When our team first met more than a year ago, we set out to change an industry. The heavily centralized and abusive music industry. And over the last few months, we spent many tireless nights developing, testing and prototyping. We wanted OPUS to be a project characterized by a great product, fair pricing and dedication to both to artists and listeners. That is why, our main objective before the Crowdsale was to develop a working demo version of our idea, and today, 3 weeks after the end of the Crowdsale, we can definitely admit that things are finally beginning to materialize.

In the sale, we managed to sell 133,308,531 Opus tokens of the original 900,000,000 Opus tokens available, for a total of 17K Ether. Even though, we originally had higher token sales, we are still fully satisfied with the final sales. It will definitely help us as prepare a public release in the coming months, which will be a fully decentralized music sharing platform.

Our goal of the crowdsale was to be as transparent and decentralized as possible. In fact, unlike many other previous crowd sales where teams had access and would “secretly” increase the cap or length, we disclosed everything. This meant independently including block # and hard cap directly in the crowdsale contract. All these variables were publicly visible on etherscan.

One downside of this “code is law” perspective, which caused some criticism from the community, is that the time displayed in some parts of the website was inconsistent with the actual Ethereum network performance. In fact, the average block times increased from 18 seconds to over 22 seconds over the course of the crowdsale! But overall we were pleased with the crowdsale results and achieved our main goals.

We are devoted to the long-term perspective of the product. In this regard, we wanted to show a dedication to the community. After advice from people in our communication channels we decided to voluntarily burn a significant part of the foundation’s tokens from the team and foundation pool. Today, we would like to describe this process in a more detailed way.

Initially, The total supply of opus tokens was 1,700 Million. This supply consisted of:

900 Million dedicated for crowd sale, of which unsold tokens would be burnt. At the end of the crowdsale, the smart contract will burn all of the remaining tokens from the crowdsale pool.

600 Million distributed to the Opus foundation, developers, and angel investors

100 Million of ecosystem tokens used by the foundation to vitalize the Opus music eco-system. These tokens are supposed to be used for early-adoption rewards, licenses, artists and advisors.

In a bid to make sure our goal of decentralization was met, the team voluntarily decided to burn an amount of tokens similar in % to the amount of unsold tokens. We have not backed down on our word. We would like to announce here that we have officially burn the tokens at the Null address. You can view it right now here. In this transaction we publicly burnt the 584 Million tokens which belonged to both the foundation and ecosystem allocation (Minus some for bounty distribution). It is almost 85% of the tokens which were allocated to the foundation and team, but as we are truly devoted to the long-term product development, we believe giving the community a greater portion is best for the future of the Opus platform.

The overall sale of token was also a success and met our other objective of making sure everybody got the opportunity take part in. Unlike many other crowd sales that had behind-closed-doors deals that only catered to whales (We had several organizations approach us with over $500,000), we fully rejected those offers. We wanted the sale to be as fair and FOMO free as possible and we believe it was a success. Currently, there are only 4 wallets with more than 1% of supply. The biggest individual contributor holds 2.8% of total OPT supply.

We totally understand that our community might criticise us for not putting a priority on exchanges listing or delaying the bounty distribution, and that is why we would like to say sorry to anyone who was disappointed after our initial ‘after-crowdsale’ performance. With this post, we will like to make this a start to series of updates regarding further OPUS development.

Next up will be a blog post regarding the more technical side of the platform.

Thanks again for supporting us during this hectic time!

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For business inquiries, artists, issues, and support, just shoot us an email at info@opus-foundation.org