To the Blockstack Community:

At Blockstack, we have always been planning for the far future. We intend for Blockstack to have a truly decentralized future, and we believe this means that no single entity must drive the system, including the founding organization with the original developers.

Blockstack passed many milestones this year: we’ve registered more than 73,000 domains on our new decentralized internet, raised $4M in funding, doubled the core team, saw many amazing applications emerge, and organized the second Blockstack summit in Mountain View, which grew attendance 4x.

Today, at the Blockstack Summit 2017, we announce the Blockstack token and mining system. The Blockstack token gives stakeholders in the community more control over the protocol, establishes rewards for app developers, and introduces new features. More information on introducing tokens and incentives into Blockstack are discussed here and here.

It’s All About the Long-term

We’re seeing a renewed interest in the crypto-economy. At Blockstack, we started working on this technology in 2014. Long before the area was getting mainstream attention, we dedicated our time and energy to our mission while the crypto-economy was in uncertain times, and we’ll keep working on it regardless of market conditions. We know the builders who truly believe are out there, driven by our shared mission for a new and better internet, and that their drive does not fluctuate along with market interest. We need those builders, dreamers, engineers, and hackers to come together to build a shared ecosystem on this new internet.

Our task is intelligently constructing a system that has the capability to evolve based on the will of the actual stakeholders in the community, not the ideology of a few core developers or the whims of the vocal minorities or the pressure of a few thousand nodes.

A Blockstack token allows us to do all of this. With the Blockstack token and mining, we can make something that can function effectively beyond the lifetime of a single company.

We thank you in advance for your participation in our growing movement and remind you again that we are planning for the long-term, and hopefully, you are too. We believe this is the most sustainable, scalable, and stable approach to truly creating a decentralized internet built for developers and everyday users, and will continue to do so, for the decades to come.

A Note About Future Announcements

We will announce more details about the token sale in the coming weeks.

From what we’ve seen with previous projects, we expect a number of phishing sites to pop up. Imposters will announce details around the timing and location of fake token sales.

With this in mind, it’s extremely important to be careful with any communication related to the Blockstack sale. When the sale is set to start, we will give ample advanced notice and will never ask you to click a link. We will instead direct you to type “blockstack.org” directly into your browser. Further, it’s important you do not trust any information related to the token sale unless it’s (1) published on https://blockstack.org (2) published on our github at github.com/blockstack (3) confirmed by @Blockstack and @muneeb and @ryaneshea on Twitter.

Thank you and stay tuned for more updates.