The fundamental vision of Enigma is to create a data marketplace for the web. For that vision to materialize, a new kind of cloud computing protocol needs to emerge — one that is decentralized, secure, and operates through incentives (in this case, ENG tokens). The technical challenges involved with building and scaling such a project are immense. The work outlined in our whitepaper, and later on in a 128-page thesis work, only represent the tip of the iceberg for us. We’ve expressed our vision previously on our blog in a two part post: “Beyond Catalyst” and its followup.

Our most committed investors and contributors very much believe in our vision and have confidence in Enigma’s ability to achieve it. They stand behind this recent decision to amend our sale structure. These investors have years of experience and are considered experts in their field. Our institutional investors expressing support include Pantera Capital, investing through their new $100mn Pantera ICO Fund that invests solely in token projects, as well as Fenbushi, the first Chinese venture-capital fund dedicated to supporting companies building innovative use cases of blockchain technology. We also have investment and support from Michael Arrington (the founder of TechCrunch and Crunchfund), Jake Gibson (the founder of NerdWallet and an Enigma advisor), and the partners of Flybridge Capital, who have previously invested in successful projects like MongoDB. In addition, most of our presale investors have alignment with the new terms: they have either converted or are in the process of converting.

In addition to this support and interest, we are seeing incredible demand for our product and our tokens from the community. In the last month, the Enigma community has grown immensely. We have tens of thousands of Catalyst users and submitted strategies. Across our channels, we’ve seen both our Telegram (8,000+) and Slack (12,000+) communities become one of the largest crypto hubs, not only in the token space — but in crypto in general.

We have received over 45,000 expressions of interest in our sale and over $250MM in indicated demand. We closed our presale for $20M three weeks prior to the sale and had to turn away significant additional interest — we still get new inquiries every day. We had to close our whitelist two days ahead of schedule due to accelerating demand. We’ve recently had over 90% of the whitelist reconfirm their desire to purchase, and we had to suspend our waitlist as the full token amount would have been fully subscribed even before the public sale. These indications give us very strong immediate visibility on what purchasers want and we want to accommodate as many of them as possible. We also saw over 2,500 new expressions of interest since our announcement of new sale terms was posted.

This unprecedented interest and ongoing support throughout our token sale encouraged us to be more ambitious in expanding our goals for Enigma back to our initial vision that we expressed in our whitepapers. Our first thought for the token sale revolved around creating a data marketplace that focused on applications for crypto trading. However, with this much support both from institutional backers and the community, we became determined to push towards building a protocol that could capture the long tail of all kinds of data.

Enigma is a fundamental protocol on which we, and eventually others, will build a suite of distributed applications. Catalyst is the first Dapp that truly takes advantage of the core capability and leverages complementary functionality in the data marketplace, distributed compute, off-chain storage, and identity management “layers”. Building out this protocol, in terms of scale, ambition and complexity is similar to IPFS, Tezos, and EOS — all of which have raised in excess of $100MM to deliver on their mission. It’s a visionary push to create this symbiotic functionality and ecosystem for how data will be managed in the future.

Another concern raised by our community besides the funding amount was sale structure and individual caps. In designing the final sale structure, we did a lot of benchmarking and saw that many recent successful token-based projects have kept a much larger percentage of tokens for the company or raised much more USD through token sales on more aggressive terms. Civic (66%), Gnosis (95%), and Storj (70%) are good examples of those who retained tokens for team use. That means greater potential for dilution for token buyers and less clarity of around the tokens kept. As an ambitious project with a long-term horizon, we are trying to set preferable terms for the community by selling as much as 50% of the token supply.

In terms of distribution, we’ve tried to model our approach on the 0x token sale model with caps and fair proportional refunding to balance interests of those on the whitelist and new potential buyers in the public sale. This helps us build a broad and active community that is interested in the long-term development of Enigma and Catalyst. As we are not a protocol that would allow for the mining of tokens, the only way to have a broad distribution with such substantial demand and only the token sale as an opportunity to buy at the initial price is to introduce individual caps that prevent “whales” from buying up all crowdsale tokens immediately. This mechanic allows us to make sure that people who are participating in the sale for the long term benefit of the project receive the same opportunity as participants looking for a short term gain buying a scarce resource.