As you may have heard, the Swiss authorities have sharpened the compliance rules for ICO’s. The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA), has seen a sharp increase in ICO’s and has decided to raise the bar for ICO’s by extending their existing guidance of April 2017.

Although there is no ICO specific regulation or consistent legal doctrine, we’ve decided to “better be safe than sorry”. We want Grain to be a sustainable, long-term success story and avoid potential compliance issues that might disturb that trajectory. So after taking the advice of our advisor — KPMG — into consideration, the best path to take is to postpone the ICO, for now.

At the moment, we can’t announce a new starting date yet. We’re still in discussions with KPMG to see what the next steps are to fill all requirements. We do foresee, however, that we’ll be able to launch the ICO sometime during the month of March.

What we’re solving in the upcoming days These new ‘guidelines’ require projects to issue tokens immediately after receipt of ETH. We originally planned to distribute the tokens one week after the ICO. These changes require us to update our ICO smart contract. Secondly our KYC-process needs to be processed by an affiliated SRO of FINMA. Our current KYC-provider is not yet affiliated with the Swiss supervisory authority, which means we cannot use their services during our public ICO. We are in the middle of talks with two providers who can assist us with this. Because these are relatively simple things to solve, we’re certain that we’ll be able to start the ICO in March. However, it is likely that the ICO will run for a shorter period of time.

New bonus structure

Because we don’t want to let down our early supporters and instead reward them for their involvement, we’re proposing a new bonus structure:

Instead of the 20% presale bonus we offered originally, we’re raising this bonus to 25% for all contributions above 5 ETH.

At the same time, we don’t want to leave out the smaller contributors that now would have to wait longer before being able participate in the ICO. That’s why we’re also opening up the presale to everyone that wants to contribute more than 0.1 ETH. These contributors are rewarded with a 15% token bonus.

Presale extended until March 7th

Lastly, because the ICO has been postponed, we’ve decided to extend the presale for a few days, until Wednesday March 7th (9AM GMT). This gives you enough time to take advantage of the opportunity and participate with the increased bonus structure.

To summarize

We see a very bright future ahead for Grain and by postponing the ICO, we can ensure that that future doesn’t get jeopardized. This is the best way to protect both our supporters and the project.

Login to your Grain presale account to participate. https://presale.grain.io/register

Talk soon,

Onno Hektor / Grain.io

CEO & President of the board

Extra remarks