thousands ?) of nodes at the beginning to avoid network clogging. Scalability shouldn't be a concern, as various project based on blockchain proved before us. However, we can not foresee every problem that might be occurring in the future, especially on those points as they highly depends on the success of the project and how quick the users are willing to adopt it as a mean of communication. Only time will tell, and necessary actions will be taken to fix potential issues with the protocol.
We do not see ourselves in a "competition", even though I understand what you mean by asking this. We aim at creating a new messaging protocol, not an application/service. What we are talking about in our whitepaper concerns mostly protocols and not how they are actually implemented.
By enforcing encryption and anonymity at the protocol level rather than application level, you ensure users that applications actually using that protocol must comply to these rules to be able to work. It eliminates the risk of a point of failure in implementation at application level.
Checking the example you've given, FrozenChat and ChatSecure are applications using the XMPP protocol. Wickr as far as I know is entirely closed source (?) while Signal actually provide source code and probably a proprietary protocol but they are not communicating on it. It also misses the point of Decentralization and Zero-knowledge principle.
We want anyone to be able to build his own application on top of the WWAM protocol, and not just provide one implementation of a chat client.
About the crowdsale structure :
We are conducting a 4 weeks ICO, divided in 3 stages :
First stage starts on August 9, 2017 and last until August 16, 2017. People investing in that time frame gets awarded a 15% bonus in tokens on top of the total amount of their investment.
Second stage starts on August 16, 2017 and last until August 23, 2017. People investing in that time frame gets awarded a 10% bonus in tokens on top of the total amount of their investment.
Final stage starts on August 23, 2017 and last until September 6, 2017. People investing in that time frame are awarded tokens according to the base rate without any bonus.
You can find a live status of the ICO on our website along with useful tools and tips on the following url :
http://wwam.io/ico (
http://wwam.io/ico)
You can also check the contract source code on github here :
https://github.com/wwam/WWAM (
https://github.com/wwam/WWAM)
Or alternatively on etherscan.io where the contract source code have been verified (You can also interact with the contract functions there if you wish) :
https://etherscan.io/address/0x59a048d31d72b98dfb10f91a8905aecda7639f13 (
https://etherscan.io/address/0x59a048d31d72b98dfb10f91a8905aecda7639f13)
We have a minimum funding goal of 500 ETH actually implemented in the source code of the contract, a refund will be automatically triggered and available in the contract itself if that funding goal isn't reached at the end of the ICO. We think that it realistically the bare minimum to be able to develop and maintain and project of this scale. It also provides investor a guarantee of investing in a project that will be alive and backed up by enough funds, as well as providing a comfortable small market value for the ERC20 tokens issued.
If we reach that minimum goal, the ICO continues with the guarantee that the project will go live, to maximum amount of 500,000 ETH (We do not want this to go out of hand either, that is just a safe cap in case the projects gain insane popularity).
We do have a lot of ideas for possible future improvements and extension of the projects, but we do not want to make promises that will be left unfulfilled. Everything will depend on the amount raised during the crowdsale, and we will make proper announcement of what we are planning to do and how we are going to do it depending on the amount raised during the crowdsale. We do not have any escrow service for the ICO as we've been part of the "silent" community for years and no not have any meaningful contacts we trust in the crypto community. However our contract source code is publicly viewable, and has been verified on etherscan.io. We did our best to be as transparent as possible on the ICO and will publish regular breakdowns on how the funds are spent.
There's no vesting period for the funds collected during the ICO, we need the investment to actually start the project, that's why we are conducting and ICO in the first place. As for now everything has been payed from our own money, that's already a big personal investment but it would be unreasonable for us to try to go anywhere with that project without a proper investment. There are no pre-allocated tokens, they are dynamically generated by the contract every time an investment will be made. The team will receive 1% of the total token supply at the end of the ICO that will be generated and added on top of the total existing supply.
Considering the unlikely event where we reach the hard cap of 500,000 ETH investment during the first round and that the bounty budget has been used to 100%, the total amount of tokens available would be 100 000 000 + 15% bonus + 1% team share + 1% bounty = 117 000 000 WWAM tokens (Or 117 000 000 000 mWWAM as it is a 3 decimals token, and contracts works in the lowest decimal unit). That's the theoretical maximum supply of tokens.
The minimal supply would be in the event of only the bare minimum funding goal is reached, and every funds are invested into final rounds, with a 0% usage of the bounty share, leading to 100 000 + 1% team share = 101 000 WWAM tokens (101 000 000 mWWAM).
So the total supply will range somewhere from the bare minimum of 101 000 000 mWWAM to the absolute maximum of 117 000 000 000 mWWAM.
About the team : We are passionate software engineers (Including myself, even if I don't take that role in the team). We met during our school education, quickly finding common interest in new technologies and global security and anonymity over the Internet. We all attended the same software engineering master degree education, which is mostly based on pure group project software engineering. We've worked for small and big companies over the years, however we're not willing to share that kind of information to the public as of now. We're not tinfoil hats, but still we are very concerned about how Internet is exposing private life of individuals nowadays. That's why we're not much into giving out public information that could backfire on us freely on the Internet. However, I, Xavier, as a founder of WWAM am endorsing responsibility for this ICO. I will be pleased to provide official ID documents if any publicly recognized representative of a viable crypto-related entity wants to confirms our identity.
There's also another quite important thing that is the legal aspect. In France (Where we're all located), crypto-currencies are still a grey area. We would need to convert a good part of the ICO funds into fiat, and that's need a lot of paperwork, creating a company for it and doing things right isn't something that can be done over the course of a few days. We're not willing to expose ourselves before anything is done, as the project won't even start if the minimal funding goal isn't reached.
About your last question, we've not received any funding from an external source, the only funds we are using right now are ours as we do believe in our project. The total funds raised for the project will be by the mean of the ICO, and what this project will become is now in the hands of the crypto enthusiasts willing to support WWAM.
Thanks for reading, I hope that will clear most of the points everyone could have doubt on
