ICO2 exceeded 20 million. How did Ant Financial mobilize the power of the community?

The digital currency community seems to be very fond of crowdfunding. Four of the top ten crowdfunding projects in the world are digital currency blockchain projects. The ICO (What is ICO: https://bizhongchou.com/ico.html), which is unique to the digital currency and blockchain industry, has been quite popular among investors in the past two years.

The Antminer ICO2, which was launched on August 8 this year, adopted the internationally accepted ICO model. Crowdfunding participants contributed funds in the form of Bitcoin, and the crowdfunding target was the rights and tokens of the Antminer blockchain protocol - Antminer shares. The crowdfunding party plans to transfer 24 million Antminer shares, and there is no upper limit on the crowdfunding amount. In addition, the Antminer ICO2 has set several international precedents, setting up multi-signature and refundable mechanisms, which to a certain extent protect the security of funds and the rights of investors.

Last October, the first round of crowdfunding of Antminer ended with 2,100 bitcoins raised in ten days. Nearly a year later, the second round of ICO of Antminer started at 20:00 on August 8, 2016, Beijing time, and lasted for 31 days, ending at 20:00 on September 7, 2016, Beijing time. As of press time, the official ICO page shows that 5,539.19 bitcoins have been raised, equivalent to RMB 22.25 million, and 1,360 people have participated.

Return to the community and face the market

This time, Xiaoyi is playing the community card.

So far, all successful digital currency and blockchain public chain projects are community projects. The birth and development of Antminer also fully utilized the power of the community. On the eve of this ICO, the Antminer team invested a lot of energy in investor education, investor communication and interaction, and collecting and listening to community feedback.

In July this year, shortly before the original start of the second phase of the ICO, Xiaoyi repositioned the project and adjusted the ICO time. The ICO time was adjusted to August 8, and it was emphasized that Xiaoyi would focus more on domestic and foreign communities, and the Xiaoyi team also needed to better embrace the community.

After the positioning was adjusted more clearly, Xiaoyi's community building has achieved remarkable results. Not long ago, Xiaoyi launched a volunteer recruitment campaign and has now recruited more than 60 volunteers, more than a dozen of whom are still active in various WeChat and QQ groups in the community every day. Among them, there are also volunteer groups specifically set up to be in charge of operations, media, fans, translation and other directions.

The volunteer with the online name "Yi Yi" is a relatively active one among many volunteers, mainly responsible for livening up the atmosphere of the fan group. She is optimistic about Xiaoyi because of its team and planning.

"I've watched Ant Financial change little by little, first with its cooperation with Guosen Securities, then with China Merchants Bank, as well as its participation in foreign blockchain conferences and roadshows, and its recent cooperation with Microsoft. It's made a lot of progress. At first, I didn't think Uncle Da was that great, but as I got to know him better, I found that he and his team are very low-key. They are high-profile in work and low-profile in life, this is how I evaluate them."

Most of the volunteers in the fan group are optimistic about the development model of Ant Financial. They want to grow and progress together with Ant Financial. They want to participate in this ICO and become the beneficiaries of this ICO. "A Fish" participated in the ICO on the first day. "I was very excited that day, just like going to buy. I watched others grab it after I got it. I didn't dare to eat dinner. I was watching the computer all the time. In the first 10 minutes, too many people rushed to grab it, and the passage was crowded. In the evening, we participated in the crowdfunding and chatted until 1 o'clock and almost 2 o'clock."

From first meeting Da Hongfei at the Alibaba Cloud Conference in October 2015 to learning about blockchain from his WeChat Moments, and lurking in the Ant Group for half a year, Yitiaoyu is now one of the most active Ant Group loyal fans and volunteers. She said, "My goal is to become a full-time employee and a pioneer in the application of blockchain technology."

The so-called "regularization" means joining the Xiaoyi team, which can also be seen as one of the rights and interests incentives for Xiaoyi volunteers. Within just one month of the ICO, Xiaoyi found and immediately recruited a talent suitable for overseas promotion from the volunteer team, and other community volunteers also voluntarily contributed community resources, design talents, translation expertise and technical development capabilities.

Using the design ideas of Antminer to build the community, with the progress of ICO2, the Antminer community has gradually formed a self-organized, self-built and self-operated organizational model. Wang Tingting, VP of Onchain who is responsible for the construction of the Antminer community, said,

“The functional groups of the Xiaoyi Volunteer Organization are actually a small microcosm of the Xiaoyi ecosystem. Influential individuals and functional groups can become credit intermediaries in the Xiaoyi Volunteer Organization. The Xiaoyi Volunteer Organization is actually a small microcosm of the Xiaoyi community and is a multi-center (decentralized) organization.”

Tao Rongqi, strategic VP of Onchain and commander-in-chief of ICO2, revealed in an AMA event at the Babbitt Forum: "The Ant Community has grown from 300 people in ICO1 to more than 3,000 people now." The huge Ant Community has shown unique advantages in this ICO. With the progress of the ICO and the development of the Ant Ecosystem, this number is still growing and now has reached 5,000 people.

Outstanding performance in overseas markets

Antminer ICO2 is open to the world, but it has not made efforts in overseas markets in the past year. As the ICO date approaches, the Antminer team has devoted considerable energy to overseas community building since July this year. Antminer's overseas market refers to the practices of well-known ICO projects such as Lisk and Wings. Yang Wentao, head of overseas markets, said that the main focus is on forum maintenance on bitcointalk. Currently, the [ANN] post on btt has been viewed more than 50,000 times and has 78 pages of replies. In addition, Antminer has also cooperated with overseas media resources and crowdfunding platforms, including ICO countdown and Smith&crown. Social media such as LinkedIn and Twitter are also constantly sending news and interacting with fans. Twitter currently has more than 1,800 followers.

Yang Wentao is the VP of Business at Ant Financial who just returned from the United States in mid-July this year. With a strong background in traditional finance, he believes that financial technology is the general direction of future development. He chose to return to China to join Ant Financial because he saw that Ant Financial has a deep accumulation of experience and is a benchmark project in the domestic blockchain industry.

The next step for the overseas community is to open Slack and invite overseas community fans to join. Yang Wentao believes that the overseas community still has great potential. According to official statistics, as of September 5, the number of overseas community investors has exceeded half.

"If you think that investment after midnight and before 7 or 8 a.m. is more likely to come from regions with time differences, participation is not bad. We can't see the amount of overseas investment, but we can infer the number of overseas investors based on whether the official website we log in to is in English or Chinese."

At the same time, he revealed that many potential investors from India, Russia and Southeast Asia, not just North America and Europe, are also very interested in Ant Financial: "They will do the translation work for our promotions. We already have [ANN] in more than a dozen different languages."

The first return mechanism

The biggest highlight of Antminer ICO2 is the refund mechanism, which is also the first in the industry. The general rule is that during the period from the end of the crowdfunding to the launch of the Antminer mainnet, participants can choose to continue to participate based on the total ICO participation funds, or withdraw 30 days after the mainnet launch. If participants judge that the overall ICO fund valuation is too high and there is a certain risk, they can choose to withdraw at one time; of course, participants can also choose to maintain the status quo and continue to participate in the ICO.

The refund mechanism has indeed dispelled many investors’ concerns about the fact that there is no upper limit for this ICO. Another volunteer who has known about Bitcoin since 2014 and participated in investing in BTS, Ethereum, and Babbitt Community shares commented:

Some people may be cautious about investing after experiencing the DAO hack, but the exit mechanism pioneered by Ant Group gives us ample time to consider. We can invest first and wait and see later.

Although investors who decide to withdraw can only withdraw their bitcoins after the Antminer mainnet goes online, the refundable setting does give investors more room for choice. It can be seen that Antminer fully considered how to protect the rights and interests of investors when designing the ICO rules, and provided a reference for future blockchain projects conducting ICOs.

In addition to the pioneering return mechanism, multi-signature guarantee is also a highlight of the ICO process design. After the theft of The DAO and Bitfinex, the Ant Financial team has given more in-depth consideration to the security of funds in this ICO. In order to avoid cheating by the crowdfunding initiator and to ensure the safe operation of the crowdfunding return mechanism, before the official release of the Ant Financial blockchain, the funds raised from the crowdfunding will be kept by the DACA Blockchain Association, HaoBTC and the Ant Financial team through 2-of-3 multi-signatures. The address is open and transparent, and anyone can check the funds in the address at any time.

Ant Financial and Onchain

At the beginning of this year, the Ant Financial team began to appear as Onchain, which is the operating entity of Ant Financial. Its main business is to be responsible for the development and operation of the Ant Financial system, while also providing blockchain customization services to other financial institutions.

Ant Financial and Onchain have been active this year. In April, Ant Financial released a white paper on consensus algorithms, proposing an improved Byzantine fault-tolerant algorithm, dBFT. In May, Onchain announced that it had officially joined the Hyperledger project, becoming the first blockchain technology company from China in the project, and is applying for Ant Financial to be the world's third HyperLedger technology implementation. At the Blockchain International Summit on June 23, Onchain announced a technical partnership with Microsoft. On June 28, it hosted the first China meeting of Hyperledger. On August 16, Onchain, Microsoft, and FaDaDa jointly created the first domestic legal + blockchain alliance "FaChain" and held a product launch conference. During the ICO, Ant Financial also announced the first batch of digital rights confirmation partners, BiQuShi and ZhuangYou.

The official has always emphasized that Antminer is a non-profit community-based blockchain project, and Onchain is a for-profit company established by the Antminer team to promote Antminer and enrich the Antminer ecosystem. Onchain and Antminer have technical and personnel connections, but are completely independent in terms of funding. It is undeniable that the two are closely connected and complement each other. Antminer is a star project operated by Onchain, and Onchain is naturally part of the Antminer ecosystem.

In addition to the progress of external cooperation, Xiaoyi has also made sufficient information disclosure preparations for this ICO. From the blog of Xiaoyi's official website, we can see that since the announcement of ICO2 in June, the Xiaoyi team has successively released several versions of crowdfunding details, updated the latest progress of the Xiaoyi team and ICO preparations, released the financial overview since the first round of crowdfunding in October last year, and the use plan of the funds raised in ICO2.

Tao Rongqi, the general commander of ICO2, said,

“Regarding the Antminer ICO, our direction is very clear: to conduct an international-level ICO. An international-level ICO means a lot, and the general direction is divided into three parts: the technology and design of Antminer itself, the details of the ICO process, and the PR of Antminer ICO.”

Judging from the results achieved, there are more than 5,000 bitcoins of funds raised and half of the overseas investors have expressed their recognition with real money. There is a volunteer organization of Antminer that has built its own business and operated it on its own, and there is also valuable experience in building the Antminer ecosystem from scratch. In terms of funds, team, and popularity, Antminer's gains should far exceed its initial goals. The next step of development will depend on whether the code is strong and whether commercial applications can be truly implemented.

The development plan and schedule after the completion of Antminer ICO2 is expected to be to launch the mainnet in the third or fourth quarter of this year, complete the development of the Web client and multi-language SDK in the fourth quarter, and plan to develop the IDE development environment for smart contracts, SM2/SM3, additive homomorphic encryption, and a new type of public chain protocol in 2017.

Looking back at last year, when the industry was at a low point, Ant Financial raised 2,100 bitcoins in 10 days, which was equivalent to less than 5 million yuan, which was still a cause for sighing. However, the industry as a whole has developed rapidly in a year, and now it has raised more than 5,000 bitcoins in a short period of time, worth more than 20 million yuan, which is already expected.