Authpaper Delivery is running token crowd sales to gain support to continue the development of the platform. Soft cap and hard cap are 1 million and 41.5 million respectively. A lot of concerns on these figures and the sales situation have been raised. This article will discuss some common questions to the sales targets and budget of this project.

CREDIT: Getty Images

Why is the soft cap so high (1 million)? What is the budget of the project?

In term of programming, there are two major upgrades need to be done to build this project. First of all, this project essentially upgrade blockchain from a decentralized transaction table into a decentralized delivery job and stamp transaction table. Smart contracts in this platform need to support adding attachments (signed delivery records) and verifying the digital signature of a delivery record. It means that the block explorer and miner program need to be upgraded.

Besides, the peer application will need to integrate blockchain part, BitTorrent (BT) protocol and distributed hash table (DHT). We are lucky that these are open source. The integration is another major work.

Image from Wikipedia, Distributed hash table

We target to employ six staffs for this project for two years. The first year is for development and the second year is for maintenance. The cost is about 200K Hong Kong dollars (HKD) per month, so it is about 4.8 million in total.

Besides, we need to have some always on peers to keep the test net and the main net of the platform running. We will purchase four workstations with at least 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD as mailers and put them in four different locations in Hong Kong, to make sure the quality of service. We will also purchase two mining machines, host one server as block explorer, two servers (one in Singapore and one in Japan) as mailers to provide oversea support. As mailers take a lot of data traffic, the cost for hosting machine on cloud may be even higher than hosting a machine ourselves.

By this setup the quality of service on international delivery will be highly depends on how many public peers would like to join the network. In short, we need to do post-ICO bounty program.

The total cost on equipment for two years, including the rent, electricity, etc, is about 650K HKD.

Building a project takes more than technical development, our legal adviser suggests that we need to reserve a portion of the received capital on registering trademark and filing patent. Based on our experience, filing a patent in Hong Kong, China, Europe and USA takes around 500K HKD.

We are discussing with two exchanges, Ultraex and UpCoin Trading Centre, about listing this Authpaper Coin. The agreement is not settled as we have not paid any deposit yet. Normally listing fee consists of two parts, one is in cash, another one is in ICO token. Once we have past the soft cap (we can confirm the project can start), we will pay the listing fee cash part using the received capital and get the token listed on these two exchanges. The token part will be paid from the reserved portion.

By the way, as selling utility tokens are considered as sales in Hong Kong, it will subject to 16.5% profit tax.

Therefore, we are setting 1 million USD, or 7.775 million HKD, as soft cap. If the soft cap is not reached, the money received by selling coins cannot cover the development cost. We will refund, and then continue our project using the transitional path, venture capital investments.

Image from will corporate cost of capital really rise with higher bank capital requirements, https://www.gfmag.com

There is a big difference between the balances of coin receiving accounts and the claimed received capital, why? Why tokens sold in pre-sales are not distributed yet?

It is because most of the sales come from my current clients and private individuals, they paid in Hong Kong dollars. For those buying Authpaper Coin in pre-sales, there is an arrangement that the tokens will not be distributed until the tokens are listed on exchange. A lockup and encouragement for them to help the coin listing.

Difference between the hard cap and soft cap is huge. Why?

As discussed above, the setup of Authpaper platform under soft cap only covers development and release in Hong Kong. The quality of service is not guaranteed in other places. And the sales gain is only enough for two years. With more capital, we can setup more workstations as mailers and mining machines around the world to guarantee the quality of services.

To maximize the data transfer rate, there should be one or two mailers geometrically near the data sender and a lot of peers and at least one mailer near the data recipient. It means that mailers with high speed Internet access and disk I/O speed are needed around the world. Hence if the received capital is allowed (near hard cap), we will build or rent small server cluster to act as mailers and miners. Two in Asia, two in Europe, one in North America, one in Central or South America, one in Africa and one in Australia.

If the received capital cannot cover this, we will rent cloud servers in some regions instead. This saves the cost tremendously, but the platform will need more peers to keep the quality of service. Unlike mailers, peers only need small disk storage to work as they only keep some data pieces to accelerate the data transfer speed.

Image from VIRTUAL CLOUD SERVERS, https://www.ntscom.com

What do you think about the situation and budget of Authpaper Delivery? Feel free to comment here, or join our telegram group to express your view. https://t.me/authpaper_group