Dear IOTA Community,

At SemkoDev we are committed to the future of the IOTA technology and its great Community. We have a deep respect for the founders and the developers doing great work for the benefit of all.

In the last years we have invested over a thousand of hours into research and development of open source tools for IOTA, something we have enjoyed very much and where we received great support from the Community. Another set of uncountable hours have been spent on researching generic network and distributed ledger solutions, which gave birth to our consensus system, among other things.

During the last months several business use-cases and opportunities appeared, where distributed ledger technologies could be used to solve important problems. We see IOTA as being far ahead of many DLTs, but at the same time, unfortunately, it has currently several drawbacks that prevent it from being used in these projects. Coordinator and scalability through clusters being some of the issues to be solved.

We have found promising solutions to these pressing issues that we want to explore in a series of B2B proof-of-concept projects. We have created first implementations, tests and also applied for a patent to protect our intellectual property.

Unfortunately, we were unable until now to find a common ground with the IOTA Foundation to discover a way for us to contribute in a more direct and effective manner to the core IOTA technology, in a manner that would suit all parties.

We are a business and, of course, we do have commercial interests. Most of all, because like any other business, we need a way to finance our R&D efforts. Without it, no innovation or research can be sustainable. IOTA Foundation, on the other hand, being officially a non-profit organisation, has a slightly different approach to this technology and also other financial instruments at its disposal. And this is completely okay.

However, as a commercial entity, we cannot simply give away an intellectual property, that is unique among all DLTs and that costs us so much to develop. Being small forces you to choose your battles wisely. The IP gives us the edge on the current market and allows us to find the funds to finance our further research and development in the DLTs. When we have completed the PoCs we intend to publish the code as open source and disclose all the details of the technology.

At the same time, we want to support the IOTA technology, by exploring on our own the ways of how our technology can be applied to IOTA, and perhaps some day in the near future, it can even serve as a better alternative. A good plan is the one with the most options and maybe IOTA would have a unique chance to choose between several good or great alternatives.

We stay committed to the IOTA technology and we will work on ways that could bring it to a whole new level in the future. For more answers regarding our work beyond IOTA, please visit the FAQ at http://phybr.tech.

During the rest of the year we will prepare for the upcoming projects and enjoy the holidays with our families. We will stay in touch.

Truly yours,

The Team of SemkoDev