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After breaking through 5,000 bitcoins, the data of Antminer ICO2 is still being updated in real time. So far, the total amount raised is 5,748.98 BTC, equivalent to RMB 23.33 million, and the number of participants is 1,424. For Antminer, 5,000 bitcoins is just the beginning. With less than 8 hours left before the ICO2 launch, Da Hongfei, CEO of Onchain, Tao Rongqi, VP of Onchain and ICO2 commander-in-chief, and Wang Tingting, VP of Onchain and responsible for ICO2 community building, shared with us the overall design process of the ICO and responded to pointed questions such as overvaluation and whether the code is original:
Xiaoyi's overall design and technology
Is Ant’s valuation too high? Da Hongfei: In June 2014, when we approached Rayleigh Capital with a piece of A4 paper and asked them to invest a startup capital at a valuation of RMB 10 million, I was most concerned about two issues: 1. There is no company but only token returns. How can investment institutions participate?
2. An idea on a piece of A4 paper is worth 10 million. Is it too expensive? Now it seems that this "unconventional" investment has achieved a 10-fold increase in value. At this time, I was asked the same question again: "Is the market value of Ant Financial too expensive at 100 million?" The first thing to note is that the circulating market value of Antminer is actually only 50 million, because the 50% held by the Antminer team can only be circulated after one year, and can only be used for the development of Antminer and ecological construction. So is 50 million too expensive? I checked coinmarketcap.com and found that 50 million in circulation market value can only barely make it into the top 30. Some of the top 30 cryptocurrencies, such as Xaurum, Bitcrystals, and Emercoin, are unheard of even for me in the industry. I think the potential of China's benchmark blockchain project, Antminer, should at least be ranked in the top 10 or even top 5. In a horizontal comparison, I don't think 50 million is expensive. In addition to horizontal comparison, another valuation model is the replacement cost, that is, how much money it would cost to rebuild a similar project. Blockchain developers are extremely scarce, not to mention the underlying protocol developers with architectural design capabilities. The Ant team has core protocol developers like Zhang Zhengwen, architects like Li Jun with 15 years of financial IT experience, and evangelists like me (laughs), as well as a group of financial technology talents from Morgan Stanley and State Street Bank. After the completion of this ICO, the Ant team will hold more than 20 million RMB in development funds. People, money, and community are a resource and barrier that cannot be replicated.
What do you think about the outside world's doubts about Xiaoyi's technical strength? Da Hongfei: From day 1, open source has been the only strategy of Ant Financial. Such a strategy is inevitable - a true blockchain must be open source. A closed-source blockchain system is a black box that requires unconditional trust in developers, which is completely contrary to the essence of blockchain. Closed-source blockchains either reuse code from other blockchain projects and dare not open source; or they are centralized systems that claim to be blockchains and dare not open source. The code of Antminer is completely original and updated in real time on GitHub. This is the confidence of the Antminer team and also brings confidence to the community. Many overseas participants in this ICO judged our reliability based on the frequent updates of the Antminer project on GitHub. After the ICO is completed, Antminer will continue to adhere to the open source route and use community-supported funds to develop a more powerful and complete open source blockchain system. We have made a complete technical plan and will release it in the near future.
Conduct an international ICO
As the commander-in-chief of ICO2, what details can you share about the process design? Tao Rongqi: The process and details of Ant's ICO are as good as those of the top ICOs in the world. For example, Ant's ICO was conducted on its own website instead of a third-party ICO website. This is consistent with Ethereum, Lisk and other successful ICOs. There are many challenges in conducting ICO on the Ant website, such as ICO rule setting, ICO website design, ICO progress control, site development, etc. Let me give you a simple example: the ICO page design we see now is the result of repeated revisions. The first impression is very important for ICO participants. When we discussed with the UI designer, we put forward the requirements of international style and geek style. After several revisions, we finally determined the current style, and the content of the homepage was still being revised and adjusted until last week. When it comes to setting up ICO rules, it is the most challenging part for the team to grasp the overall ICO. Here is a detail: According to the initial design, the 50 million shares of Antminer that were frozen for the construction of the Antminer ecosystem were partially unfrozen three months after Antminer went online. However, after discussion, we felt that three months was too short and might not be conducive to the market value expectations of Antminer after circulation, so we decided to extend the three months to one year. This decision now seems to be very correct. ICO addresses are fully public. All ICO addresses participating in Antminer are fully public. Which addresses have BTC, how many BTC there are, and whether they have been moved are all clearly visible. Before the end of the ICO, no BTC in any address will be moved. The amount of money in the ICO process is fully transparent, and the multi-signature and refundable mechanism are telling participants: the Antminer team will not take and invest on its own. Multi-signature guarantee. Antminer is the only ICO project in China that has been guaranteed by multi-signatures. Multi-signatures are a shackle for the project and a guarantee for the participants. However, there are more topics about multi-signatures during this ICO: the Bitfinex theft incident has made us think more deeply about the security of multi-signatures. Although custodial multi-signatures are convenient, they are not as secure as the most basic multi-signatures. So we chose to keep BTC in the address during the ICO process and manage multi-signatures after the ICO is over. The biggest feature of this ICO: refundable was proposed by Da Hongfei. I thought it was quite bold when he proposed this. This refundable ICO is the first of its kind in the world. In a word: consider more about the ICO participants, and the participants will give you corresponding feedback.
Nearly half of the participants in Ant’s ICO are from overseas. How did it carry out overseas promotion? Tao Rongqi: Although we have been talking about promoting the Antminer ICO internationally for a long time, we found that there are many shortcomings in the actual operation. We can even say that we have to start from scratch. The core of building an international community is to do a good job of promoting Bitcointalk (BTT). In terms of BTT promotion, we learned from Lisk, Wings and Waves. Interested enthusiasts can find that there are many traces of Lisk ANN posts in Antminer's BTT ANN posts. BTT has its own rules. After studying and researching, we adopted the Bounty mechanism. At the beginning, there were few responses to our Bounty plan, and the first BTT Pre ANN post stagnated for a while. This made us very worried about whether we could build a good overseas community. After careful study and repeated discussions on the Bounty plan, Wen Tao, the co-founder who returned from Morgan Stanley, completed the Bounty design with a small trial, and focused on changing the BTT forum signature. We also re-made an ANN post. The result was unexpectedly good. This gave us great confidence. Since then, the number of users on Twitter has also grown rapidly, forming a good interaction with BTT. Zihao, who is in charge of Xiaoyi Twitter, is still a college student. In just one month, he has mastered Twitter operations very well. At the beginning of ICO, the number of foreign ICO participants was significantly lower than that of domestic participants. As time went on, we were pleasantly surprised to find that the number of overseas participants increased significantly. Although the investment amount still accounts for the majority of the domestic participants, the number of participants from all over the world is almost the same as that from China. There are two important parts in overseas PR: content and interaction. We have not been able to find the right person to take charge of these two parts, especially interaction. Wentao and Yiling are very important to the overseas community of this ICO. It is said that there is a lack of technical talents in the blockchain field. After this ICO, we found that it is even more difficult to find talents suitable for overseas promotion. We are very lucky to have talents like Wentao and Yiling. I have mentioned a lot above, and of course there are more details that cannot be mentioned here one by one. To put it simply, everyone in the team has always been thinking about one sentence: how to make the Antminer ICO better. So we have the current result. In addition, regarding the community, Antminer is a community project. Only by embracing the community better can it gain community recognition. The team has spent a lot of time and energy on this aspect. From the results, it can be seen that the community is the widest moat of Antminer's ICO.
A community organization model that is self-organized, self-built, and self-operated
The Xiaoyi Community plays a vital role in ICO2. Let’s focus on introducing the self-initiated, self-built and self-operated model of the Xiaoyi Volunteer Community. Wang Tingting: The Xiaoyi Volunteer Organization is actually a small microcosm of the Xiaoyi Community. It is a multi-center (decentralized) organization. Now is the early stage of development. Although there are still some centralized shadows, our goal is to establish the Xiaoyi Volunteer Organization into a self-organized community. At present, the Xiaoyi Volunteer Organization is divided into operation group, media group, fan group, design group, technical group and translation group according to different functions, and constantly establishes new groups according to the needs of different development periods, such as the recently established Zhihu public relations group, Babbitt community group, Xiaoyi forum group, etc. Each group has a leader, who will assign tasks and score his team members according to the internal mechanism. Team members can join different groups according to their preferences, do their favorite tasks according to their own schedule, and complete the tasks to increase their influence score. There is a community influence ranking list inside the Xiaoyi Volunteer Organization. Excellent volunteers on the list can get rewards and give scores to the next batch of volunteers. The "community influence" of this volunteer is actually a bit similar to the election prototype of candidate accountants in the Xiaoyi design mechanism. That is, when accounting on Xiaoyi, we can select this person as a candidate accountant based on the influence of a certain accounting node in the community. This is also a "community influence" model that the XiaoYi community will use after the XiaoYi mainnet goes online in the future. After the completion of ICO2, we will immediately launch the "Entrepreneurship Camp" plan and the "Developer" plan based on the Ant ecosystem. In the future, after the launch of the Antminer mainnet, all assets of the Antminer volunteer organization, including the Antminer shares and Antminer coins obtained by volunteers, the volunteers’ digital assets (such as the Antminer picture album originally designed by volunteer Lin Chen), volunteer contribution points, etc., will be registered, issued, traded and circulated on Antminer. The functional grouping of the Xiaoyi Volunteer Organization is actually a small microcosm of the Xiaoyi Ecosystem. Influential individuals and functional groups can become credit intermediaries in the Xiaoyi Volunteer Organization. If the Xiaoyi Volunteer Organization is further reduced and viewed as a whole or a node, then the Xiaoyi Volunteer Organization can also become a credit intermediary in the larger organization of the Xiaoyi Community because of its influence. In the Xiaoyi Ecosystem, the Xiaoyi Community can also become a credit intermediary for other organizations or alliances built on Xiaoyi because of its influence. The Xiaoyi Volunteer Organization completed the construction by self-initiated, self-built and self-operated, the Xiaoyi Community completed the construction, and the Xiaoyi Ecosystem also learned the construction experience. Since the establishment of Xiaoyi Volunteers, Xiaoyi Volunteers have completed every task excellently, whether it is patiently answering questions to new group members in the Xiaoyi QQ group, or fighting a public relations battle with Xiaoyi's black hand water army; whether it is spontaneously establishing the Xiaoyi forum, or comprehensively launching Xiaoyi content construction; whether it is Xiaoyi poster and image design and dissemination; or mentoring new volunteers, Xiaoyi Volunteers have become the image spokesperson of Xiaoyi, and the volunteer team has become the core organization of the Xiaoyi community. Xiaoyi volunteers are not only the image spokespersons of Xiaoyi, but also the source of talent discovery for the Xiaoyi team. For example, Li Yiling, a volunteer in the first phase, has been absorbed as a formal member of Xiaoyi TAT because of his outstanding performance. At the same time, some organizations have joined Xiaoyi volunteers and contributed more resources and channels to Xiaoyi. For example, Wang Feng, a volunteer in the first phase, contributed more than 100 group resources to us. There are also some volunteers who work very hard and silently for Xiaoyi, becoming very good promoters and seeders of Xiaoyi. For example, Zheng Yuchen and Yu Yongqian, volunteers in the first phase, performed every task very seriously and persevered. In addition, Xiaoyi also has a group of technology enthusiasts who improve the construction of the Xiaoyi community by establishing the Xiaoyi Forum and other methods. For example, Han Daniu, a volunteer in the second phase, initiated and developed the antfans.org forum, which became a learning and exchange camp for Xiaoyi fans. Finally, we also found some particularly interesting creativity and ideas, which also came from Xiaoyi volunteers. For example, Lin Chen, a volunteer in the first phase, expressed his understanding of Xiaoyi through an original picture album, and answered the confusion of many fans in the Xiaoyi community in an easy-to-understand way. Finally, I have to talk about my personal feelings. Although the Xiaoyi community has only been in development for a short period of one month, the power of community development really amazes me. We have been thinking about how to build a good community. Now it seems that we just added the ideas of designing Xiaoyi into it. With a little adjustment, the Xiaoyi community can be built and operated spontaneously. I found that blockchain is not only a technology, but also a way of thinking. We are using blockchain thinking to do something very interesting.
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