As part of our journey in completing the vision of our platform we made the decision to evaluate doing an Initial Contribution Offering (ICO) or as it often is now called Token Generating Event (TGE).

Everything has taken some more time than initially expected but we now have our first contract on the Ethereum Blockchain. The contract handles the contribution from our handpicked pre-sale participants that want to help us make Friend become fully decentralized.

We chose to do it safely and chose Zeppelin as partner for both pre-sale registrations/KYC and also for the smart contract auditing. Some work however was still to be executed by ourselves, like the deployment of the contract on the Blockchain.

Being far too busy with everything else we did not manage to have a full node running the day of deployment. After intensive working hours we found a feasible solution using a tool chain that allows deployment without running a full node. The Remix IDE together with MyEtherWallet and the MetaMask plugin for Chrome allowed us to deploy the contract — first to Ropsten test-net and after testing and getting a feel for it also to the main net.

As many manual steps are involved, a good checklist and secure and distributed backups of all important keys and passwords were on top of the priority list.

Still there was some excitement left and some Ether to be transferred to the wallet that was supposed to own the contract. We also quickly learned that setting the gas price to the unwritten standard helps a lot with getting transactions done in reasonable times — after waiting 34 minutes for a single function call to be executed you would rather set it a bit higher the next time.

Now we have exciting times ahead. We are the first company that does its ICO in Norway and having a Norwegian entity own the tokens. As we are friendly and open we are working tightly with the authorities and our partners to make sure everything is done within the regulatory framework. Big kudos to our colleagues in Oslo for a great job here.

At the time of writing this we have 4 weeks left to prepare the ICO/TGE itself. A lot of communication, security checking, proof of concepts, programming, designing and interacting with our valuable partners is to be done to get this show running.

Exciting times. Blockchain technology is about to revolutionize the world and we are happy and excited to be part of it. As the unifying platform with the user in focus we intend to become the preferred deployment channel for both classic web apps and Dapps — and let both the new world and the known tools be accessible in a secure and convenient manner for users around the globe.