Following Binance’s delisting announcement of Substratum, we feel it is important to clarify important aspects of our project to the community, and the entire Crypto sphere. This statement responds to all factors outlined from Binance as possible motivations for delisting

Commitment of team to project

Since founding the project in 2017, the team has worked tirelessly towards the goal of a secure and decentralized network, providing freedom to the open web worldwide. Most of the project team members are full-time and work from a physical headquarters in Columbus, Ohio. Their work commitment is first and foremost Substratum and they continue to deliver progress every week.

Level and quality of development activity

One glance at the Substratum GitHub will show not only a consistent stream of development and code commits overall, but a sharp increase in activity over the last 30-60 days as the developer team approaches completion of version 1 of SubstratumNode – the flagship product at the core of the Substratum Network. Quality of development is more notably seen in the robust source code, and the open beta versions that are currently being used and tested by community members worldwide. Users have successfully shown the compiled software working on all platforms and many different devices. A publicly released test showing content viewed from restricted countries was also released by a community member, showing Proof-of-Concept with one of the beta versions of SubstratumNode

Network / smart contract stability

Relating strictly to the ERC-20 smart contract itself, the team made the decision to do a token swap to a new smart contract in December of 2018 to remove a mint function that was included in the original design. This function, outlined in the original Whitepaper, was to allow network scalability in later uses of the Substratum Network ecosystem under very strict circumstances, but was later perceived to be a vulnerability by some in the Crypto Shere. This ‘vulnerability’ was noted formally by Binance in 2018, and has now been fully rectified, while still catering for the future expansion of the Substratum Ecosystem by adding additional decimal places (for an 18 decimal current token). It is important to note that no communication was received from Binance in 2019 raising concerns around the new smart contract. Further it should be noted that the token contract was audited by Quantstamp before performing the token swap. Therefore, the team does not believe there are inherent risks in the current smart contract.

Level of public communication

Our belief within Substratum is founded on being focused on an Open and Uncensored Internet, so the team takes public communication most seriously. We have been consistently active in our community across many social media channels and communication mediums and we are striving to improve in this area in many ways over our efforts in the latter half of 2018. Like any project, we face challenges and occasional delays, and the team does indeed apologize that certain goals we communicated were not reached as quickly as we had hoped. Part of this is from the nature of producing a product and vision that is revolutionary and disruptive, and paving the way towards our unique goal.

Since starting back in 2017, we have put massive effort into being transparent and open with ideas and team vision, even if not always well received by each and every one of our onlookers. In total there are over 150 informational videos on the Substratum YouTube channel, and our Headquarters has hosted monthly meetups for any member of the public to attend. Topics have included everything from Crypto Currency, Internet Security, and of course, the Substratum Network itself.

Additionally, we at Substratum are very fortunate to have an amazing core group of volunteer community admins who have been strongly committed to our community and relaying our public messages across various social media channels.

Responsiveness to our periodic due diligence requests

Until the Binance delisting announcement, there were no signs of ‘non-compliance’ or areas where diligence was not exercised in terms of requests or concerns from Binance.

Evidence of unethical / fraudulent conduct

Of utmost importance to us is to formally address further, any accusations of or perceived unethical conduct. We believe some concerns around this factor stems from an announcement to our community that there was a possibility that funds from the ICO will be hedged against a depreciated ETH. While some decided to interpret this as ‘trading’ funds, there were in fact no trades conducted and this can be verified formally through blockchain records and an inspection into founder and ICO wallet addresses. We have formally reached out to Binance to offer full transparency, and are adamant about providing clarity about this.

Contribution to a healthy and sustainable crypto ecosystem

Our fundamental goal is a healthy and open internet for all and of course this is coupled with our view that the crypto ecosystem should also be healthy, open and fair. With Substratum, we have constant involvement in the crypto space, innovative development in programming in the industry, a clear use-case that allows the technology to solve real world issues, have created dozens of full time jobs in the space and a physical headquarters to stage the project and house the team. Part of the vision is to expand the crypto ecosystem, by using the Substratum Network as an on-ramp for users to be exposed to crypto itself and the idea of blockchain for real world applications.

It should be noted that our first priority for SubstratumNode is of course to “Make the Internet Free (as in freedom) and Fair”, closely followed by our second priority of “Earn Crypto Currency, Change the World”. SubstatumNode stands to be the first product in the vision of an ever expanding Substratum Ecosystem, built on a decentralized foundation of users across the globe, no matter where they live. As anyone can see, we are not just in the Crypto Sphere but here to contribute directly to a healthy and sustainable crypto ecosystem.