The goal of Saturn Network from day one has been to bring global cryptocurrency adoption faster. Money runs the world, and there are tremendous inefficiencies in the legacy approach that need to be fixed as fast as possible, before more people are hurt by the soulless system of gatekeepers and middlemen who extract value from people's work without contributing much in return.

Exchanging bitcoins for dollars is not the killer product of crypto, and frankly if that's the only thing that crypto is for then it's not that useful of a technology. What we, the people, need is to be able to download whatever bits and pieces of financial technology that we need, and take control of our money. We need to be able to fight back when oppressive or moronic governments are making irresponsible and stupid financial decisions that end up hurting millions of people. We're not advocating for anarchy, and not necessarily advocating for separation of state and money (at this point at least). What we do advocate for is being able to choose whether you want to use legacy financial system or use crypto exclusively, and have fair bridges in between. Ultimately it is a negotiation with the regulators, and if you've ever been to a negotiation you know that in order to arrive at a fair outcome you need to be able to say "No" and walk away from the negotiation. As of today the cryptocurrency community is not yet able to cut all ties with legacy financial system if we have to, and Team Saturn along with fellow cryptocurrency visionaries is working on making that a reality.

Before we could draw a roadmap we first need to visualize our goal as vividly as possible. Once we know what needs to be built we can proceed with breaking down the large tasks into smaller ones and explain how and when we get to the promised vision.

Saturn Network Roadmap

Final Stage: Saturn

Saturn Final Stage

The core idea behind switching currencies lies not with people, but with businesses. Businesses have strong market pressure to optimize their processes and expenses. The question then becomes:

How do we enable crypto native businesses?

For that, the business needs to be able to

Accept customer payments in crypto.

Raise investments and distribute investor dividends in crypto.

Pay partners and supply chain providers in crypto.

If that is not possible, there needs to be easy conversion between crypto received from customers and fiat.

Any currency price mismatch within the supply chain can put you out of business. Needs tools to mitigate this risk.

And yet, it's a catch-22 situation, because no business is going to deal with the above points until crypto is already in customers hands and they are willing to spend it.

While plenty of well funded teams are working on the customer story of global crypto adoption, Team Saturn is focused on providing the business tools, and we are uniquely positioned to succeed. We set out as a crypto native business in 2017, and do all our payments, accounting and fundraising in crypto. Our goal is very ambitious and very hard, but when we succeed all the tools and products that we develop along the way will be of immense use to humanity.

The beauty of Ethereum is that our work is compatible with the building blocks that other teams produce, and vice versa. This means that we are able to combine and partner with other teams in order to get to the final point faster.

Here's the product roadmap that needs to be implemented for a full cycle of goods ➙ money ➙ goods, which is ultimately what defines something being a good currency.

At the core we need to have DEXs. Uniting around one cryptocurrency, like the so-called Bitcoin Maximalists suggest, makes no sense for the goals that we set out. As someone aptly put it, "Bitcoin lets you build businesses around it, Ethereum lets you build businesses on it".

Ethereum was the pioneer of the movement to tokenize the world, which is a good thing when done correctly. However, Ethereum governance is still an unsolved problem. By creating the DAO bailout hard fork they've put an end to the immutability and "code is law" properties which were the cornerstones of what blockchains can bring to humanity - help humans organize themselves around a fair set of rules without no governments in between.

As such, we at Team Saturn believe in EVM, not Ethereum. Since the chains that run EVM are largely compatible, why don't we build the products for all of them and let the market choose which ones they want to use based on cost/security tradeoffs.

Non-EVM chains have merit too, e.g. Bitcoin is the best store of value ever created by humanity, and some other chains may have attractive properties such as private transactions. Thus, we need Atomic Swaps to bridge liquidity among EVM and non-EVM chains, e.g. Bitcoin, Monero and BEAM.

Peer to peer fiat to crypto exchange - LocalEthereum being a great example, but needs to support more chains and tokens.

Stablecoins are vitally needed for existence of crypto native businesses, as they are the ultimate hedge to the floating currency rate in supply chain problem. Stablecoin DAOs provide a unit of value and medium of exchange that can easily be adopted. The shining example here is DAI and MakerDAO, but this technology could use a design upgrade, decentralized oracle review and be ported to other chains.

Decentralized Oracles framework - ChainLink, MakerDAO and Augur are good examples but this space needs to be further explored, and freedom-critical apps may need custom-made oracles.

DAO builder - the concept of DAO are one of the most profound inventions of our lifetime. DAOs are on-chain limited liability companies, that allow individuals to pool capital together in order to work on a common goal. We must make it easy to form token-governed DAOs that feature an easy user interface for investors to manage their portfolio companies, track their revenues and project future prices of the governance token.

DAO fundraising framework - forming a DAO should be easier and more efficient way of fundraising and running a business, and more transparent and less overhead (means more value) for investors. Our HODL 2020 program may be the answer to successful fundraising for DAOs and we'll be looking forward to turning it into a product that others can use.

Crypto payment system - a great example being BTCPay, but needs to support more chains and tokens. Ultimately, a merchant should be able to set up a shop with Shopify, Woocommerce or Magento (that combined account for more than 95% of e-commerce marketplaces) and accept crypto, with all accounting and performance insights automated.

Create dev tools along the way to grow our community and invite creative collaboration! If you want to go fast - go alone. If you want to go far - go together. By building the dev tools and releasing them in the public domain we are able to give back to the cryptocurrency community, as well as empower future devs to build even better tools for customers and businesses alike!

With that out of the way, let's review our roadmap from September 2017, when Team Saturn publicly announced its existence.

Stage 1: Methone. September 2017 - May 2018

Stage 1: Methone

Be the first team to adopt superior ERC223 token standard.

Develop critical infrastructure for uncensorable apps - the foundations for what you see today were laid down back then.

Write the whitepaper for first DAO business - Saturn Protocol DEX.

Invent proper token model - Dividend-bearing DAO. Correctly aligns founder/investor interests, allows Team Saturn to raise funds to develop technology to bring this roadmap from the void into reality and secure financial freedom for humanity.

Stage 2: Mimas. June 2018 - December 2018

Stage 2: Mimas

Saturn Wallet - first dapp wallet for $ETC.

First successful protocol launch sale.

First DEX on ETC created, birth of ETC token economy.

Stage 3: Enceladus. January 2019 - August 2019

Stage 3: Enceladus

Add support for ERC20 tokens to the DEX.

Saturn API release.

Monitor exchange stats and grow KPIs.

Write and open source trading bots.

Focus on partnerships, e.g. CoinGecko, CoinPaprika, Delta.app, Blockfolio.

Stage 4: Fenrir. September 2019 - [March 2020]

Stage 4: Fenrir

Stage 5. Prometheus. [April 2020] - [Q4 2020]

Stage 5: Prometheus

DAO activation on ETH and ETC - hand off protocol governance into the hands of our community, conduct first dividend payout and move to quarterly dividend payouts

DAO toolkit & dashboards - create DAOs governed by any token without any technical skills, make it as easy to create a DAO and fundraise as it is to create a Facebook page for your business.

Tokenized trading bots.

Cross Chain Atomic Swaps for cross chain liquidity.

Chain expansion - aggressively bring our tech to EVM chains.

Protocol Launch Sales to support chain specific modifications (e.g. TomoChain's TRC21 standard, or TRON's custom address scheme and compiler toolchain).

The Final HODL: Prometheus - Sale of Saturn Tokens (on Ethereum and Ethereum Classic) via our Strategic Investor Programs, agree to a lock up for a bonus.

Saturn Protocol v2 - a major upgrade to the protocol that powers our decentralized exchange. The successful launch of Saturn protocol v2 will mark the completion of the Prometheus stage of our roadmap.

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