To give you a little background on how we started Indorse: Indorse was conceived from our work at Attores, a company my cofounder Gaurang and I started in 2016. At Attores, we have been placing diplomas on a private ethereum blockchain for a Singapore polytechnic (a technical college) and helping the students push their e-certificates to professional networks like Linkedin.

We soon realized that there was something fundamentally broken with the current model of content creation and remuneration for the creators of that content. Specifically, professionals looking to publish their skills which are certified by trusted institutions (which we were working with), but additionally non-accredited or independently acquired skills such as coding outside of a classroom.

Additionally the way current platforms handle the ownership of user’s data was not in line with our values as we believe that the ownership of the content they publish should remain with the user who created it.

Since we first proposed the idea of Indorse, we were overwhelmed by the incredible support from the cryptocurrency community. We’ve been involved with the bitcoin and blockchain for many years now with myself having operated a bitcoin brokerage in Singapore from 2013 to 2015, eventually selling it to another exchange. My cofounder Gaurang has been writing smart contracts since 2015, and is a co-organizer of the Ethereum Singapore meetup. Many of the advisors from the crypto-community we’ve also known for many years. When we began discussing Indorse with them, they immediately saw the value of a platform which would allow for a decentralized network for professionals, giving back ownership of user data, and rewards them for activities.

We are already past the minimum required contribution of 15,000 Eth in the pre-sale itself, and hence now our efforts are mainly going to be concentrated on the development of the product.

Activity leading up to the token sale:

Presented at 2 Major Conferences

2. Presented Indorse at 12 meetups and events in 7 countries

3. Participated in 5 AMA’s

4. 26 Articles written about Indorse

5. 2786 members in our slack channel

6. 2018 twitter fans

7. 586 participants in wechat groups in China

8. ~100 Telegram users in Korea

9. May to July: Grew the team to 8, including 4 developers

July 25: Presale of Tokens: Sold out in 3 days

August 8: Sale of Tokens, Now

All contract code from the sales are available on Github for review or use by the community.

Soon to be released: Public version of the Proof of Concept- with the ability to create claims and indorse (vote) on the legitimacy of the claims of others.

Some of the characteristics of our token sale

Security Considerations

Audits

Concerned by security issues and hacking attempts in the blockchain wallets and previous token sale efforts, we were laser focused on making sure that our websites, DNS registrar accounts, wallets and Smart Contracts were safe.

We went through multiple rounds of audits and advice from the trusted members of the community to make sure we didn’t have any unknown bugs.

Along with the audits for Smart Contracts, we also hired a penetration tester to audit our websites and apps, to make sure they are not vulnerable.

Use of ENS

Ultimately, we decided to use ENS (Ethereum Name Service), so that people could send Ether to indorse.eth directly. This meant that we would never publish a contract address as 0x… which leads to scammers and spammers putting in their own addresses in different social media, slack bots, etc

Obviously, this lead to certain hurdles, while contributing to our token sale, since not many wallets and apps support ENS yet. But we decided to sacrifice immediate sell-out of the token sale for a safe and secure procedure such that none of our users lose money to scam posts.

Community Considerations

Cap on individual contributions

We were getting asked from the community about what will happen if a whale swoops in and puts in thousands of Ether in a go, for the token sale. Therefore, we decided to put a cap on individual accounts of 1000 Ether. A maximum of 1,000,000 IND tokens would be issued per account during the token sale. This was done with an intention to level the playing field and making sure that everyone gets an equal chance to participate.

Cap on gas price

Again, similar to the cap on individual contributions, we also put a cap on the gas price at 50 Gwei such that people cannot take advantage of the gas price to get ahead in the queue.

Low hard cap

We are only raising as much as we need to build a robust product and have traction in the market. The main focus of this token sale is to hire top notch developers, deliver a product, and build a community of users around it. We therefore have a reserve of tokens for a second token sale, about 1.5 to 2 years down the line.

We will continue to operate with the best interest of the community in mind as we move ahead with the development of the Indorse platform.

If you have any feedback for us, please feel free to join the slack community and let us know.

https://slack.indorse.io

If you would like to participate in the token sale, please visit https://indorse.io