Hi everyone, it’s been a while since we’ve released an update and we’re definitely overdue for one. In this update, I’m going to talk about what’s been preventing us from moving forward, what we’ve done in the meantime, and what we’re planning to do in the future. Because of our interest in total transparency, I’ll try to say everything that I legally can.

Obstacles

The main problem preventing us from moving forward is a dispute with our former CEO and founder, Salvatore Gallo. We had numerous issues with his leadership in his company. We disagreed on how we should raise money (he wanted to start with traditional VC’s, we wanted to go directly to the crowdfund). Legal (he wanted us to advertise ourselves as a utility token, we wanted to register as a security and do the crowdsale under SEC Security regulations). And finally, ethics. We believed that he acted immorally and that his behavior in the workplace was completely inappropriate. Obviously, he did not feel that this was the case. It’s important for us to talk about this. There’s no way that his type of behavior is an isolated case. There’s plenty of evidence of this happening in esports and there’s also been a strong response. I haven’t seen the same outcry in the blockchain space, but this doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen, it just means that people don’t talk about it.

In the process of removing him, we faced many challenges and we were ultimately unable completely remove him from his positions. This problem was further complicated by debts that we have to repay and his lack of cooperation. This ended with several members (including me) resigning from our positions. However, at this point, we believe that we are close to a resolution and we will be able to move forwards soon. I know that he will disagree with my assessment of our issues, so I will ask him to respond to our allegations and I will publish his reply in full here.

(Update:Sal’s reply: “I read your Medium post, but I don’t want talk about it here.

If you are willing to have a constructive conversation about Aether United future, please let me know.

I’m available — I always was — and wishful to constructively talk about it.”)

Progress

Even though we haven’t made large steps towards the crowdsale, we have made some important achievements. The first one is with Republic. Republic is a highly respected equity crowdfunding platform that recently started hosting crypto based crowdsales. One crowdsale has already been done on Republic with great success (PROPS). These crowdsales fully abide by SEC regulation and we have had several discussions with Republic in order to do our sale through them.

We’ve also rewritten our value proposition to make it clearer and we’ve completely rewritten our whitepaper. You can see a draft of it here. These changes make our vision clearer and will be important as we move further.

Moving Forwards

As I said above, we plan on hosting our crowdsale through Republic and raising money with a ~1 million dollar cap. We’ll need to revise our website and make some other changes in preparation for this, but we are very close to this stage. We’ll also be finalizing our whitepaper and marketing material. If you know any marketing/business dev. professionals that are interested in blockchain/esports, please let me know, this would be very helpful as we get close to the sale. (you can contact me on Twitter at @Legionof7 or at our Discord) Also, please keep giving us your ideas and concerns, it’s more helpful than you think.

Thank you for sticking with us and supporting us through this process. We’ll try to release more frequent updates and connect with you more!

~JZ