Important update message for threefold 19 Jan 2023

#1

Dear Friends, time for an update.

ThreeFold has gone through a rough time, we have been struggling for money for the last 6 months. Since June 2022 we are self-financed and our team has made huge efforts to work for minimum salary. We are also incredibly grateful for all the support we got from friends and community, many are helping for free.
We tried to find money in the blockchain ecosystem which didn’t work. We downsized a little and had to cut costs around topics like marketing, token promotion, … We took the decision in July to focus on our best 10 projects / projects with a focus planet & people first as well as benefits for what a community needs. This strategy has been working. We are close to enabling some serious communities and even countries. Funding also seems to be closer now. We believe we will close at least one of those projects in the near future and we also signed a head of terms for a project with a country (name cannot be disclosed yet). We need fuel before we can realize our joint vision and mission.

Right now, we are in a scary period though and can use any financial help possible.

Thanks to the support of our investors and community we were able to realize the following over the last 5 years:

There are of course things which didn’t work out:

  • Because of not finding enough funding we were unable to do promotion and also further develop some of our planned use cases. We also could not support our token in a meaningful way.
  • We haven’t been very good in communication, we could have done better.
  • We have a serious delay with our network of validators, we tried to find funding through blockchain partners and as such leave our technology choice open, this did not work.
  • Our token market cap is very low, less than 15m USD right now, we believe this is not in line with the size and potential of the project. This leads to pain for our farmers and this needs to be resolved soon. Many special thanks to our farming community to keep on supporting the project despite this fact and the huge power bills.

Some key things happened which are fantastic and we are very happy about:

  • Many people are waking up and want to create a new world, a world based on values, where everyone has to be authentic and we all have respect for people and our planet. They realize digital is the way to go and make this happen. People start writing about concepts like: https://thenetworkstate.com, this is 100% aligned with our vision and we have the system to help.
  • We are working with some countries and also two very large communities to deliver a sovereign new internet with applications and a true decentralized yet regulated financial system which has the ability to empower hundreds of millions of people.
  • We are developing our own financial backbone system and we have been able to achieve some serious breakthroughs. This system was needed for our projects and we didn’t find what we were looking for in existing blockchain based systems (we need millions of transactions per sec and ability to do payments even when the Internet is down). We also resolved how digital currencies and goods can be exchanged without a central order book, not even a blockchain. This system will be the base of our Internet of Internets financial system including the validators.

ThreeFold as a Venture Creator

ThreeFold SA (Luxembourg) is operating as a venture creator with the purpose to do good for people and our planet. Our technology capabilities can be used for hundreds of use cases and different types of communities. We believe this makes a lot of sense since our team was running a successful incubator before see https://www.incubaid.com/ where we had more than 7 good exits. Of course all these use-cases expand our grid and use our technology.

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Some of our first projects (ventures):

  • A GPU commercial platform for AI on top of the ThreeFold Grid. The purpose is to democratize AI for everyone, so it’s much more cost effective and neutral, not owned by some large companies.
  • 2 Digital Nation projects. We use our new digital finance platform, digital twin and tf grid technology to enable millions of people to get access to a sovereign digital future. The business model is a recurring freemium model.
  • A freemium model around decentralized apps (based on Fediverse) on top of TFGrid.
  • Multiple countries to deploy a local sovereign internet. The main benefit for the country is more equality (education, internet access, healthcare), safety and security, lower internet cost, sovereignty, climate friendly and GDP positive contribution.
  • A secure phone see https://ourphone.ourworld.tf (draft) using embedded apps on the grid.
  • A first implementation of our twin see https://www.freeflow.life (freemium business case).
  • We are working on a digital freezone project (with a country)
  • We are working on a digital library project where an alternative decentralized solution to chat GPT will be created.

There is more cooking (-: The venture creator helps with funding, business development, technology, legal and admin support, startup mentoring, … The above mentioned projects will start as funding comes in.

We believe we have the potential to create an ecosystem which has the ability to do good for everyone involved going from the investor to the people and our planet. Our focus of course is decentralization and sovereignty and as such help with climate change, providing equality (farming, healthcare, education) and sustainable growth opportunities for emerging markets.

ThreeFold as a community based Grid

NEAR TERM

  • Version 3.8 is almost ready with a lot of nice updates. One of the features I personally like most is the ability for solution providers to build solutions on top of us and be rewarded for it.
  • A farmer bot will allow farmers to manage their power and not have to pay for electricity if there is no income. (We aim to demo this either at the end of next week or at the start of following week.)
  • The introduction of a preferred TFT which is given to farmers to compensate for their monthly costs. This preferred TFT is being bought back at minimal 0.1 USD per TFT by a commercial organization which will sell commercial capacity on top of the grid (different set of solutions e.g. Mastodon, Discourse, GPU based AI, …) . Weynand and team are working on this.
  • Many new monitoring features provide better visibility on what’s happening on the 3nodes.

LONGER TERM OUR INTERNET OF INTERNETS CONCEPT

We are waiting for some more money to be able to conclude and deliver on our Internet of Internets concept (as announced 6 months ago). Which is the ability for every community to decentralize and deliver their own instance of an Internet with an integrated digital financial system.

NEW for v 4.0:

  • The long waited Validator concept (registration might already happen in Q1 2023)
  • Our own financial digital platform with integrated blockchain, micropayments, reputation system, decentralized exchange, …
  • Our tiered Internet concept with regional internets, neighborhood clouds, …
  • More decentralization features (monitoring, …)
  • Reintroduction of 3bot (we had it in v2.0, now back in 4.0) this time based on vlang (our sponsored language see: https://vlang.io/) and our digital twin technology.
  • Integrated search and web publishing framework.
  • Updates in the farming model for making sure farmers are rewarded more quickly and fairly taking into consideration their effort, power usage, quality of hardware and network.

We are planning a community call, or maybe a series of calls, in the next couple of weeks to speak more on these topics. Please feel free to respond on the forum for now.

Much love,

Kristof

CEO ThreeFold SA (our venture creator in Luxembourg)

Some funny things from the past

These slides are from exactly 3 years ago:

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In that presentation we had above, just to show that we know tactics will change but the vision needs to stay the same:

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Of course many mistakes have been made which I believe is unavoidable for any startup.

8 Likes
#2

Hi Kristof,

I see you are developing a lot of amazing technology, but I have the feeling that you are missing focus. I’ve been in 2 startups myself and see have seen a lot of startups around me being in an accelerator program. If there is one thing that can kill a startup because of huge money drains it is lack of focus.

If you would have to choose only one project or customer segment to focus development, marketing and sales on, what would that project or segment be? Where is the need for P2P internet the highest? Who currently doesn’t have access to internet and with Threefold, they could? In that respect, I think it is not wise to focus development and promotion efforts to farmers and use cases in developed countries. They do not feel the pain. For them, they merely use Threefold because they believe in a better world.

Perhaps you are already doing the right things, I don’t know. I hope you see that building great technology is not equal to and doesn’t automatically result in building a great business. I’m open to having a talk about your strategy and seeing if I can help in any way. I’m sorry if I sound arrogant, I just don’t want to see this project die.

With much love and appreciation,
Niels

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#3

thanks for your message and I can understand it comes across that way.
I do understand the requirement for focus as I had to build companies before and I do agree.

Right now we are extremely pragmatic, the full engineering team is only working on creating the next version of our TFGrid. Our mainly voluntary business development team is working on landing some of the big projects and get money in that way. All the rest is just prepared for the future.

Whoever comes in first with funding and a good use case which is in line with our values will get our priority. If others want it too they will have to bring their own market and funding and we can deliver the tech required.

The list of possibilities above is the result of people asking us to help them with concrete projects and target markets, they would help with funding and commercialization. None of those will get started before funding is in.

About the venture creator, If we look at the past we have been quite successful in running a venture creation business (incubaid.com), this actually provides for all the focus required and allows us to mobile funding faster…

Lets not forget its our aim to get the grid used in the widest possible way that is why it makes sense for us to build an ecosystem of startups which will build on top of this.

A venture creator allows us to use the tech for a wider base, but not before funding is in

why do we exist?

  • Do we exist because we want to create an alternative cloud to amazon or google?
  • or do we want to allow any blockchain company to run their stuff on top of us
  • or is our focus to go really decentralized and support the fediverse
  • or maybe AI is now going so crazy, that might be the way to go
  • or do we need to help countries because the way how CBDC goes is not so good…
  • Do we exist because we want to help communities to have a more prosperous digital future?
  • Do we exist because people need a digital twin as alternative to blockchain and centralized apps?
  • Do we exist because 1/2 of world has no access to decent internet
  • …

I am not against picking any of them and get a team focussed, this is what the venture builder is baout.

If we would decide to focus ourselves only on 1 thing we still would need about 5 to 10m USD to get there, I am not against it of-course, anyone who wants to can run such a venture and be hyper-focussed around one topic even per region if that would make sense, but we don’t have that 5m USD.

What we do have is some large communities which ask us to provide them with sovereignty and a digital future in which they can collaborate, communicate, share info, manage money, … and they are willing to fund.

Lets now see what happens over next weeks/months, they are exciting times.

and ofcourse always welcome to chat and do a zoom

regards

Kristof

3 Likes
#4

Thanks for the clarification, @kristof! So are you building the Threefold infrastructure based on what you think future ventures would need or do you build it based on what current ventures require? The first is technology push, of which there is a high probability you are developing the wrong things. Market pull, the second, is preferred.

I compare it a bit to the mass manufacturing system Henry Ford built. The first use case of that kind of production system happened to be a car, a Ford T, and in one color only: black. Because it was sucessful, many other applications followed and the system got improved based on market demand to get us to the highly cost-efficient (yet planet-destroying) manufacturing system that we have today. If Ford would have started to build a production system capable of producing cars, trucks, bicycles, microwave ovens, as well as refrigarators, he would have failed because he would have spent all his resources before reaching product-market fit with one of his applications.

My question is: what is Threefold’s Ford T? Start with that and focus building the infrastructure for that. Earn income. Then scale it to all other verticals you can imagine.

Am I oversimplifying it? Or is this the plan? Would be nice to see some more details about the strategy. I only see a lot of developments of the (undoubtly marvelous) generic production system, but no Ford T’s…

5 Likes
#5

Thank you @kristof, very few are this transparent and well said @nielsbosmans. The main reason this project got interesting to me was because of the Environment side of things. The world is waking up to sustainability and why it is important to have a sustainable world. I am in the sustainability industry and you can only imagine what awaits TFT if they market themselves and a decentralized NETZERO cloud-based service (part of their numerous services). This is exactly what I have used to convince friends and family to join the “TFT family”.

There are two audiences;

  1. The developer, who wants to build on TFT and use the wonderful services (like you have described above)
  2. The common man who is looking for privacy and data security, the hospitals who are tired of people hacking their systems because of centralization, the enterprises (financial institutions and companies who have ESG strategies, GHG targets and care about the environment and people)

To see growth, you have to bring people in category 2 along, bring the Web 2 folks. When it’s time to start marketing, don’t focus on attending only blockchain events, focus on sustainability events and web 2 tech events where you can reach the top decision-makers in the industry.

You have to know that most people in Web3 just want to build technology, they are not yet focused on People and Planet, and selling the 2 PPs to them might not be a game changer.
If you need someone to volunteer on the sustainability side of things, please reach out. That is my field and I can’t give valuable pointers.

4 Likes
#6

It’s true that we should reach out to both of these categories of audiences as much as possible. Please reach out to me on Telegram and I’d be happy to hear and follow up on your suggestions about how to bring more sustainability to the project and reach out to people from this field!

#7

Hi Niels,

I do agree with you, well said.

I like the fact you use Ford as an example, supposedly also from him:

T, Henry Ford famously said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

That doesn’t mean we should not listen to our customers (-: it means that if you push for something really new customer feedback alone is not enough.

Threefold Grid is a platform with multiple components and each component has a purpose e.g. the storage system, the compute parts, …

Using the car example, Ford also had to invent tools and components. These components can be used to create various types of cars, just as over time, we now have a wide range of vehicles with similar principles for engines, tires, and suspension.

Allow me to speak for myself. We can ask ourselves why are we alive? I am sure each of us has a different answer to this big question.

For me, being alive means having the opportunity to simplify IT so that more people have access to better tools for doing good in the world. I believe that the world needs positive change and that a better internet and financial digital infrastructure can help achieve this goal. In my view, IT should serve as a tool, not an end in and of itself, and these tools should be designed to be as accessible as possible so that the greatest number of people can benefit from them.

For me the ThreeFold grid platform = the Tool needs following requirements

  • allow groups of people to co-own a deployed IT workload (any linux compatible workload)
  • deploy this IT workload anywhere in the world at a good cost base
  • make sure its done in the most sustainable way (energy, on good cost efficient/durable hardware)
  • deploy the workloads closer to where the endusers are, so the internet is more efficient and secure
  • make sure the system is sovereign and more secure (opensource helps)
  • make sure the system is reliable
  • make sure that economically it makes sense for people to provide service on the grid (farmers, …)
  • make sure its easy for people to learn how to use the tool (documentation, tutorials, …)
  • make it easy for people to advance the tools, so we can together get better tools

On the last 3 parts we are doing not good yet, this needs to improve.

This means we are not creating the technology for the purpose of the ventures of the venture creator, a venture is a tool by itself, to allow motivated teams deliver added value for a certain region and usecase where they can use the created tools to their benefit.

As CEO of Threefold SA (our company in Luxembourg) I have a responsibility to generate economic value for our investors while being aligned with the interest of our TFGrid platform requirements (see above), as well as respect for our planet and the people on the planet (communities). I do my best, in the limits of my abilities and available financial resources.

Am I the best CEO for ThreeFold SA, I believe “NO”, I am not, I might be good at certain things but operational excellence and being patient enough is not one of them. We are looking for a CEO for ThreeFold SA so I can more focus on the technical parts and venture creation (incubation which is something I am good at and like to do).

The venture creator is something for the near future where we build an ecosystem on top to let more startups use these components, this is something of my own interest which I believe does have value.

Next to ThreeFold SA, our hope is to make this project much more decentralized, there are so many wonderful people in our community who want to help this project to succeed. Personally I am so grateful that people see the value of what has been done so far.

Maybe its time to create a proper DAO where everyone can contribute, be rewarded for their contribution as well as feel part of the journey to a global neutral sovereign secure Internet infrastructure platform.

6 Likes
#8

Exactly, this is what I believe can drive demand 100x :rocket:

1 Like