Response to Concerning Post
George (Mirocana CEO)Hey,
It's not easy to rationally allocate limited resources. As the founder of the project that tries to do that in a most efficient way, I know that by practice. As we mature, I begin to face a new type of challenges. Challenges that are not connected to my main field of doing - development of trading algorithms.
Recently, some person wrote a review with some errors and misunderstandings that he knowingly or unknowingly added. I would like to address them.
Concern №1
This person claimed we added "fake advisors" to the site.
There are no and never were any "fake advisors". Currently, we have five advisors and they are shown on our website (except Vadim Koleoshkin from Zerion who joined yesterday - they conduct an audit of our smart-contract). Now we negotiate with four more, two of them awaiting compliance approval. I think we will grow our advisory board to 12 before the token sale starts.
He referred to our research group as "fake advisors" and it's wrong primarily because these people do not advise us on the blockchain, trading, legal or on any other aspects. It is a community of people that are interested in product development and have skills in data science. You can join this group too. We work with these individuals on a part-time basis and pay for each research task. They all agreed to participate in our research by providing us an email and answering a few question on their experience. Two months ago we added few of them on the website without of consent of doing so. It was my mistake since some of the people would like to remain anonymous while participating (some didn't want their employee to know they are working on something else). We deleted information about research group from the site and decided to make our research tasks available to everyone - we will conduct first predicting tournament in mid-November as a beta version of Mirocana Sigma platform. We are preparing the dataset (~19 GB) and finalizing the design of the platform's page.
Concern №2
This person claimed the lack of leadership and poor management.
I started the development of the system in March of 2015. Since that time I tried many approaches and rewrote the codebase 6 or 7 times. It involved the creation of my own syntax and backtesting framework for writing new strategies since any existing solution was limiting my ideas. For instance, I rewrote the majority of the codebase to switch to ClickHouse (the fastest database by many benchmarks that was released in July of 2016) in order to optimize and speed up the development. In the beginning, I had a day job and I was developing the system at night and on the weekends. I understand that some might worry that I, as 21-year old, may manage the company inefficiently, but I'm very motivated because I see very decent results and a huge room of potential. There's no way we stop.
In total, we have raised over $400k of investments for the company: $170k in May, $260k on closed pre-sale on 7th of October.
We are building a sustainable business of asset management. We already manage our own funds and funds of our investors and we profit from that. So far, we have spent just nearly 10% of the raised money, I spend money rationally and consider that as a very cost-effective result. We will become operationally profitable by the end of this year. I assure you, that we will invest more in product development and we will be hiring as many talented people as we could after a Token Sale. As a rationalist, I see that every dollar spent on the marketing of the Token Sale now will end up in 7-15 dollars of extra funding. That's why we are focused on a successful Token Sale now rather than product development - this is the fundraising stage of the development of the company. I deeply understand that our customers would like to see the system in action - that's why we will work twice as hard to make our products available before Token Sale starts. I have a strong vision on company development and we will continue iterating our system for better results.
Our mission is to make our complex AI-powered trading system available to our supporters on reasonable terms and grow the value of MIRO token. Our crowd-sourced learning platforms will be released according to our roadmap or earlier.
Today, 4 people are involved in the development of our predictive system in a full-time capacity. It's not enough, we are hiring more in coming weeks. We will restore bot's operation shortly. I invite any interested person to our office in the center of Saint-Petersburg.
Concern №3
This person claimed the shortage of MVP.
We have a working version of the system with 150+ strategies in it. As well we have a Telegram bot which operation was suspended in September of 2017. We will restore bot's operation this week.
We will never disclose the source code of our system because it's our proprietary intellectual property. Our main challenge is to make the system scalable to thousands of independent broker and exchange accounts.
To increase the level of transparency we plan:
Concern №4
This person claimed the legal issues.
We are working with very experienced lawyers to ensure that our Token Sale is legal and fully legitimate. They have been working with many other ICOs in the past. I don't see some critical issues that may end up in fines or other penalties. Our official response:
Mirocana is a two-company legal structure. Our first company is a Quebec corporation that holds all of the intellectual property rights to our state-of-the-art technology that we actively seek to protect via copyright, patent and trademark law. The Quebec corporation holds the rights for the Mirocana analytical software and may be seeking to obtain licenses for financial advising in Canada and/or the United States in the future. The second company is an Estonian limited company that is focused on developing the blockchain technology and will obtain licenses for financial advising in European jurisdictions where it is required by law. Since Mirocana is not a trader platform and we do not plan to engage in such activity in the foreseeable future, we will not be registering ourselves as brokers and/or traders.
We believe that legal stability is of outmost importance for the success of our business. Consequently, we have designed our legal structure to achieve the following goals:
• Incorporate in jurisdictions that provide favorable legal views towards blockchain, financial advising and crypto currencies;
• Gain access to corporate incentives provided to IP holding and IT companies, such as those provided by government of the province of Quebec;
• Easily register our IP and be able to transfer it between our sister companies without undue tax burden;
• Optimize our tax structure; and
• Ensure long term legal stability and predictability.
The MIRO tokens may be acquired from the Estonian entity as this company will ultimately be engaged in managing the Mirocana analytical platform, working with clients and supporting the licensed brokers and exchange platforms that register with Mirocana. In order for both Quebec and Estonian entities to act lawfully, all of the required IP rights and the rights to the software are duly and properly cross-licensed between our entities. The details of the software and IP rights licensing agreements may be available for the review to key prospective contributors upon request. The Quebec corporation is duly organized under the laws of the province of Quebec in Canada and the Estonian corporation is duly organized under the laws of Estonia.
Please note that MIRO tokens are utility tokens, i.e. they are digital asses that will solely give you access to the Mirocana analytical tools after launch of our prediction and analysis platform. Therefore, our tokens are not financial instruments or securities that will provide profits in the future by themselves to the token holders. Please note that the analysis of whether the tokens may be considered a security under provincial and/or federal Canadian legislation is similar to that of the United States. MIRO tokens do not qualify under the U.S. Howey test as financial instruments and/or securities. They equally do not qualify as such in Canada. However, if a prospective purchaser residing in Canada will inform us during the KYC process that he or she is investing because he or she believes MIRO tokens to be either financial instruments or securities, we reserve the rights to: ask for proof of being a ‘qualified investor’, reject such a purchaser of the MIRO tokens, or refund such a purchaser in full for his or her purchase in the future.
In closing
I have no doubt that our company will be successful. I personally work as hard as can to achieve super-results. Dealing with the posts that try to harm your reputation is very important since the reputation is not something you get, it is something you earn. We will make every effort to earn more credibility from potential token-holders. We will not charge any fees or commissions during the first 8 months after a Token Sale, during this period we hope to build the trust between customers and the system, and those who didn't purchase token on Token Sale would like to purchase them later in order to get access to our asset management products driving the value of the token up. If you still have any concerns or ideas how we can increase the level of transparency, please write directly to me.