Year-End Report

2018 was a build year for the Aerum team. We successfully designed and built our unique, real-time scalable consensus protocol, and we developed the smart contract and blockchain client to support it. We created a technology to allow high-throughput gateways to facilitate our transaction rate. We crafted beautiful modular blockchain wallets for web, Android and iOS. We engineered a pioneering cross-chain swap mechanism and designed a unique collateralized cross-chain swap. In short, we have ideated and designed our vision for a public FinTech blockchain network powered by professional participants and based on the Proof of Stake principle.

Our approach to the funding and network bootstraps was to run a parallel public and professional campaign. We initially had started with an approach that seemed to be a standard — run a campaign with a fundraising target that should address the multi-year needs of the project and provide us with enough funds to support product development, marketing, community building, business development, onboarding, and the initial few years of network bootstrapping and mass roll-out.

However, the market downturn forced us to review and adjust our goals. We have taken a look at more traditional fundraising strategies that include multiple funding rounds based on delivery milestones, and have decided to implement this method as well. Our initial all-in-all goals of 5M soft cap and 20M hard cap were re-adjusted to 3M soft cap and 6M hard cap. This decision is based on providing enough funding to get the functional network out, bring partners on board, make the project operational and sustain it through the initial phase for a couple of years.

We have managed to bring several very strong partners on board, who will join the Aerum community bringing their extensive user bases with them. They have participated in the Aerum fundraising campaign and contributed $3M as pre-paid future service fees. We are also in talks with several more partners who are interested in participating.

We are very proud to have Bethereum as our most revent strategic partner joining Aerum with their 16,000+ member-strong community and an already functional market prediction application. Aerum is looking forward to working closely with Bethereum in January to bring a live pilot application for Bethereum and Aerum users on a PoC live Aerum network.

Our other partners such as Veracity Protocol, Zangll, Crowdbank are preparing to start an integration process and will be joining Aerum’s PoC live network AerumOne.

We are also in the final stages of finalizing 3 more strategic partnerships with well-funded and well-managed projects that address very important social and ecological aspects of humanity and Aerum is very happy to be working with them. These further partnerships will be announced very shortly.

Our big strategy change for the coming year is to pivot from solely focusing on the decentralized network and technology building side of things, to creating a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vehicle for B2B interaction with our customers and partners. To achieve this we are now building a Blockchain Cloud company to address SLA-based blockchain lifecycle management and support for business applications. This idea has proven very successful with our partners and we are looking to onboard many more in Q1 2019. We are also running a separate equity-based fundraising campaign with accredited investors for the new Aerum Cloud platform company.

Changes to the ITO

2018 has been a very hard year for everyone involved in fundraising. The Aerum team decided not to start an ITO before we have a fully functional Beta version of our software and firm dates for the live version delivery. We were playing a transparent, fair game. However, the delay lead us to start our campaign in the worst bear market in recent cryptocurrency history.

Our whitelisting campaign started on October 15th and is lasting until December 31st. We have collected a healthy number of subscribers, however constant strong selling in cryptomarkets did not create any favorable circumstance to actively promote token purchases during this period.

We have decided to focus on business development and let the bear market ride out. Fortunately, we are already seeing a strong recovery and the potential turn to a bull market. We see this as a great opportunity to participate in our token sale as well as list our tokens, hopefully around the very bottom of the crypto markets.

In order to provide more opportunity to our campaign participants we have decided to adjust our campaign time limits to allow more people to participate at their own pace. In order to do that we have decided to prolong our Crowdsale campaign from original end date of 31st January 2019 to a new date of 31st March 2019. The new Crowdsale dates are from January 1st 2019 to March 31st 2019.

Participants registered for the whitelist will have get an extended opportunity to purchase their allocation throughout the whole Crowdsale until March 31st with the same locked token price of 0.05 USD per 1 XRM token.

Aerum has also signed an agreement with ExMarkets exchange to list our XRM token during the second week of January, offering an opportunity to participate in the fundraise via an exchange. Once token is listed we will place a price widget on our website.

Last but not least, as our contribution campaign has been reduced to $6 Million USD and over $4M USD has already been received (mostly on institutional/private side). We are already past 67% of our fundraising goal and well over the 3M USD soft-cap. As soon as we hit $6M in combined fundraising we will terminate any further selling and will re-allocated unsold tokens from the token sale allocation into a long-term reserve used for staking and future funding campaigns.

In order to provide all campaign participants with more security, all tokens set to be distributed to airdrop/bounty participants and the marketing pool, as well as for all private investors, will be placed into a vesting escrow contract that will be unlocked by end-of-day on March 31st. More tokens will gradually become available through the vesting process over the next three months. We believe this approach will be fair for all participants and provide more security for those who purchased tokens during the Crowdsale campaign. As a reminder, founder tokens are locked for 2 years, while team and advisor tokens are locked for 1 year. We are in it for the long haul and believe that Aerum will become one of the world’s top-10 blockchains in the next 3 to 5 years.

Thank you once again for your support in 2018. We wish all of you happy holidays, and a productive start to the new year. Here’s to our mutual success!

Alex Rand

CEO of AERUM