We are pleased to announce the establishment of a formal legal entity in Vaduz, Liechtenstein, on March 20th. under the name “Byteball Foundation” by LMG Lighthouse Trust. It is currently in the process of being renamed as the “Obyte Foundation”. We are also completing other registration procedures as required by the authorities.

The sole purpose of the Foundation is to foster the development and adoption of the Obyte DLT protocol and platform. Furthermore, it will work to promote any subsequent technologies directly or indirectly linked to Obyte’s DLT for research, promotion of science and the general public interest. Any contributions and benefits received by the Foundation are to be reinvested in the aforementioned areas.

The key entities of the Foundation, as required by Liechtenstein legislation are: The Board and the Auditor. The Board is comprised of 3 members with Tony Churyumoff as the chairman. The other 2 members of the Board are Mag. Lucas Mair and Dr. Alexander Lins, who satisfy the Liechtenstein residency requirement set by law. To ensure the Foundation stays true to its mission, an Advisory Board will be established, consisting of highly qualified and competent professionals who will help guide the Foundation. Annually, the Auditor will verify that the Foundation’s assets are properly managed and appropriated in accordance with its purpose.

The Foundation will delegate commercial activity to a subsidiary, to be established in the near future. The subsidiary will be responsible for planning and managing the day-to-day operations related to the Foundation’s goals, which include marketing, technical development, and business case implementation.

Obyte Footprint

As you might be aware, Obyte went live on December 25, 2016. Its founder, Tony Churyumoff, was inspired by Bitcoin and driven to develop and further improve the underlying technology. He saw that for the mass adoption of DLT and cryptocurrencies, key elements to the original concept underpinning blockchain needed to be designed in a new way. Specifically:

Users needed freedom to post transactions directly to the distributed ledger with no gatekeepers (eliminating the need for miners);

The algorithm for posting transactions needed to be simplified from 2 steps to 1 (eliminating the need for blocks).

With that in mind, a new generation of DAG-based DLT was born.

Tony was able to deliver everything promised in the White Paper relatively quickly, except for decentralization. As it turned out, this last and most important element of the ecosystem required more time to be delivered properly.

What we now have is a far more advanced, proven, and mature platform for the transfer and storage of value. It is secure, scalable, and offers a complete set of features, enabling developers to create applications for use in actual business cases.

However, one vital ingredient in becoming a viable solution to companies, organisations and for actual business use cases was missing: A legal entity. This is what we have now finally established.

We appreciate the community’s patience and the input we have received to help us build what we have now. We hope that the new structure will enable us to build better and stronger relations with partners, and enable the community to evolve to a new level.

Next steps

We can definitely say that the establishment of the Foundation is a key step in Obyte’s evolution. We now have the legal framework required to plan for the future and build long-term relationships with partners in both crypto and business sectors. Without this, we simply could not meet the basic requirements for engaging with partners on a larger scale in the real world.

Maintaining a legal entity and structured operations helps us move to a new stage in our development. When the final details of the organizational structure of the Foundation are completed, we will be able to move forward more efficiently. These are necessary steps for Obyte to become a leading DLT platform.

The tech unit currently relies heavily on Tony. We believe that there should be a more diverse and widely founded team of programmers with overlapping skills covering back end development, front end development, cryptography and network development. Also, there should be a diverse team of external contributors who compliment the activities of the core development team by implementing new ideas and solutions.

We’ve always been focused on building real applications but marketing in the past was the weakest point in our guerrilla-mode operations, with a lack of people on the team fully dedicated to executing and improving marketing operations. Despite the community rightfully expecting that we fill this void, we could not find and place the right person for that position. This will now be our priority. We see that the marketing team should have expertise in user acquisition, community building, digital communications, developers community support, event and PR management. It should be a solid team of dedicated professionals motivated by Obyte’s vision and strategic aspirations.

Here is what our team mates have to say:

Steve Safronoff, COO: “Next step in Obyte’s development is another proof of project maturity. It will be challenging but also exciting to operate to scale. Building a strong team is a critical factor at this stage and it will define future success. We have great technology at our disposal and it is a considerable advantage we should fully utilise.”

Luke Angell, Head of Partnerships: ”I’m very excited to have this basic, but critical, issue resolved. Building partnerships is about building relationships, so we have of course been doing that, but at the end of the day for those partnerships to deliver real value to both parties they need to be formalized, and now we have the mechanism to do so.”

Valerius Coppens, Head of Strategy: ”It’s one thing to write a whitepaper, it’s quite another to actually release a working product and get early adopters to try it out. With the establishment of this Foundation a new chapter begins. Obyte is growing up and getting ready to conquer the world.”

Tarmo Annus, Developer: ”I have participated on many hackathons and only very few of them have become actual companies. This project has been like a really long hackathon and establishing a Foundation company is a huge milestone, it’s like a software that comes out of beta.”

Casper Niebe, User Acquisition Manager: ”From the moment I discovered Obyte, I have been convinced of the vast possibilities, the superior technology and the right focus on bridging the gap between the real world and distributed ledgers. Embracing opportunities and utilizing the real world requires a link from the ecosystem to the outside world. The Foundation is a major milestone in enabling use cases in areas such as FinTech, Supply Chain Optimization and IoT projects.”

Tony Churyumoff, Founder: ”This project started as a one-man operation, later became a small group of enthusiasts, and now it is moving to a formal organization. With the Foundation, we now have a more solid foundation, a vehicle for realizing our belief that fully open networks like Obyte are an excellent tool for those who want to make the world a better place.”

Links:

Obyte foundation in Liechtenstein company register (in German)

Original extract of the commercial register 20.03.2019 (in German)

Latest extract of the commercial register 25.10.2019 (in German)

Act of formation and Statuses (English translation)

Confirmation that Byteball Foundation is a non-profit common-benefit foundation and is therefore tax-exempt (in German)