Press Release: Harbour DAO Adjusts Whitepaper to Align Closer to Community-Driven Governance

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Press Release: July 10, 2017 – Dean Eigenmann CEO

Why we came to new ICO terms

Today, the 10th of July, we are announcing the new terms of our ICO. You may have read that we would sell all 500,000 Harbour tokens at 10 HRB per ETH during the crowdsale. After much debate, we have come to new terms.

Instead, our initial crowdsale, launching on August 1, will sell 150,000 Harbour tokens at 15 HRB per ETH. The remaining tokens will be released later, at a time to be decided by the community.

This means that instead of raising 50,000 ETH in the initial crowdsale, we will raise 10,000. It’s worth explaining the motivation for this structure here.

On the one hand, it is tempting to raise as much money as possible right now, especially given the amount of hype and capital being poured into Ethereum-based projects. A lot of external advisors were saying we should do just that, get as much funding as we can while the getting’s good. We could all certainly see their point; it would be great for Harbour to have $12 million of funding next month. And that is exactly what we were going to do, initially.

But after seeing what has been going on in the ICO space, seeds of doubt started to take root. We were inspired partly by Matthew Di Ferrante’s thoughts on how to do ICOs responsibly. The past three months have been a fever of token mania, and we’ve seen a lot of questionable ICOs raise a lot of money. All of us on the Harbour team have a pretty clear idea of the type of ICO we don’t want to be –

We didn’t want to raise funds and not deliver

Our initial plan to raise all the money up-front wouldn’t have created the right incentive for us. We would have raised 50,000 ETH (around $12 million or €10.5 million at current prices) in one go, and for the rest of the lifetime of the project, we would be responsible for managing and stretching that lump sum, using it to build the project.

But imagine us six months after the crowdsale: now we have all the money, but we’re still hard at work in the logic-mines. From the moment the crowdsale ended, we would essentially be working for free. Then what happens if we meet a hard engineering problem? We don’t get extra money for solving it. Our financial incentive has become decoupled from the engine we’re building.

Other ICOs have raised all the money up-front. It’s still too early to say for sure that they didn’t deliver a product, for some of them, it’s looking less and less likely.

With the structure of the ICO we are announcing today, we will only be raising 10,000 ETH to begin with. This is equivalent to about $2.5 million or €2.1 million at current prices. This is enough money to solve to keep development humming for now, but it’s not more than we need.

The remaining 500,000 tokens will be sold later, so it’s in our interest to convince the market that Harbour is a worthwhile token. If we build a quality product, those 500,000 tokens will sell for a good price; if we don’t, they won’t.

We wanted to hold ourselves accountable to the community

The genius of the blockchain is decentralized governance. We are building the Harbour DAO to take this a step further, with democratic voting and governance on the blockchain.

We believe the rules we have chosen for our ICO are consistent with this ideal. Why? Because this way, the community basically control our paychecks. After the sale of 150,000 HRB next month, the decision to raise funds by selling the remaining 500,000 will be determined by the community.

In other words, we are opting to get paid a bit, develop a bit, get paid a bit. And the better the development goes, the higher the value of HRB will be. This is the right incentive structure: our own financial success is tied to the project’s success.

By contrast, the model of raising all the money up-front — used by a lot of well-known ICOs — would have essentially forced backers to stake their trust in us as central authorities, managing everyone’s money for them. We didn’t want to be the sort of ICO that asks backers to trust them with their money, based on nothing but promises for the future and a roadmap.

We wanted to earn money from a solid product

The recent rash of ICOs has seen some make big splashes onto the market, making high valuations very fast.

That’s cool except for the way it has nothing to do with the product. You can inflate the price of anything — even the worst junk token — with enough short-term hype. But hype never lasts.

While it is a tradable token, Harbour isn’t just another cryptocurrency; it is the first Decentralized Autonomous Organization for managing token assets, and we want to build the most solid protocol and the highest-quality product possible.

We believe the ICO structure we have chosen reflects that. We are releasing the tokens bit-by-bit, probably over the course of a couple of years or so. This will give the market plenty of time to sniff out any weaknesses, and incentivize us to build a truly solid product.

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The best decision isn’t necessarily the one that makes the most money in the short term. We are developing and launching the world’s first Decentralized Autonomous Organization to manage token assets — and that’s a marathon, not a sprint. We believe that if we uphold ethical standards and build a solid product, it will ultimately serve us, as well as our tokenholders.

While it’s always hard to say no to the short-end money, we believe we are doing what is best for the community in the long term.

To read more about Harbor, Click here.

To Visit Their site click here: https://harbour.tokenate.io/