Adjusting Our Approach to Funding
From the very start of our project, our goals were singular: scale the project, complete the code base for v.1, move in lock step with the IOTA Foundation, use production ready infrastructure and make it an open source DAO platform before the end of 2022. Those plans have driven the direction of the Soonaverse since its inception last year.
We established a budget to achieve these goals and have been operating at breakneck speed to meet every milestone. Like most software startups, working this quickly established a large monthly burn rate. The teams created were large enough to bring the Soonaverse to the next level, but also came with a large amount of overhead.
Original Funding Goal
The purpose of the token sale was to finance our continued high velocity evolution by compensating a large team of developers to scale up the platform, and fund operations such as marketing, education, operations, finance, and legal. We also allocated a large amount for liquidity on exchanges.
When the market crashed and the price of IOTA fell, our costs in USD remained fixed and our runway shrunk. This is the reason our fundraising goal did not change, but the amount of IOTA necessary to support it rose immensely. We understood the risks of scaling up so fast, and that bearish sentiment could affect our future fundraising goals.
We decided to continue our plans around the token sale, since we believed that even in this market our project was fairly valued and provided the community an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of $SOON without needing to purchase an NFT from the SoonLabs NF3 collection. Unfortunately, we realize as this token sale is nearing its end that the funds raised wouldn’t be enough to drive our entire vision for the Soonaverse.
Next steps
We were able to scale up so quickly because we assumed more funding would be on the horizon. Since that’s not the case, we’ll reduce our operating expenses and pivot to a more lean approach as we talk to the community to find more equitable solutions. We would like to emphasize that no one is leaving the Fab 5. We are here for the long haul and this isn’t going to stop us.
We will be refunding all of the 1.8 Ti raised and engaging with our community to discuss what the best next steps should be for us, the platform, our valuation, and the restart of token raise and the Token Exchange launch in the coming days.
We have always tried to be the voice of the community, but this is a moment where we feel the best thing we could do is listen to what you want us to accomplish together, with the resources we have available to us. Thank you for your continued support and understanding.
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