Filecoin Answers to Questions from OneBlockCapital

LEGAL DISCLAIMER: (Sorry, i have to. Regulations.) This document contains forward-looking statements, which, involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other important factors that could cause our actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially. This document is not investment, financial, or other advice.

One Block Capital asked us some questions here: http://oneblockcapital.com/2017/08/01/one-blocks-questions-for-filecoin/ -- i really liked this format, so figured I would answer them in a post as well. Thanks for the patience waiting for answers -- as you can imagine, we are mired with lots of preparations for the sale. :)

Be sure to check out https://coinlist.co/currencies/filecoin for more info as it gets released.

> Q: How much has been raised in the advisor pre-sale?

About $52 million.

> Q: It seems to us that the dynamic time-based pricing (i) incentivizes the fastest clickers (ii) and risks DDOS-ing your platform or the ETH network; in addition to not being able to provide an actual indication of pricing - which is subject to the timing of the payment (could be very long for crypto). How do you plan to address these issues?

It is not meant to incentivize fastest clickers, and you will see that the CoinList UX makes efforts to reduce the importance of "fastest clicks". We (cannot promise but) will try to open the investment page ahead of time so people can familiarize themselves, read and acknowledge all the risks and disclosures, make their decisions, and even fill out part of the form some time before the sale starts. This way users can take their time and get ready to go before the sale officially starts.

Instead, what this increasing-price structure is trying to capture is the following:

Primarily this: in risky technology investments (crypto networks or startups), as funding is raised, the project is de-risked to some degree, both by the committed capital and by the specific investors investing. Earlier investors are risking much more than the investors who come after them, and it has always struck me as highly unfair to earlier investors to price entire rounds the same regardless. Instead, I think that de-risking should be balanced by an increase in price.

Since we think and are working for Filecoin to be worth a lot more in the future, then we naturally want to sell it at the highest price the market will bear. Subject to reason, if we can sell it higher, then we should.

This structure gives the strongest rewards to our strongest supporters, those who already plan to invest and do not care about how much has been raised, or what other investors have invested.

To some degree, we would like the market to price the investment, thus the increasing price function can find what the market thinks it is worth. Whatever this price is will inform network launch prices, so it would be great to get a sense of what the market thinks is fair currently. Granted, this is not nearly as optimal of a price-finding structure as, say, a Dutch Auction. But we find that this structure simultaneously achieves some notion of price-finding while also rewarding our strongest supporters.

Normally, startup companies have many rounds, at different prices, stretched out over time. In token sales, it is usual to have a single up-front fundraising event instead, with the requirement that the team better be able to finish everything they intend to do and launch a fully functioning network. Follow-on fundraising is not solidly figured out yet. Therefore, teams raise more to be safe, and this increasing pricing function helps us make sure we're selling it more fairly, instead of selling it all at the lowest price regardless of what people think it's worth.

> Q: Are you concerned with executing an effectively uncapped token sale – a model which has faced strong criticism in the cryptocurrency community? What benefit does a potential capital raising of >$100M bring to project development, especially when tokens are already retained by the team.

Our token sale IS NOT uncapped. It is capped in terms of the amount of Filecoin sold: 200M FIL.

Over the last few years, Protocol Labs has proved to the world that we know how to deploy capital to create valuable projects, valuable technology, and valuable software. To date, all of the work you see -- IPFS, libp2p, IPLD, Multiformats, Filecoin, CoinList, and all our research -- all our work has been funded by under $3.5M. We know how to deploy capital effectively. We have great plans for the Filecoin network and its surrounding ecosystem, at many levels of funding. We plan to deploy 100s of millions of dollars over the next few years to make Filecoin the world's best storage network, not just the best decentralized storage network.

We are prepared to carry out this fight already; even if we raise zero money in this token sale, we will do everything in our power to decentralize and optimize the world's storage. But let me be very clear here: it will dramatically increase our odds of success to have significant amounts of capital backing us. We need to recruit excellent teams of people; we need to fund the development of dozens of software tools, products, and services; and we need to invest deeply in forming a strong ecosystem, so that we get strong allies making Filecoin great.

I want to remind everyone reading this that Filecoin's competition is not the other decentralized storage networks. Our (collective) competition is the massive, centralized cloud storage companies. We are talking about the tech titans -- AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure -- the three biggest companies in the world have cloud businesses with BILLIONS of dollars in revenues, not just funding. In order to put up this fight, we will need significant resources. Yes, resources in the hundreds of millions will empower us to develop Filecoin as fast as we can, as well as the dozens of other tools and services required to make Filecoin a service and ecosystem remotely close to competitive with the centralized counterparts.

> Q: How do you address the potential valuation difference between the first (advisor) participant and last participant in the same token sale - which could be ~10x. Any justification or mitigation?

The advisor sale involved an amazing group of technologists, researchers, entrepreneurs, engineers, designers, industry leaders, and investors. All of these people and organizations (a) have been working hard with us for years to make IPFS and Filecoin successful, (b) have fully committed themselves to work hard with us and for the Filecoin Network for many years to come, and/or (c) offer tremendously valuable advice, hands-on help, knowledge, skills, resources, connections, and more. We will put all our advisors to work for the Network. And I am not kidding when I say that the group we assembled in our advisor sale is likely to be one of the most capable and powerful group of investors that have ever funded a project. And all of them are committed -- vested -- to work closely with us to make the Filecoin Network as valuable as they can, for years to come. Hence the discounted price.

We know our advisors will help more than almost any other groups. But I want to be clear that we expect value-add and help from all our investors, not just those from the advisor sale. We hope to and expect to engage with lots of amazing, valuable people and organizations through this sale. Everyone will be brought together and incented by the Filecoin Network and all our shared goals.

> Q: What is your use of proceeds under different scenarios for amounts raised?

We're preparing a number of "Sale Goals" that we hope to release -- this includes descriptions of software we need to make, integrations we need to make, projects we need to fund, and so on. We may still be able to ship this info, but time is short for us and we have dozens of things to do before monday.

We also, naturally, will not give away everything we're doing, because we have many ruthless competitors who actively read everything we post.

> Q: What happens if less than <200mm tokens are sold? Do they get burnt? If not, who owns them?

Good question. We should have addressed this in the FAQ in the "Sale Economics" doc.

We will split all remaining tokens as follows:

(1) We will first apply the remainder to pay for the costs of the token sale itself (note we did not take this out of the total allocations, like other token sales have done)

(2) Then, we will sell half of the rest to the public on network launch

(3) And we will keep the other half for market making: buying and selling filecoin on exchanges to provide market liquidity

> Q: How do the Chinese pre-ICO collections on Renrenico and Lhang fit in with the timed sale process (they claim to be Filecoin’s partners on the sale) – they have raised >20k ETH combined. Will they just dumped on Coinlist as the sale opens? How are they getting away with the accreditation process?

These collections ARE NOT AT ALL connected with us, and they HAVE NOT gotten any permission from us to do what they are doing (reselling). Some of them say they have negotiated a deal with us to be proxies (resellers); this is completely false! Investors should invest directly through CoinList and note that anyone who claims to have permission from us to be a Filecoin reseller or "proxy purchaser" is lying.

> Q: What is your target or best estimate for network launch (understand it is not a commitment)? This is not found in any of the documents.

We do not like giving such estimates since most software timing estimates tend to be wrong. That said, we are targeting 6-12 months, but it could be more.

Thanks for the questions!

Juan Benet