New Website & New Branding

Designing for blockchain can be a challenge. The technology is still new and it is important to onboard those who are entirely new while equally accommodating the more advanced members of our community. In a series of workshops and design sprints our two senior designers Charlene and Kirstyn created a utopian vision of Neufund’s blockchain future:

“With Blockchain being such a new pioneering technology, we wanted to create a utopian fantasy. A futuristic-inspired world that conveys the spirit of adventure. It is a journey of discovery as we venture into the unknown, where anything is possible.” — Charlene

When it comes to the new messaging it was important that we make our aspirations clear: Enabling ownership for all. At Neufund, we believe that ownership should be more efficient, accessible and transparent. We don’t aim to reinvent the wheel — we want to provide the environment where ownership can be managed easily and efficiently. This is what our new claim stands for. Read more about our new branding:

If you are interested in participating in Neufund’s mission to enable ownership for all, this tool might be useful for you:

Term Sheet Ninja

Our new open source tool, Term Sheet Ninja, is here. It helps you calculate the investment terms for your term sheet. You can use it to configure your future Equity Token Offering (ETO) with Neufund or to model any kind of term sheet.

Learn more about the project here and try it out yourself. Our VP Ventures Agnieszka Sarnecka wrote about it:

“ While supporting companies at preparing their Equity Token Offerings and designing the platform we have realized that companies often need support when configuring the investment offer. That’s why we created the Term Sheet Ninja.”

She also spoke about the new tool and how to do Equity Token Offerings on Neufund at an event this month at Full Node in Berlin together with Emflux Motors. If you want to check it out here’s a video of her talk.

More events from the past month

We already mentioned in our last community update that our CTO and Co-founder Marcin spoke about token models in Paris at The Blockchain Day. You can now listen to his “Getting your tokenomics right: how to design them and why the token matters more than the money” presentation on Facebook.

Plus, our Investors Relations Manager Alex Molé traveled to NOAH London this week, where investors from all over the world gathered to connect with the most promising startups. From the diverse set of companies on display and lively discussion, it is clear that the startup scene in Europe is thriving.

Meet the Neufund Team in November

TEDx Munich with Zoe Adamovicz on the 18th of November

Hive61 in Poznan with Ula Lachowicz on the 20th of November

Bundestag Blockchain Summit with Zoe Adamovicz on the 28th of November

Open Letter to the Bundestag

Our CEO and Co-founder Zoe Adamovicz wrote an open letter to the Bundestag together with Frank Thelen, where they asked politicians to improve the regulatory environment in Germany for blockchain. Currently, there are no regulations in place leaving authorities, crypto investors and blockchain businesses in uncertainty. If watchdogs do not know how to act, how can we expect that from entrepreneurs and investors?

Some voices from the press

JD Alois from Crowdfund Insider wrote:

“The reality of operating in a jurisdiction where there is absolutely no regulatory oversight whatsoever, runs counter to what industry leaders seek — which is a structured and compliant ecosystem where crypto can thrive.”

And Marin Marinov from Cryptovest noted that:

“Both managers urged Bundestag members to issue immediate guidance to BaFin as changing a law or writing a new framework will take a longer time. Adamovicz and Thelen also called on Bundestag members that are pro-DLT to openly express their positions and to follow examples of Germany’s neighbor France.”

Neufund in the News

Our CEO Zoe Adamovicz was listed as Europe’s Top 50 Women In Tech by Forbes among other amazing female tech leaders.

“Women don’t wait for the future. The 2018 Inaugural Top 50 Women In Technology identifies three generations of forward-thinking technologists leading more than a dozen tech sectors across the globe.” — Kitty Knowles and Helen A. S. Popkin

Platform Development

Frontend

In October we added even more E2E tests that cover more features. And we are also preparing for our next release with new additions to come. This will include a series of new wallet functions. First of all, it will allow ICBM wallets to upgrade to our latest smart contracts to participate in upcoming ETOs. We are also working on a withdraw wallet. With this tool, users will be able to withdraw any amounts they have in the platform. Additionally, there will be a wallet migration tool enabling users to migrate within from incompatible wallets to compatible ones.

We are also upgrading our Metamask implementation to handle Metamask’s latest changes.

Backend

This month we finished the gas stipend service. The purpose of this service is to automatically exchange a small amount of nEUR to Ether (for those investing with nEUR). As a user of our platform, you need at least a bit of Ether to pay for gas used by Ethereum transactions.

Thanks to this service people don’t have to go through the painful experience of using 3rd party exchanges.

The service is small, but uses all of our core components. The process starts in the backend application where agents verify incoming euro transfers. Then the stipend service connects to our message bus that contains messages created by the Ethereum events reader. It uses the current EUR/ETH transaction rate stored in a smart contract that is periodically updated through our gas price oracle. Finally, it performs transactions safely using our transaction framework. And in the end you immediately (after a few ETH blocks) see in the UI a change in the Ether balance of a user’s account.

Platform Operations

We have decided to implement Thomson Reuters’ World Check tool for risk intelligence. This will enhance our KYC and verification process to meet all regulatory obligations and beyond.

Thomson Reuters’ World Check is an essential service which will support our due diligence needs in the fight against crime, bribery and corruption. World Check will help us to remain focused on providing high-quality risk intelligence that serves our Know Your Customer (KYC) procedure.

A happy mind is the key to a happy team

The Neufunders spent some time together over a sunny weekend in October. The team attended a very interesting mindfulness workshop organized by MindRind together with the Buddhist monk Gelong Thubten on October 21st. More than 15 Neufunders and the closest community (partners/friends) participated in it. During this full-day workshop, Gelong Thubten shared his knowledge and wisdom on meditation, mindfulness, emotions and reactions to stress. He explained how mindfulness meditation reduces stress and creates a better emotional balance. We discussed various topics and did some practical meditation sessions that can be useful for our further personal development.