As many will have noticed, our new website has been running countdowns since we began. These have served equally as calls to action and to inform everyone of the stage of the fundraising process we have reached.

We have invited all of our existing network to exchange half of their coins for tokens before our public launch.

Since the beginning of this exercise we have seen our network grow at the fastest rate yet. Our slack channel has swelled from 30 users last year to over 460 now. This has in itself required us to adapt, due to Slack no longer being suitable for distributing the information we need. We are happy to announce that in the past few weeks we have deployed and begun populating a new forum for this purpose. We are currently accepting applications (talk@carboncoin.cc) to be the first members of this forum to help build the content there in return for some bonus coins.

The existing Carboncoin network has been under constant security testing from those who must be very threatened by what we are doing — to the extent that we have deployed an extra layer on our custom security feature, named GORT, a layer of stochastically varied cleverness, which is the product of several years of work. This feature, completely unique in the cryptocurrency space, has shown our network to be robust even in the face of the most sophisticated of attacks.

Alongside these essential tasks we have continued to build towards our token fundraising exercise, as per the countdown on the website. It is a credit to the developers of those tokens that they have completed them on time. To reiterate: our tokens are ready for deployment.

Unfortunately though, along with not compromising on the security of the tokens, there is one other thing that cannot be compromised on - that is the legality and compliance of the issuing organisation, and the subsequent routing of funds. We’ve reached out to our advisory network at length and concluded after multiple discussions that, despite our proposed structure being almost certainly completely compliant, we simply cannot deploy the tokens until we are absolutely certain.

We are delaying the launch of the token fundraise until we have this level of certainty. As recent events in the space have shown, it is simply not acceptable to jump into a fundraising exercise without making absolutely sure that all funds raised will be used for their intended purpose — namely developing our new protocol, and beginning the forestry project, a test-bed for research which will become our first biodiverse forest ecosystem. To risk these funds being taken in fines for failing to do our homework at this stage is simply poor management.

Instead of placing another countdown on our site we are going to list here the prerequisites for our token launch:

1: A comprehensive overview document detailing everything from our objectives, both technological and environmental, through our development team and intended expansion of it, to the precise proportions of funds directed to the different aspects of the project and associated roadmaps. Much of this information can be found on the new forum site in our Official Statements section already. 2: A formed legal entity capable of compliantly taking delivery of the proceeds of the fundraise and directing them in accordance with our mandate. At this time we are particularly considering two ways of doing this, both of which can be turned around quickly once we have absolute confirmation our intended method meets our compliance requirements. 3: A website populated with all terms of use, conditions of sale etc we require to globally affirm our intended method. We have built this site in addition to the token contracts, and again its completion must await our legal verification.

The existing Carboncoin network enjoys the same compliance benefits as the original Bitcoin. It has a higher transaction capacity, a very manageably small blockchain, and runs on two lightbulbs’ worth of energy. As we have made clear on all channels, there is no good reason to stop a working thing before there is something superior to replace it. As we have also stated we cannot foresee a reason we will stop it even after that.

We will be building all the services we have designed over the past four years and deploying them on the existing blockchain while the new one is being finalised, built and deployed. These services are geared to increasing the number of users and the rate of use. The plan is that when the new network goes live it will have an established ecosystem of services to launch into immediately. It is a very exciting time to be involved.

It is the fourth anniversary of the launch of the current network on the 15th of February. If it is possible, we will make it happen then, otherwise as soon as possible.

We are deliberating on reactivating coin swaps for new holders and if we decide to do so we will publish it on our forum and our social media channels.