Here are the most frequently asked questions, that we wanted to answer:

Team gathering out of office over weekend

Brainstorming in non-formal environment

Team building

What does Mysterium team look like now?

At the moment, our team consists of these people — Robertas, Paulius, Valdas, Vitas, Šarūnas (he’s helping us part-time with design), Aleksandras (me) and Philip (aka @phabc in our Slack). After the token sale, Matt and Augustas left our team as it was a mutual decision to do so. Matt has helped us with the research and collecting data, which was very important before the token sale. Meanwhile, Augustas help was crucial for the success of token sale, since he is a great marketing and communication expert. Currently, because his expertise is needed in other places, we agreed that he can work on other projects, but once we develop a working product, and once we’re ready to launch it to the public, he might come back again — assisting us with communication.

The main developer team currently includes Paulius, Valdas and Ričardas — they will continue to work on the development process. Valdas is in the process of transferring his full time dedication from his previous employer to Mysterium. In the upcoming months, with us being established in both places Vilnius and Berlin and with an addition of new team members, you will see more activities on GitHub, also we are thinking of ways how to best inform you of our short to mid term development plans (maybe Trello, maybe some other tool)!

Q: What will you do next?

In the past week team was working on defining OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) for the III’rd quarter, and these are:

Setting up an operation structure desixgned for rapid scaling in the future (e.g. entity, accounting, law firm in Berlin etc.);

Hire new Team members — people will range from CTO to developers to people who have experience in both legal field and internet products;

Development of Version 1(V1) — starting with defining a roadmap aligned with the vision, then executing it with team on hand;

Legal development — start figuring out ways to protect the node operators, and the goal is to find a new team member who will be responsible for owning this part of development and start with this;

HQ in Berlin or Vilnius?

On top of that, I wanted to clear up some confusion that you might have — the initial idea was for our core team to move to Berlin, while having a small team in Lithuania. However, after doing some research on that, we realized that it would take us a few months to get settled there. Instead, we wanted to build V1 product as soon as possible, hence we will stay in Lithuania, while starting to hire people in both places at once — only what is absolutely needed in Vilnius, rest in Berlin, forming it as HQ in long term. This will allow us to have more time before moving so we can choose developers who have crypto background, instead of rushing with the decision.

Once settling in Germany — we will be combining both methods: be involved ourselves while searching for people in Berlin, as well as work with an established agency — which will make our reloaction to Berlin a lot more smooth. Local agency will aid us in:

finding key people in Germany,

or may even help us in bringing them from abroad — their knowledge of local laws and culture will aid a lot in this,

finding office space.

We are in the process of talking to few agencies at the moment and some nice prospects emerged. If you have any prospects of agencies who might help us in this— please don’t hesitate to contact us.

What is v1 product?

V1 will have all the “ingredients” of decentralized vpn, but it will not be completely decentralized. It will include a working product, payments, identity management and discovery mechanism (Discovery mechanism will act as a match making service between node and a user softwares). We estimate to have a working v1 version by the end of 2017, or beginning of next year at latest. With the development process speeding up, we want to have an external testing team that would give us independent feedbacks on our work.

Hiring process

The hiring process itself is not easy — over the next 12–18 months, we are planning to add 10–15 new members to our team, but we can’t hire them all at once. The onboarding process is quite long, we don’t want to bring too many people on board too quickly and not be able to run a smooth team because of that.

At the moment, we are talking with couple of developers and product people in Lithuania.

What about updates on GitHub?

A quick note from Valdas:

“The reason why you haven’t seen GitHub activity lately, is because GitHub does not show unfinished/un-merged branches of code and also because he was spending more time with architecture, product features and hiring new developers rather than the code itself.”

Any additional information about bounty?

As the whitepaper says, 0.7% of the whole token supply (32,433,366 MYST) will be distributed to the bounty participants. Some of you may have helped us on bitcointalk forum, and we currently have a list of all the contributors, which you can find here: https://goo.gl/sWNfSN , but the list of all other bounty contributors should be published on the last week of July. As mentioned before, bounty participants will receive their tokens by August 1st.