That was a hell of a ride!
Wow… The support we had on this was astonishing! 1950 contributors and more than $5M raised (at current ETH price). And not only that, the community that has grown around us in our social channels is outstanding, incredibly supportive and keeps growing every day!
A little history: I was part of the founding team of RSK. Since I first learned about Bitcoin I was looking to building a solution on top of blockchain related to films and, having met great minds and gathered them together, we finally developed the game-changer smart contracts platform on top of Bitcoin. Still, my passion was in movies, so I started advising some blockchain based entertainment companies. Then on August of 2016, I had my first beer with Federico Abad — creator of Popcorn Time — and decided to leave RSK to follow this vision. In November, we meet Pablo Carbajo at LaBitConf in Buenos Aires and spread the enthusiasm on him. By January, with the addition of Javier D´Ovidio to the team, we´ve begun developing the alpha version of the platform.
We´ve started the ICO road back in May, in New York. We were young and naive, and arrived to the Big Apple with a demo of our product and a backpack filled with illusions, expectations and misconceptions. And also a bunch of Flixxo stickers.
By July having a crowd sale was more than just an idea. It started to become a reality. At Coinagenda, Barcelona, we partnered with Wings and Icofunding, and also found out that there was a real interest from VCs and funds to be part of our project.
September, the big trip. The roadshow. First time premiering our platform, speaking to a crowd — in English! — at a full-house Amsterdam´s Bitcoin Wednesday. About 200 people in the room, and a lot of time to pitch. Then traveling to China right after the Chinese government announced the ICO ban… Beijing, Hangzhou. Sleeping in airports after unsuccessfully trying to sleep in a hotel room — damn jet lag. Making friends and partners with other ICO-people, improving public relation skills with a glass of beer in the hand. Making AmaZix and Forklog join our team. Back then, our Flixxo Telegram group had only 34 people…
There is a moment, after pitching that much, after having been asked the right questions, after having received a lot of feedback, in which you feel confident enough to deal with any audience, when you know that you can answer all the questions. We´ve started to perceive that in the road to the airport in Beijing, when the taxi driver blew out a tire and stopped the car in the middle of a highway. I was trying to explain to him that I was running late to take a plane, he was trying to tell me that I shouldn´t worry. Looking at the cars running next to me at 100km/h in a country I´ve never visited before, where all the signs were written… well, in Chinese, I found out that we were on the right path.
Zurich, Kiev, Athens, London again in New York. Pitch, pitch, pitch. PR with a beer. Uber, Airbnb. Pitch and beer. Partnering with AdEx, celebrating our first 1000 followers on Twitter, in Telegram. Adding Olha Rymar to our team.
We came back with the same bag, still filled with illusions and expectations, but we had a better understanding of our product, of our token model. We had developed a full token economy, a model in which a token had a justification and in which that token could not be replaced with BTC or ETH. Even better: in our token economy, Flixx had circulation (circulation=circle, have you thought on that?) and anyone was able to earn the token that would spend later.
Presale and ICO contract were developed and audited by Coinfabrik. Everything was ready to take Flixxo to the moon.
Presale was a really stressful moment. For long days we watched at our empty wallet, wondering what was wrong. Bitcoin price was raising at a fast pace with the promises of many new forks, and some big ICO fails had made contributors buy tickets out of ICO-Land. Then the first contribution showed up in our wallet: and this guy happened to be a YouTuber. That was the most auspicious foretoken ever! By the end of that week, more than 6500 ETH were raised.
Probably you know the rest of the story. You would have been around by then if you were one of our contributors. We´ve partnered with Bancor, iex.ec, Coinomi. We raised more than 11500ETH (much more than our soft cap of 5000ETH), which is amazing . And we are ready to work hard to deliver a platform that could disrupt video distribution forever.
If you have been part of this journey, we really appreciate your support. If you just happened to find out about Flixxo you´re more than welcome to join us. This is a community based video platform and we aim at building this together with our community.
What´s coming next?
It was surprisingly awesome to see the trading stats at EtherDelta, in which Flixx was traded at 2x–3x ICO price. In our token model anyone will be able to trade their tokens within the platform (advertisers need tokens!), however there are secondary markets and they´re liquidity resources for Flixxo users. We are glad to announce that the following exchanges listing Flixxo will be Gatecoin, KuCoin and Livecoin. Yes, we are in conversations with some of the biggest exchanges but due to NDA, we would not state them until we reach an agreement.
We´ve been reached out by some of the biggest media and communication companies in the world! Everybody has heard of blockchain and we are in the right moment at the right place. We´ve been invited to USA and India, and we are pretty sure we will be able to announce incredible partnerships soon!
But first, we need to go back to the platform. To the protocol. We are already re-designing the whole UX and have started the conversations with RSK to further cooperate developing Lumino protocol for scaling the blockchain and being able to process thousands of transactions per second. We´ve been digging into BitTorrent protocol and have started rethinking it, looking for better interactions with a blockchain and looking for ways of improving the quality of video distribution, even the long-tail content that is not very popular and is not streamed by many seeders.
In the upcoming weeks we will be traveling to Los Angeles, starting the quest for gathering great quality content from unsatisfied YouTubers.
We will do our best to keep the communication you´re used to on our social channels, but we will have to work very hard in the next months for bringing up an awesome platform. We are taking into consideration many of the suggestions of our community, so let´s keep the conversation alive!
Looking forward to disrupting video distribution forever! And together ;)
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