I think the value in a New Year’s Eve lies in the fact that with the switch of the calendar’s biggest unit, this time from an 8 to a 9 at the end of it, we are also reminded that a sizeable chunk of time has elapsed. It is thus a time of reflecting upon achievements and challenges of the past and charting the course for the future.

2018 was not an easy year for the crypto-verse. At the same time, hard times give birth to great solutions. When things are running well and all coins moon, whether they deserve it or not, people become complacent. Conversely, when the whole industry is crashing down, it swipes away all the players, good and bad, and success becomes much more elusive for all. Ultimately, as history shows, on the macro scale, it’s the fundamental movement and strategy that matters, not short-term diversions. The longer the time scale of the graph is, the fewer sporadic ups and downs remain visible, and the more evident the fundamental movement becomes.

Just as we were cautious at the times of euphoria of 2017, we were unrelenting and confident throughout the depressive 2018. While the pendulum is swinging violently, amplified by various forces benefitting from the instability and extreme sentiments of the public, Ambrosus marches on with its dedication to build the decentralised backbone for IoT networks of the future and to work towards adoption of this backbone by different actors of the global economy. It has always been a long-term mission for the Ambrosus ship, and irrespective of whether we are faced with tailwinds or headwinds, we will simply adjust the sails accordingly, but our direction remains clear.

The trends below pertain to those adjustments of the sails that I envision for 2019. These are my planned high-level actions for the direction of the ecosystem in this year. They will be complemented with specifics and documents in due course, but for now they offer a glimpse into where we are heading. These trends are not necessarily organised in order of preference. Apologies for any possible typos, as everyone is celebrating NYE right now, so nobody to double check the text.

Distinct Crypto and Corporate Value Propositions

The architecture of Ambrosus ecosystem is influenced as much by engineering and game theory, as it is influenced by law and politics. It has become increasingly obvious in 2018 that the two layers of AMB-NET: (1) the core blockchain protocol and immediate infrastructure; and (2) all enterprise-oriented products such as the Hermes Dashboard, Mobile Checkers and the IoT tooling — not only address fundamentally different audiences, but offer inherently different value propositions and require fundamentally different approach. In short, corporate players want products that work reliably and bring value, convertible to dollars, and they may not care much about decentralisation. Blockchain and crypto players value privacy, censorship-resistance, emphasis on the community and absence of central parties interfering in their affairs. Ambrosus team boasts both the product-obsessed engineers and decentralisation enthusiasts. In 2019 we plan to divide the technical team into the product team and blockchain core team. Product team will focus on corporate users and their focus will be to build awesome dapps and software that will maximise bundle generation on AMB-NET. Blockchain core team will focus on the cryptoeconomics robustness, decentralised infrastructure, scalability, improvements to consensus mechanisms as well as the core blockchain products, such as the Explorer and Wallet as well offering the launchpad for ICOs and Dapps on top of Ambrosus core blockchain. Their KPIs will me maximising usage of core blockchain, active users of AMB and the core value proposition that a robust cryptocurrency offers. This way, the two technical teams can focus on their own objectives, which jointly strengthen the value and benefits of Ambrosus ecosystem. Similarly, communication tools will also be divided into Corporate and Crypto (in particular, the website and core slide-decks. Our website will be split into two major sections: Corporate and Crypto/Dev-oriented). I believe our approach in 2018 to offer “best of both worlds” did not work, because we were too centralised for the crypto-community and too decentralised for many corporations, in the end not satisfying either side. This adjustment will create strong value propositions for each part, and each distinct part will be tailored and marketed to their own distinctive audiences. As experience showed, there is very little overlap between crypto-geeks and conservative pharma execs.

Decentralised Legal and Operational Structure

Since its inception Ambrosus has been an international project, co-organised and implemented by various partners located in various jurisdictions. In line with the more distinct value propositions for Crypto and Corporate that we will be making, there will also be a clearer distinction in our respective legal and operational structure. Switzerland offers great innovation opportunities and has strong scientific community and world-leading institutions, which is why it is going to continue to be the R&D hotbed for Ambrosus with the innovation lab and part of the product team to continue working out of Switzerland. At the same time, in order to avoid any clashes with Switzerland due to its significantly more conservative attitude to cryptocurrencies, we will continue to avoid positioning anything related to cryptocurrencies as coming out of Switzerland, in order to avoid risking reputational damage for Switzerland. One of the challenges we experienced, has been the flag, under which our project is supposed to fly. On the one hand, a big part of our R&D team are Swiss, based and working in Switzerland and work with the leading Swiss institutions and participate actively in the Swiss ecosystem. Therefore, we do have a legitimate claim to claiming to have Swiss technologies. On the other hand, due to the legal complexity, high cost compliance and operational challenges, our main operational base has been Estonia, where we are likewise employing a lot of our team members. However, whether it’s Switzerland, Estonia or Ireland, these countries are our operational hubs where we perform R&D, product development or business development activities. These countries’ legal framework as it currently is, is not conducive to cryptocurrency-related activities, without running afoul of regulators and running prohibitively high compliance costs. Thus, similarly to Crypto v Corporate value proposition, some jurisdictions are more conducive to doing business and offer great reputation at the price of high compliance burden (good for corporate activities), whereas other jurisdictions offer a lot more flexibility for pioneering activities (good for crypto). Crypto so far is looked upon negatively by most regulators in most large or sizable economies and thus from a legal stand-point it needs a publicly communicated legal entity. Our crypto-related activities have already been largely done from various jurisdictions to avoid conflicts with regulators, but from now on a dedicated legal entity will be operational in Belize, whose sole purpose will be to be the legal/administrative office for any crypto-related activities for our cryptocurrency AMB. Thus, to avoid any ambiguity, our ecosystem’s core activities — and respective legal responsibilities — are taking place as follows: our R&D is taking place in Switzerland (three legal entities), product development is in Estonia, business development is in Ireland and cryptocurrency-related activities are in Belize. These are the official “flags” of our ecosystem, each country having its own clear purpose and clear responsibilities.

Stronger Emphasis on the Cryptocurrency Element of Ambrosus

From the legal and operational points above, the best news is that we can be bolder in pushing for the stronger uses of AMB as cryptocurrency without having to dance around the barn with regulators. I am personally a strong believer in the core value proposition of cryptocurrencies. Unfortunately, the vast majority of regulators are anti-crypto, being rightfully fearful of the threat of cryptocurrencies to challenge and create real competition to national currencies and other instruments that so far only the government can control. This has resulted in a lot of projects literally crippling the full potential of their crypto by trying to design it in a way that satisfies the regulators and lawmakers. There are two fundamental problems with this approach: 1) cryptocurrencies are a new phenomenon, and their true utility can only be realised if the law is appropriately adjusted making room for their innovation and positive disruption; 2) lawmakers and regulators are aware of the fundamental threat that crypto offers, and thus they will never be truly satisfied, until they can exercise full control over crypto or at least all the key gatekeepers and stakeholders. While we are continuing to engage various regulators and stakeholders in our key countries, we do not want to keep on waiting while they deliberate and propose new rules, and to limit the progress of our entire ecosystem, including the value proposition that Amber (AMB) our cryptocurrency offers. In particular, as we are preparing to onboard external masternode operators in January and February, we want to integrate AMB into the wider digital economy, not merely as a token limited to the platform but as a widely recognised, trusted and used decentralised cryptocurrency. Radically departing from our previous consistent practices of 2017 and 2018, through our Belize entity and on its behalf as our crypto-operational base, we will be immediately starting activities with a number of stakeholders to improve various indicators related to the cryptocurrency itself. In particular, we will work with liquidity providers and wallets with direct fiat gateways (e.g. ability to top up those wallets using a wide variety of funding sources) to improve accessibility to AMB for wider public and to strengthen the stability of AMB. We will work also on the key products such as AMB wallet with the needs of crypto users in mind. In the end, bundles generated by corporations will be priced in USD and most corporations are realistically very unlikely to use cryptocurrencies in the foreseeable future for their daily operations. Thus, we will focus on the convenience of credit/fiat system for our corporate products, whereas for the crypto products we will work with values of crypto audiences in mind, making AMB a convenient and trusted choice for users to transact with each other in the global digital economy. Many times, throughout our pilot projects or in design of architecture, we were asked if AMB can work on financial settlement applications and to help improve efficiencies of financial transactions. Our answer was No, due to legal uncertainty. Now, with the new legal strategy, we can start realising those projects where AMB possesses new features and utilities. We are going to have also team members working specifically on this area. I am personally inspired by how Ether (ETH) has evolved into a multi-purpose token and how it offers different utility to different users. I am going to launch initiatives that make AMB the multi-purpose cryptocurrency for the IoT economy.

Expansion of AMB Ecosystem via ICOs, STOs and Dapps

With the stronger value proposition of AMB and the onboarding of the first wave of external nodes (which reminds me, Wave 1 will be announced and onboarded on Test-Net in the week of 14–18 January) — with these actions set in motion, our platform will become available as the launchpad for ICOs, STOs and Dapps, especially for those projects that are geared towards IoT or hardware more generally, who may in particular benefit from all the IoT infrastructure, tooling and products we have build and are maintaining. Moving beyond simple use-cases where AMB is accepted as crypto in an ICO/STO (as was the case with ShipNext STO earlier this year), we will work with projects actually being vested in the success of AMB ecosystem. To spur the development of the ecosystem, we will offer teams and projects launching on AMB blockchain packages of AMB. Depending on the USD rate of AMB, we plan to offer up to 1 million AMB to projects, provided they remain committed to our blockchain and also provided they remain vested in AMB for a minimum period of 2 years after launch (i.e. part of the project’s crypto must always be in AMB for a minimum of 2 years, subject to extension). We will be launching calls for proposals for projects launching on AMB-NET in the foreseeable future. Likewise, right now Ambrosus is working both on the blockchain core as well as corporate product level, which is challenging. We actually want a dozen new product teams launch on top of Ambrosus, making use of our underlying technology of blockchain and IoT protocols, to explore use-cases beyond the current food and pharma use-cases, and going into broader categories of supply chain, but also beyond — into the industries like smart cities or energy (for those thinking it’s far-fetched, consider a solar panel generating clean energy and recording each MWh of clear energy it produces into a bundle sent to AMB-NET, and consider that this bundle generates a cryptographic proof that a particular solar panel generated 1 MWh of clean energy at a particular time and you can pinpoint the origin of this unit of electricity, and our Atlas nodes can store this data for a limited period of time, while the blockchain reinforces the data integrity and IoT protocols assure security and scalability of solar panel to blockchain communication — it’s the same tech stack!) Right now, we simply do not have the bandwidth to truly realise all the amazing potential of Ambrosus ecosystem, which is why we encourage entrepreneurs and startups applying their creativity and business acumen to our technology. This is where we can significantly strengthen our joint efforts: Ambrosus delivers and maintains the core architecture and technical backbone, and dozens — maybe hundreds — of teams worldwide build their own products, their own Ambrosuses, on top of our Ambrosus. This is the limitless pool of creativity that we wish to unleash and take our system forward. Thus, communicate this far and wide: Ambrosus is not only hiring, but we are also available to help entrepreneurs launch and focus on business execution, while we focus on the tech and our flagship product. Additional details will be released over Q1 2019. We will likewise work with entrepreneurs, not necessarily launching on AMB-NET, but serving as integration partners for Ambrosus, offering to resell our technology or combine their consultancy/solutions business model with our technology. We are going to strengthen our efforts on releasing additional SDKs, APIs and tools to enable creating dapps and solutions on Ambrosus as easy and intuitive as creating a website on Wordpress. Thus, an emphasis on flexibility, scalability and functionality of our blockchain is also going to be a key emphasis. This will strengthen both the blockchain and IoT parts of our ecosystem.

Spin-Offs of IoT Products

As the first patents around our ecosystem generated by Ambrosus Innovation Lab are coming to fruition, we plan to launch additional legal entities around AMB ecosystem, either on our own, or jointly with some of our partners from the IoT/hardware side. Some of those entities may apply for financing from VC funds and other traditional sources. We will be exploring using a hybrid model for those spin-off IoT products, whereas where feasible, they will be financed via private placement executed in the blockchain environment of Ambrosus blockchain. In those cases, we will look at two possible scenarios of these spin-off projects reinforcing AMB ecosystem: either, those IoT devices will have a user-agreement limiting their use to Ambrosus blockchain only, or where use of IoT devices may be suitable in an environment for which a DLT does not make sense, then there may be a reserved pool of the STO in question, which will be airdropped on all AMB node operators, existing or queued. Thus, the IoT spinoffs will either make use of the underlying blockchain or they will provide airdrops to everyone operating or being in the queue to operate any level of AMB Masternode (beginning with Zeta level). The airdrops would be proportional to the holding stake of the respective node, providing value and service to the network. As the security of the network is directly proportional to the value of the stake/deposit provided by the participant (in other words, the more AMB a masternode operator has locked as a stake/deposit of rheir masternode, the higher is their economic incentive to maintain the integrity of the network), then it follows that the airdrops will be distributed proportionally to the contribution to the network integrity a masternode operator provides (in other words, if higher AMB stake leads to higher security/integrity of the blockchain, higher AMB stake will also lead to a higher proportion of any airdrop taking place within AMB ecosystem from spinoff IoT projects that will be received by a masternode operator; in yet other words, while the current cryptoeconomic model only differentiates between 3 levels of Atlas nodes and various Apollos for the purposes of reward distribution, this future model will take into account the actual stake/deposit that a user has — additional T&Cs to follow). This will allow us to strengthen AMB ecosystem, even when launching products coming from Ambrosus Innovation Lab that may find application elsewhere, beyond the realm of the DLTs.

Fortnightly Progress Updates

Finally, a small, less ambitious, thing, but a nice bonus nevertheless: having talked to our community, we have heard from many that they would like us to return to what was traditional for us in 2017: regular progress updates. This year, due to explosive growth of Ambrosus, a range of activities and our distributed teams, even internal communications have been at times challenging. Having done a comprehensive overhaul of our internal communications starting from 2019, we are likewise going to make it our standard feature to have a fortnightly progress update coming from Ambrosus, which we will traditionally release once a fortnight (= every two weeks; it turns out biweekly is an ambiguous term…), beginning with Monday 21 January 2019.