Neufund’s Community Update for March

March 2018

In the last weeks we’ve been working hard on preparing the launch of our new website together with our fundraising platform. This includes several exciting news and we are happy to already be able to share some details about what you can expect from the Neufund Platform. Our developers have been working on building an investor wallet for nEUR and Ether as well as the ETO listing page with several Platform features. All of this will be soon ready for beta testing. We already prepared an extensive overview for you on how to launch an ETO — the 2.0 version of an ICO, but scam free. The website will also have a new look. We got together earlier this year to re-brand Neufund to find a new design language which mirrors our vision. And lastly, we’re also happy to announce that four additional team members have joined us at Neufund. So here it is our second community update!

Neufund Platform Development

Up until now, we shared two blog posts explaining the process behind Neufund’s KYC and investment processes: How to register on the Neufund Platform to invest in ETOs and “Know Your Customer (KYC)” Introducing Neufund’s KYC and verification process. The first impressions of the new platform have been revealed: Registration, KYC and deposit of nEUR and ETH.

We are still working on the further components of the platform, however, you can already have a sneak-peek into the new interfaces.

Investor wallet

Similar to a banking interface the wallet holds liquid assets that could be easily added or spend. The Neufund wallet contains two types of digital assets:

Euro token (nEUR): an Ethereum token that enables acquisition of equity via an investment process on the platform. It’s one of the simplest ways to get into the world of Blockchain investments since the exchange course of this asset is always equal to EUR 1:1, thus very convenient for a typical investment portfolio with standard currencies. Ether (ETH): the second asset in your Neufund wallet which allows you directly invest in equity with no conversion needed. To keep things simple and convenient (accounting, bookkeeping, taxation etc.) each investment value will be shown in Euro Tokens (nEUR).

Investor Wallet

The total value of your digital wallet will be shown in EUR, so you don’t need to run daily calculations and constantly watch exchange courses.

ETO listing page

One of our biggest challenges has been to make the ETO registration as easy as possible whilst fulfilling all legal requirements of professional campaign listings. Thereby we are turning an expensive, time-consuming, bureaucratic process into a simple streamlined form which automatically generates, auto-completes and draws the term sheets of the investment campaign.

Please bear with us, as this feature will be constantly updated and re-shaped with every feedback we receive from companies registered on our Platform.

The ETO listing page is essentially a central dashboard for registered companies. We give full ownership over the design of this page to the first companies who are doing their ETOs with us.

Tech Update — Frontend

In the past months, we have been busy building the Neufund Platform for equity fundraising. Our team is enthusiastic about the progress we have made so far, but there is still a journey ahead until the Platform will be fully completed.

For now, we would like to give you a brief overview of the Platform’s development and the progress we’ve been making. We decided to break the registration process for an ETO down into several platform features which form six separate milestones:

Log in & Registration, KYC, Dashboard, Deposit Flow, Investment Flow, Company Listing (ETO).

Each milestone gets a story point estimation by a number of tickets and based on the previous velocity we are able to estimate the release of the milestone. This is how we are able to update the community and commit to some deadlines.

NEUFUND TICKET BOARD

On the product side, we are about to close our first 3 milestones. So we are exactly halfway through the journey. If you are curious, we are using the ZenHub extension for GitHub to keep our tools as lean as possible.

For our next step, we are looking for community members to test our beta release. And we are looking forward to implementing your suggestions.

Tech Update — Backend

Our backend combines smart contracts and a set of micro-services that support off-chain tasks. We build on the ICBM code base and currently, we are in a quick prototyping phase where most of the interfaces and implementations are ready and are being attached to frontend and micro-services. Some notable contracts include:

Universe contract which acts as a root of trust and interface registry similar to EIP 820.

IdentityRegistry which is a simple repository of identities with extensible claims and minimal usage costs. We investigated many options from implementing ERC 725 which involves significant gas costs to researching cheaper options where identities are forwarding contracts that are deployed with deterministic addresses. Finally, we settled for a simple and cheap contract that meets our requirements. However, that does not preclude porting our identities to different registries in the future.

Updated EuroToken, EuroTokenController and EtherToken which will function as payment tokens for investment.

Updated LockedAccount that ICBM investors will use to participate in ETOs.

In parallel contracts bound to legal agreements are designed and implemented. Those include:

ETO commitment and associated terms contracts with an attached prospectus, investment agreement, and reservation agreement

EquityToken base class with associated equity token holder agreements

Company contracts responsible for executing shareholder rights and associated shareholder agreement.

Interfaces and algorithms for those contracts are being shaped with our legal team. Both smart and legal contracts will be open sourced exactly as in the case of ICBM.

Furthermore, we’ll have the same obsessive testing approach as with ICBM with several reviews and tests for every possible use case, including simulations of ETO processes. You can monitor our smart contract progress on Github.

Blockchain fundraising with Neufund

As you know from the beginning our goal has been to create a fully-legal and compliant fundraising process. We take all regulatory and compliance requirements seriously, and we believe that many of them make sense. It is, in the end, our mission to protect the investors and the community — in this, we are aligned both with the lawmakers and with the Blockchain community’s democratic and inclusive spirit of transparency. ETOs are the ICOs 2.0 — scam free.

Equity Token Offerings align both worlds, ensuring real-life benefits for all parties. ETOs are an efficient and novel way to raise funds. Both investors and companies are equally incentivized. Companies address a large investor pool with a single pitch, and a syndicate can easily be built from even as many as thousands of investors. The symmetry of information provided by the transparency of the Blockchain technology allows all parties to achieve success.

Once the platform is launched and the first ETOs are running, we will open the platform for any type of innovative ventures. If your company is incorporated and has an innovative vision you will be able to register and list it on our platform. In the early stage of the platform, we will take a closer look at companies that apply for listing. To smoothen the process we’ve come up with a simple process to set up your own ETO on our platform.

Read more about the ETO process in a blogpost by Agnieszka Sarnecka, our VP Ventures here.

We’ve also released a one pager describing the process of fundraising with Neufund, take a look:

Available on our website here

Neufund‘s investor community

As you remember we have raised an equivalent of 12 582 992.64 EURO in our ICBM. All funds are reserved in a smart contract for future investments on the Neufund platform. We currently have a network of 1500+ investors in the Neufund community. This community consists of elite and prominent investors including Business Angels, crypto-HNWI, and retail investors as well as Venture Capital and Private Equity. We’ve included a list of notable investors below:

Meet the new team members

Let us introduce to you our new brilliant experts: Ula, Dave, Agnieszka and Marlene.

Meet Ula Lachowicz — VP of Marketing

Ula has been leading marketing and communication for SaaS and B2B products for eight years now and has been working in the tech industry for more than a decade. She started her fintech adventure at the Polish startup PayLane, building up the branding and marketing from scratch. Four years ago she moved to Berlin to start working for B2B enterprise focused companies, like Styla. She’s also the co-founder of the Polish Berlin Tech community of Polish techies and startupers here in Berlin, and co-organizer of the Polish Tech Night events. She has the Getting Things Done approach in her blood,which goes along well with Neufund’s marketing strategy.

Meet Dave Scharf — Senior Blockchain Developer

David joined Neufund at the beginning of 2018 as a full stack developer. He has more than ten years of freelance work experience in developing projects ranging from high traffic community websites, native mobile applications to full stack web applications. He has previously co-founded his own startup where he worked with clients such as BMW, Mercedes and Coop. David is passionate about working with emerging technologies that transform the way people interact with technology, which is one of the reasons he decided to join Neufund.

Meet Agnieszka Zak — Executive Assistant

Agnieszka has a background in linguistics, German and international law. After her philology studies she completed a postgraduate course in German and international law at the Warsaw University. She has worked for various companies in Poland and Germany, for which she has done administration, legal translations, sales operations and event management. She joined Neufund in March 2018 as an executive assistant to Zoe Adamovicz to work closely with the marketing department. Agnieszka is passionate about languages, Berlin’s cultural scene, sports and her hometown Warsaw.

Meet Marlene Ronstedt — Blockchain Reporter

Marlene is a journalist, writer and artist. She holds an MA degree in Digital Media Studies from Goldsmiths, University London and a BA from Leiden University’s Liberal Arts Honours College. She got interested into the crypto space, because of its transformative potential, whether it’s finance or governance. In her role as a journalist she has covered different Blockchain related topics. Her writing appeared in various English and German publications including the German Wired. She also is part of the collective Dangerous Tech Berlin with which she organizes meetups and writes about Berlin’s tech scene. Furthermore she is working on an art publication for a FP24, a gallery in Antwerp.

Join the Neufund team — we are hiring

We want to expand our communications and design teams. Follow all job openings here. We are specifically planing on hiring new team members for the following positions:

Rebranding Neufund — behind the new look and vision

In the beginning of 2018 we sat down together to rethink Neufund’s vision and branding. We wanted to see our legal- and reg-tech focus reflected in our design. During our successful ICBM which ended on the 17th of December 2017 we gained a lot of trust in our platform from investors, the crypto community and companies. In order to maintain this trust and sense of security in a constantly changing environment, we need to not only be professional and fully compliant, we also need to have a brand image that reflects those values.

You will be able to read more on our re-branding mission in a separate blog post which we will be published later this week.

NEU token now listed on Yobit

We are happy to announce that Neumark (NEU) has been listed on a new exchange — Yobit.

You can now trade Neumark (NEU) here.

YoBit is a Russian-based crypto exchange that was founded in 2015. Next to NEU tokens, it offers access to Bitcoin as well as hundreds of other altcoins. Yobit has a daily trading volume of approximately $30M. You can read more about Yobit here.

Currently NEU token is traded on:

HitBTC

Liqui

Yobit

ForkDelta

IDEX

Etherdelta

BitBay

Neufund in Media

This month we are more than proud to see Forbes listed Neufund’s CEO Zoe Adamovicz among the Five Female Rock Stars Leading the Crypto Scene in 2018!

Our CTO Marcin Rudolf commented on the Litecoin Hard Fork and was interviewed for the article “Is A Cashless Economy Ahead As Regulators Address Cryptocurrencies?” on Investing.com.

Neufund has been also selected for the Top 10 ICOs that are disrupting the financial services industry by DISTRUPTOR Daily. Thank you for that!

Industry news

What happened recently on the blockchain and cryptocurrency markets:

Neufund on Tour

In April the Neufund team takes part in the following events. If you are there as well we’re looking forward to meet you.

CRYPTOCHICS HACKATHON — Toronto, April 6–8, with Zoe Adamovicz and Ula Lachowicz

EVENTHORIZON 2018 — Berlin, April 16, with Zoe Adamovicz

HHL SPINLAB INVESTORS DAY — Leipzig, April 16, with Agnieszka Sarnecka

NUNATAK NETWORKING NIGHT — Munich, April 18, with Zoe Adamovicz

CRYPTO CAPITAL WORLD — Vilnius, April 25–26, with Zoe Adamovicz

FORUM FINANCE — Berlin, April, 28, with Agnieszka Sarnecka, André Eggert

All general info about Neufund can be read on our subreddit

Visit our subreddit to join the conversation and read all the information you need about Neufund in this post. Or join our telegram chat if you have questions or want to meet the Neufund community and team.