Taking into consideration that the raise we did happened in February 2018 and most of it was on ETH and BTC… a significant part of the raise lost value due to the market conditions of 2018 when we had a long lasting bear market. Sadly I would say that probably around 50% of the 1.2M got hit by the market (if not more) since right after the month of February 2018 things began to crash and a bull market didn’t return until late 2020.
As I’ve explained before we had a team of 6 full time employees, all researchers and developers located in San Francisco and New York. I don’t intend to violate the privacy of our staff but I can share that all of us had the same salary of roughly $6k monthly (way below market rates for people living in the US).
We worked towards implementing pilots and testing all of the Proof of Personhood technologies available in the market by then:
- BrightID
- Humanity Dao
- Idena
- Upala
and yes, we interviewed and followed the work that Kleros did since the very beginning (you may check my one and only commit on the Proof of Humanity github).
Our goal was not PoH/UBI from the very beginning but rather figuring out digital democracy. For that purpose we contributed to the mentioned projects but also held pilots in different locations around the world.
Here’s yet another report on the pilots and research we held presented in Perm University in Russia:
http://permwinterschool.ru/download2021/SantiagoSiri.pdf
Ultimately, it became clear that Kleros would be doing the killer protocol for Proof of Humanity and that would be the ideal fit for our token. Since then, we joined the project and committed to it.
Democracy Earth became the number one promoter of PoH in the world, onboarding many of the users it has today. We still want to be that force for good since we are firm believers of this project.
This infighting keeps hurting the project and is not leading anywhere productive. HIP 49 didn’t pass thanks to the community calls we had which brought attention to the technical challenges.
My vote on it was at the last minute with certainty it wouldn’t pass because I think there are elements to be considered about further decentralization of the project moving forward into the future.
But in no way I would support breaking this project apart. We need to grow stronger together.