Dear ThreeFold community members,
My name is Kristof, I am one of the Founders of the ThreeFold movement. It’s my pleasure to update you on the status of our project. I hope you appreciate our quest for authenticity and transparency.
First I would like to thank our community. It’s amazing to see how much support and activity there is, thank you for that and for your trust in the project.
ThreeFold went through quite a journey over the last five years. The grid is now in its third generation. Rightfully, people are asking why we are not pushing for more utilization at this stage? Why is the token price so low? People wonder what’s coming next?
We estimate that more than 50m USD has been invested in the project so far. A large part came from our farmer community that invested heavily in hardware and operational expenses to build the grid. We understand the expectations that have been set and we want to reaffirm our commitment to make the ThreeFold ecosystem self-sufficient and ready for global scale in a decentralized spirit. We also want to thank our ThreeFold Tech investors that supported technology developments throughout the years.
About 6 months ago, a project didn’t materialize as fast as we expected and we therefore had to face cash flow issues during crypto winter. This forced us to restructure and make sure that we focus on the elements which are the most important at this stage.
This required us to focus and delay some of our plans:
- We delayed the launch of the L2 validator network and the liquidity pool concept. This means that TFT could slip in price as there’s uncertainty from the public about what’s happening next. As of today, our liquid market cap is less than 20 m USD.
- However, the positive side of the coin is that the price of TFT is so low that it’s a great time for any believer of ThreeFold to buy back tokens from the market.
- The team has been very busy fundraising for our upcoming growth stage and some of the proceeds will be used to support the liquidity pool.
- We had no choice but to cut marketing and communication budgets, however we aim to work much more closely with the ThreeFold community to keep the movement growing. We see this situation as a reminder for us to also communicate much more with (and empower) our community and to start to operate in a much more decentralized way than before.
- We focus our business development efforts on some important projects. We expect to be able to announce them in the near future, hopefully before the end of this year. They will bring users and funding.
- We kept on going full steam for engineering and most of our resources are going there, it’s important to deliver the full Internet of Internets strategy.
- We kept on supporting the FreeFlow project which is an end user capable layer living on top of the ThreeFold grid. But we decided not to launch it yet, wait till we have more funding or community picks up.
- Our incubator kept on funding side projects: OurVerse, Vlang and a stealth project around blockchain. All of these will become key components of the greater ThreeFold vision.
- A part of our team moved to Zanzibar, Tanzania to work on some projects. We’re incredibly excited to share some of these use cases with you very soon in the form of e-books which will act as open-source blueprints for anyone to see how ThreeFold technology can empower a new Internet paradigm.
You might wonder what all of this means for the future of our project? Our team is more confident than ever. We are currently self-financing 80% of our expenditures and getting support from friends and community members, so it’s ramping up again.
In the next few weeks and months, we will take the time to take you through our vision, emerging use cases and plans to enable an Internet 2.0 — one that is designed to regenerate our planet, empower people and create long-term sustainable value for all participants. Our plan is to begin the deployments of the first regional Internets in H1 2023. Together, we hope to visualize and externalize our projects much more to attract early adopters that will support us in scaling globally. Decentralization needs to be much more present in our project. We need to make it much more simple and actionable for our community to join in the upcoming developments, and we look forward to your ideas and support to make this process as smooth as possible.
Values are incredibly important to us. The new Internet needs to be based on a new set of values — authenticity, planet and people first. We are very serious about this and refuse to fall into the trap of “fake it till we make it”, “pump and dump”, or any forms of manipulation towards people. This might mean that ThreeFold in its approach is not for everyone, but we’re confident that the time has come for communities like ours to lead by example in challenging global times.
Our dream is to build the most decentralized Internet platform in the world. We’ve been highly inspired by Bitcoin and aim to do everything we can to support a model that empowers people to lead the technology towards its ultimate potential. We look forward to defining what this means together.
What we have built is truly crazy — a framework to roll out decentralized Internets owned by communities. This is no longer a pipe dream as all the essential components are already built, from the low level infrastructure and the digital twin concept (web 4) to a new metaverse layer and a new indexing system for the web. There’s much more coming, and we’re so excited.
What we have today:
- The ThreeFold Grid 3.7 is usable for compute and storage workloads. Everyone can deploy kubernetes clusters and virtual machines on the grid, use our quantum safe storage system to store anything, autonomously deploy some workloads such as blockchain validators and many other cool Internet applications. The UI has been improved and we’re working on a new manual which should be shared with you very soon.
- What we have here is incredibly cool but we miss a team who can bridge the gap between engineers and a market. We’d like to incentivise some community members with a TFT pool to find more early adopter communities within the space.
- FreeFlow, the first implementation of a digital twin (thank you Jimber team!) is getting ready. Anyone can already play with it today and will soon be able to deploy it privately on the grid. FreeFlow Twin is an alternative to Google Docs, Whatsapp, Zoom, Chrome and more. A website is being prepared (draft): https://www.freeflow.life/ and we are planning for a crowdfunding campaign to speed up this project soon.
- Our metaverse startup has done an amazing job and we will soon be able to deploy it on the grid. The rendering quality is unmatched in the space and can already be run from the browser.
- Our biggest strength is our people. We have an amazing team, incredible supporters, and a vibrant community. Without all of you, the journey wouldn’t be the same. Thank you for your unconditional support.
As mentioned above, we feel confident, we believe we know what we need to do, we need to be focussed and allow the community to come in and collaborate on a lot of the work which needs to be done. This is how a decentralized project needs to act.
Please allow us to try and avoid some potentially misaligned expectations:
- The price of TFT will not rise because of speculation, hype and marketing. TFT will naturally become scarce as people buy TFT for multiple use cases:
- Deployment of Regional Internets
- Staking for our validators
- FreeFlow Twins
- Utilization of the TFGrid
- ThreeFold might also be used as an alternative to Amazon or Google Cloud. However, our vision is to become the underlying layer for a decentralized Internet on which everyone can build their own experiences. We will leave it up to the community to build anything on top, there is a 50% margin in the proof of utilization algorithm that rewards sales channels.
- We believe our project will grow because of the deployment of some large size and value aligned use cases for the grid we are working on. This might take some more time. We need to resolve some necessary requirements like more decentralized tools for community and grid expansion and concluding on one of the projects which will provide more fuel to power our expansion (funding or revenue).
- The token price might be volatile and undervalued for a while longer. There is a plan which will be executed once the required funds are available and that the timing is right in relation to all the actionable items mentioned in http://liquidity.threefold.me
Thank you everyone for your tremendous support. Together we build the new Internet. Our Internet.
Warm regards,
Kristof
Btw: If you wanna read my latest blog about why we do what we do, see https://medium.com/p/5251e0da6a76.