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Wings is a crowdfunding platform that helps companies and innovative projects obtain financing and helps investors select projects. Unlike other crowdfunding platforms, Wings combines blockchain technology, smart contracts, reputation systems, project management tools, and a concept called swarm intelligence, so it can help investors select high-quality projects and help them manage them. The foreign website CrowdFundBeat compares Wings to Indiegogo and Kickstarter in the digital asset field, providing projects with a platform to obtain financing, providing ordinary investors with free investment channels, and making it easier for investors to choose projects based on big data and community wisdom. Since the ICO was launched at the end of November, Wings has raised more than 1,500 BTC so far. Although the ICO has been slow in recent days, 1,500 BTC is a relatively good result in the past few months when ICOs have generally been unpopular. Public information shows that Wings was formerly known as ChainLab, which was co-founded by Stas Oskin, Sebastian Stupurac and Boris Povod. Chainlab had previously received investment from Bitmain. Bitmain co-founder Jihan Wu said,
“Bitmain invested because we saw a great team, and we look forward to seeing Wings grow into a DAO platform built on Rootstock and Ethereum, and become an innovation accelerator for public chains.” Guo Hongcai, a well-known angel investor from China’s digital currency community, and Chu Xiahu, the founder of Weiyou, are also advisors to the project.
Guo Hongcai commented on Wings: "This platform emphasizes social interaction, which will facilitate the initial community feedback, project evaluation and financing of projects, and will also form a decentralized filtering mechanism for projects (filtering out noise and focusing people's attention on truly promising project proposals)." From Wings' official blog, we can see the progress of its external cooperation, including cooperation with Bitcoin wallet and security solution provider Airbitz to improve the private key management process, and cooperation with domestic innovative blockchain project Xiaoyi to jointly develop markets and technologies, etc. Recently, Sebastian Stupurac, the project manager of Wings, accepted an exclusive interview with Babbitt. With the same concept of decentralized autonomous organization, and with the precedent of The DAO, Sebastian introduced to us the various designs that Wings has made to avoid security accidents, as well as the creation process and future plans of Wings. 8btc: Could you please briefly introduce what WINGS is in a few sentences? Sebastian: Simply put, WINGS is a new type of project crowdfunding platform that combines blockchain technology, smart contracts, reputation systems, project management tools, and a concept called collective intelligence. The platform will streamline the project lifecycle. It will start with submitting a project proposal, which will then need to be evaluated and predicted by the community before crowdfunding can begin. The platform will provide an environment where people can participate in decision-making and management. This will increase transparency and accountability through the DAO mechanism, which will help high-potential projects get the much-needed community attention, funding, viral marketing, and increasing follow-up investment participation and input.
8btc: How did you learn about digital currency and blockchain? Do you have any special experiences you can share with us? Sebastian: Speaking of this topic, every member of our team has his own story. For example, one of our team members read a Silicon Valley newspaper that day, which specifically wrote about something called Bitcoin, whose value had just reached $1, and predicted that it would reach $1,000 in the next five years. Another team member read a post on the Hacker News community, which claimed that Bitcoin was a scam and that although it was trading at 70 cents at the time, it should not be worth that much.
8btc: What motivated you to create Wings? Sebastian: Wings was created because we found an unsolved problem that needed a solution. On the one hand, from the community perspective, more than 700 cryptocurrencies and projects have been launched in the past two years, and more are announced almost every day. Many people who have heard of Bitcoin or Ethereum want to participate in these projects, but are afraid that the projects have no development potential, or cannot deliver on their promises, or even encounter scams. The WINGS platform can solve these problems. Through the platform, the crypto community can pay attention to high-quality projects and filter out unnecessary performers; it is conducive to potential supporters to maintain a certain degree of confidence and interest in the project. On the other hand, many mainstream enterprises are also interested in the crypto space as an alternative financing method to supplement regular angel or venture capital, which will help maintain their equity in subsequent rounds of financing. In addition, projects are in great need of early adopters in order to advance projects and solutions. However, these entrepreneurs do not have the experience required to achieve cryptocurrency financing and manage the community, and doing these things will distract them from their core business. What DAOs provide is to use the community for early financing, social marketing and decision-making. The WINGS platform will provide solutions and carry all the burdens, allowing entrepreneurs with minimal experience to easily launch new project DAOs.
8btc: How long did it take to build a team and put your ideas into practice? Sebastian: We started working on the WINGS concept in February 2016, spending a few months analyzing the idea from all angles, developing a basic proof of concept and prototyping the UI, rewards system and chatbot tools. We then started marketing work, writing a simplified and scientific whitepaper and developing an initial prototype. At the same time, we were also growing the team, building the community, establishing partnerships (such as RSK, Airbitz, ShapeShift, Antshares and many more), and contacting various entrepreneurs and companies that we thought were potential users of the WINGS platform. Of course, we also worked on building the entire legal infrastructure for the project. Overall, it took more than 10 months to get to where we are today.
8btc: Could you please introduce your team members to us? Some of them have experience working on IOTA, Lisk and Crypti. How did these help build the Wings platform? Sebastian:
Sebastian Stupurac – Focused on projects and products; was a member of the Crypti team;
Boris Povod - Blockchain developer; one of the founders of the Crypti team;
Stas Oskin- Business Development and Core Developer; was one of the founders of the Crypti team;
Dominik Zynis - Focused on marketing and communications; was part of the Mastercoin (Omni) project;
Serguei Popov – Mathematician (PhD); designed the IOTA Tangle algorithm;
Chandler Guo – Guo Hongcai: China strategic advisor; one of the leaders of Ethereum Classic and involved in many other crypto projects;
Eric Gu – Chuxiahu: China market consultant; founder of Metaverse;
Nikolay Taymanov – Community Management Manager for Eastern Europe;
Lior Zysman – Legal Counsel;
Matthew Elias – Strategic Advisor, USA;
Nimrod Back – Event Consultant; By brainstorming and applying our team’s extensive crypto and technology experience, we will design WINGS as a unique platform to solve real-world problems through a wide range of blockchain approaches and technologies.
8btc: Due to the complexity of smart contracts, security has become a critical issue. Are there any preventive measures to avoid security issues like The DAO? Sebastian: WINGS has adopted and introduced multiple smart contract security standards, such as: ● Bitcoin-based smart contracts, using RSK (RootStock) technology;
● RootStock Alliance provides fund protection and prevents emergency fund transfers ● Airbitz login ensures private key security ● Each launched project uses a single and independent smart contract and token (instead of the one contract in The DAO to manage all funds)
● Adopt public smart contract templates that have undergone extensive security audits ● Set up white hat bounties to discover potential vulnerabilities and solve problems;
● A milestone-based fund release system provides fund control to project participants and improves project realizability.
8btc: Are there any projects similar to WINGS in the market? If so, what are the advantages of WINGS in comparison? Sebastian: When we started, we did an extensive market research and noticed that crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter were very successful. In just a few years, they have helped projects raise more than $2.8 billion. We also looked at how AngelList, which has supported more than 1,000 startups, helped them raise more than $2.2 billion in recent rounds. Today, there are many platforms like Ethereum, NEM, BTS, LISK, Waves, and others that launch a coin or DApp, but there is no platform like Kickstarter or AngelList that exists for the crypto economy. WINGS will solve this problem and provide a new way for participants and companies to obtain financing, making it easier for the community to invest in new projects that already exist.
8btc: Wings has raised 1,500 BTC. Are you satisfied with this progress? What percentage of investors are Chinese? Do you have any way to distinguish Chinese investors from other investors? Sebastian: With nearly 1,500 bitcoins raised on the first day of the 49-day campaign, we are very happy that we are on the right track. We are sure that we will reach a higher amount to realize the full vision of WINGS as we see more and more people discover WINGS and participate in the token campaign. In the coming weeks, we will make major announcements, announce the first companies and projects that will use WINGS crowdfunding in the near future, and release the public alpha version of WINGS, through which you can experience the WINGS platform firsthand. Regarding the second question, we have multiple indicators, including through all WINGS-enabled mailboxes. We have not yet looked for specific domain names in China, but we know they are there.
8btc: How is Wings developing now? Any latest news on development plans and cooperation progress? Sebastian: In the coming weeks, we will provide a public platform channel that allows anyone to submit new project proposals, preview and predict, and even do a crowdfunding test network (if we have time). We will also provide rewards for the best projects shown in our alpha version, and of course these projects will have the opportunity to be listed as the first batch of projects to be announced after the WINGS mainnet is launched. Regarding the cooperation, once some details are finalized, we will announce major news to the public, but it is confidential for now.
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