If June was a busy month here at SwissBorg July was downright hectic. Our Second Referendum on the blockchain was delayed due to the surge in the price of gas for ether transactions. Our tech team monitored the market closely, and when the price of Ether transactions had stabilized to a level that would keep the cost of participation low, our team made the decision to launch voting and allow the community the necessary amount of time to participate. The period for voting in our 2nd Referendum will continue to noon CET on August 3rd, 2018, with the possibility of extending it further if gas prices surge again.

Like the previous month, we have the good news that our tech team continues to grow. We’ve hired more engineers and feel ever more confident of delivering the products we have promised our community, such as the ICO platform that is already in place and supporting Helix Orange and our Investment app that is being built as we write. We are blessed with being located in Lausanne where one of the worlds best computer engineering universities, EPFL, is located which provides us with a vast pool of bright computer engineers.

The SwissBorg ecosystem is just like blockchain, products are as important as the community. We have taken new steps to grow and connect with our SwissBorgers. The most important of these was expanding our Blockchain Unchained event brand, which took us to more than seven major Asian cities ending in Tokyo where our Japan team organized two very successful and trend-setting meet-ups. Our Community Ambassadors have also been busy, on social media trying to reboot our subreddit, going to conferences, setting up pop up meet-ups, trying to show our presence and reach out to enthusiasts. Referendums, our way of tapping into the swarm intelligence of our community, are one of the best ways to practice our philosophy of inclusiveness and meritocracy. Our 2nd Referendum, asks our community which sector/industry they prefer SwissBorg to engage for inclusion in our ICO platform. In response to feedback from our community, we’ve improved this referendum by taking into account the holding time of the CHSB token to be more in tune with our promise of meritocracy.

Did you miss our July Q & A? You can view it here.

Tech update

July was Referendum Month here at SwissBorg. Our tech team worked hard to launch our second referendum which is going on right now until August 3rd, noon CET. We are happy that it has been running smoothly ever since the initial delay due to the surge in the price of ether transactions which would make participation too costly for community members.

Special shout out to Draazzzz, a SwissBorg Reddit community member who singlehandedly built an unofficial interface for viewing the referendum results: https://www.cryptalloc.com/rsb2/

For more on Referendum 2: http://bit.ly/2K0i33Z

ICO Platform Update

Our ICO platform is running well; we are in the second phase of structuring. Many DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) are asking us to run their campaigns. We are very selective and demanding regarding the quality of their business technology, the muster of their team, and a mission philosophy that is compatible with ours. We are setting up a pipeline to select the best DAOs to support on our ICO platform in the coming months. We are creating a selection committee and a diligence committee to bring onboard the SwissBorg ecosystem the best DAOs.

ICO campaign for Helix Orange our selected DAO is going well. SwissBorg provides them with technical and marketing support. Helix is one of the digital ID pioneers, focusing not only on digital ID but KYC (know your customer) as well. They already have their MVP (minimum viable product) and are running the pre-sale phase.

Legal Update

In the legal department, the big news this July was that Swissborg was accepted as a member of the Financial Services Standards Association (VQF), one of Switzerland’s Self-Regulatory Organizations (SROs), officially recognized by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, FINMA.

VQF will be in charge of supervising SwissBorg when it comes to combating money laundering and terrorism financing. Our team will also engage in advanced training with VQF Academy on applicable legislation as well as helping us optimize internal processes to guarantee the highest levels of compliance. Read more: http://bit.ly/2A8GAnX

Line Elodie Derungs, our energetic head of legal and her team, who worked hard to receive this membership, is a forward moving, highly engaged, engine here at SwissBorg. She sends this update:

- We hired several people to complete the core team with some very useful additional skills

- We continue to solidify our corporate governance and structuration of the group

- GDPR compliance is tough but we are progressing well as a team towards implementing the required processes for ALL our community members to profit from the highest level of data protection and not just for the EU residents as required by law. We go above and beyond for our community as a whole because: #WeAreSwissBorg