The team behind Delphi has decided to do things a little differently from our predecessors. There are certain disadvantages to the approach we have opted to take; for instance, it is more difficult for us to directly market our platform, because there are security considerations involved for any form of communication or correspondence that is established or maintained by our team.

We are not a company, so we do not have a “marketing department” or anything resembling one. Instead, our core team intends to focus wholeheartedly on improving our technology and maintaining operational security. These two priorities trump all others; we do not intend to invest significant resources into advertising-based efforts or legal expenses. In fact, we consider this a competitive advantage and distinguishing characteristic of our effort in this space: we want to do one thing, and do it well. Beyond setting aside an extremely modest early advertising budget, which we believe will help to ensure a sufficiently-distributed initial token distribution, our team does not intend to dedicate our time or capital into marketing at all, as this is not our area of expertise. As such, we feel that it would be more appropriate, and safer, if social media channels (e.g. Slack and Reddit) were primarily maintained by members of the Delphi community, rather than any of the founders. We also hope that this approach will reduce the effectiveness of any phishing attacks or scams (of which there have been many recently).

This is not to imply that there will be any lack of communication or architectural transparency. We intend to be in continual communication with the community, doing our best to listen to and achieve its collective wishes as much as possible, every day. We will strive to answer every question that is asked and concern that is raised, as long as doing so would not risk compromising the project or vision. We want anyone who wants to contribute, in any capacity, to do exactly that. If you intend to contribute as a developer, we also highly encourage spending some time to make sure that you are able to communicate and contribute securely (and ideally privately). In the end, we want the lines between Delphi’s community and its team members to be blurry, or better yet, nonexistent. We’ve already received considerable feedback from the community in the brief time since our announcement, which we are absolutely intent on incorporating into our efforts.

One common suggestion that we’ve been seeing is requests and inquiries about whether we have any social-media bounty programs available. After some thought, we have decided that offering such a program is in line with the spirit and intent of the referral rewards program that we originally outlined in our whitepaper. As such, we have decided to appropriate all referral reward coins that would have otherwise been associated with non-referral-tagged contributions to the Delphi Fair Auction towards our Crowdsale Bounty Rewards Program. We have drafted up a basic proposal, inspired by other successful models followed recently in the space, to attempt to offer a fair and objective program through which participation can be quantified. However, we want to take a moment to say that if anyone strongly objects to any of the details of this program, please speak up… if the community, at large, has any better ideas on how to go about this, we’re all ears. We will be paying close attention over the next few days, to make sure that we are really doing what the community most wants here.

Maybe a grassroots movement won’t make as big of a splash as other, flashier, more “flagship” ICOs these days, at least in the early stages. We think that this is perfectly okay. As long as Delphi is built upon sound technical foundations, and earns a small but passionate community in the early days, we are confident that over the long term, our platform will win in the open market. Great things often start from humble beginnings, after all.

For those of you who are interested in giving this a shot with us, let’s show the world exactly what we are capable of.