Today, we are announcing an adjustment in our hard cap from a target of 50,000 ETH to 25,000 ETH, and doubling our ratio from 1 ETH: 8,000 RTE to 1 ETH: 16,000 RTE.

This announcement follows discussions and meetings with various high-level investors, partners, our advisors and community. In the past month, our CEO had been very busy in various high-key events, the most recent being TOKEN2049 in Hong Kong and Asia Pacific Ethereum Meet-up in Thailand together with Vitalik. More importantly, 2017 has seen some enormous raises through token sales, and all of us are seeing the aftermath of these raises.

Asia Pacific Ethereum Meet-up, together with Jun Capital

We’re fortunate enough to have the benefit of hindsight from seeing what happened to these recent token sales with extremely large caps. They have vastly over-estimated the sums of money they require, and this has led to a saturation of demand during the crowd-sale period. Once tokens become tradeable on exchanges, there is a supply-demand deficit in secondary markets. These problems will only be exacerbated when company tokens vest and enter circulation during an already bearish market.

What really sets Rate3 apart from the rest is how we learn from the past, while listening and acting when the community speaks.

Here’s Why We Are Lowering our Hard Cap:

Our strategic investors are providing more: We are very fortunate to have sought “smart investments” from investors, who provide valuable money, advice and connections. Previously, in our initial conceptualization and planning, we have projected more expenses required for partnerships, operations and marketing. However, our strategic investors are able to provide valuable connections and help in this area. We’ve learnt from past token sale examples: Many token sales in the past have over-estimated the funding they require, thus having an enormous hard cap. Their large hard caps have severely affected the supply-demand dynamics in secondary markets, leading to how many past token sales now have less-than-desirable results. We’ve listened to the community: Many of you have voiced out your worries about our previous hard cap, especially in relation to reason (1). We understand all of your concerns and are thus revising the hard cap. We’ve done more: Our technical development and product team have managed to accomplish a better progress than expected, with existing assets. This means that we are already ahead of our planned technical and product roadmap. With our current progress, the developmental costs have turned out and are planned to be lower than preliminary estimtes.

We are very thankful to our community and early supporters.

The price of Ether has been decreasing in the past few months, but our community and early supporters have been very supportive of the Rate3 project — through sending us various feedback, helping us to spread the word around, participate actively in discussions.

Once again, we cannot thank all of our community enough. Rate3 has always been about working together with the community to create a unified global e-commerce ecosystem and we will never compromise all on our mission.

We will be doubling the ratio to 1 ETH: 16,000 RTE tokens from the original 1 : 8,000 ratio.

This way, we will not be making any changes to the existing token distribution, so 40% of all tokens at inception (400,000,000 tokens) will still be allocated to the token sale.

Changing the ratio rewards our early supporters for their early support and more importantly, it aligns the interest of all participants.

Moving forward, we believe that this method is the best for all our previous and future supporters. There are both merits and consequences to other methods, but we have sought the advice of various experts and heard from the community to reach this consensus.

Token Allocation & Use of Funds

Our token allocation and use of funds will remain the same as before —

Token Allocation:

Use of Funds:

R&D (30%): Technical development, according to roadmap

Technical development, according to roadmap Partnerships (25%) : Merchant acquisition and engagement, partnerships with financial institutions and other capital providers

: Merchant acquisition and engagement, partnerships with financial institutions and other capital providers Marketing (20%): Enhance awareness, engagement and retention for participants

Enhance awareness, engagement and retention for participants Listing Fees (10%): Fees paid to various 3rd-party exchanges

Fees paid to various 3rd-party exchanges Operations (10%): Business operations, incl. working with external vendors

Business operations, incl. working with external vendors Legal (5%): Legal contracts, compliance costs and due diligence

What’s Next?

Our first round of crowd sale and more details will be announced in upcoming weeks.

We have concluded our first round of KYC. Instructions and details of our first pre-sale will be publicised to the successful KYC participants through email, so do check your emails!