Written AMA summary
Hello Warp Finance community,
First of all, thank you very much for the mostly positive reception of recent news. We were not sure how the update is going to be received by you but are very happy that most of you agree with the path we want to move forward on.
You have asked a bunch of questions during yesterdays AMA and we have tried to write our answers down accordingly how we gave them and you can find them grouped in three different categories.
Warp Team
Q: Who is in the Warp team currently? (Answering like Q1 is confirmed)
A: At the moment, we can only confirm and announce two members of the team. You know the first person quite well as it is no one less than MrStiive. He started as an interested person in Warp Finance and was contracted as marketing consultant for the project since April 2022. In October the same year MrStiive took over control of the product as visionary of Warp as one action of the Advanced Blockchain incubator and became the so called ‘Project Lead’ which will turn into a product leadership role.
The second person is Chris who has not been in the official Warp team up until now. Chris is a doxxed person and we want to transparently share that he has a current role at Advanced Blockchain. His now role in Warp Finance is unrelated to his other role at Advanced Blockchain and won’t compromize the independency of the project. We went into more details about his role at Advanced Blockchain and lifted any expressed concerns. He will take care of all back-office tasks which distract from product development. Just to name a few here: Finance, controlling, recruitment, accounting, stakeholder communication, if needed fundraising, just all traditional ‘off-chain’ responsibilities in a company.
Q: Is MrStiive staying with Warp?
A: Yes, MrStiive is still here. He has been on a part-time capacity since he got enganged on the project. So nothing is changing here.
Q: How is the planned Warp team structure looking like?
A: Now that Warp has left the incubator, we have full control over the team and resourcing. The most needed skills for finalizing Warp v2 are smart contract development (Solidity), backend development (Typescript, NodeJS, basic DynamoDB, AssemblyScript& GraphQL), and frontend integration once the code is successfully audited. (Design and Frontend are done and ready).
Next to those crucial roles above we are generally prospecting for Design and Frontend roles.
We have first interviews for all of the roles above already scheduled. On recent Friday (13th January 2023) we had an interview with a Frontend Developer with Integration capabilities who has worked on Warp v2 already at the during Q1 of 2022, and on Monday (16th January 2023) we are having interviews with a Solidity and a backend developer. We are in contact with even more people and are especially looking for developers who have worked on Warp in the past already.
Initially the developers will be contracted up until delivery of v2, and will be either milestone based or a combination of a low hourly rate plus a bonus after reaching the milestone. Post v2, we expect platform revenue will allow us to maintain the team and continue developing out the more advanced aspects of the vision.
Q: What have the people of the Warp team done for the last two years? (rolewise)
A: MrStiive’s involvement should be well described under ‘Q: Who is in the Warp team currently?’. Even though Chris’ team involvement starts with January 2023 he has helped a lot between June to August 2022 to make the Warp version two Beta release possible. Generally speaking he is well aware of Warp and what needs to be able to move forward.
Q: Is the development on hold right now or is the remaining team still working on features?
A: All developments are paused at this very second. Since the beginning of December development progress has been close to zero unfortunately.
Financial Capacity
Q: How are the financial capabilities of the Warp project?
A: We want to be fully transparent when it comes to the financial capabilities of the Warp team. We are still in the process of moving funds to the new wallets which addresses you are already able to find out by yourself but which we will also confirm and share after funds transfer is completed and open liabilities are paid. At the end of all of this the team has the following resources available:
9,000 — Warp tokens
3.195 — ETH
~57,000 — USDC
On top of that there is the Community Fund which the Warp team is holding in a separate wallet as custodian. The Community Fund has a total of 6,630 Warp token. We as Warp team don’t see this as our property. We could use this fund as an extension budget for the development team but we would only consider this after a Warp token-holder voting.
Q: Does Warp need financing from investors?
A: At this point we believe that we are able to complete Warp v2 with the funds we have and that we don’t have to take additional funding from investors. From that point onwards we will need to gain traction with the platform to generate revenues and finance further development. Even if we should not need an investment it could still make sense to explore the option to increase success chances and to catch up on development speed for the time we have missed in 2022.
Advanced Blockchain and exiting the incubator
Q: Since when was the exit of the Advanced Blockchain incubator planned and why took it longer than expected?
A: Talks about the exit of the incubator started during the mid of November. The reasons why it took longer than expected was that we wanted to leave the incubator with a clean slate. MrStiive and Chris wanted to have a clear overview about liabilities and assets before taking the next step. The incubator was a good and safe space to go down this rabbit hole. If you may have noticed the Warp team wallet was never touched and the initial 26,250 tokens were still in there up until now even though we publicly know that a good portion was already allocated to other parties for provided services. Negotiations and deals have taken place which gave Warp Finance more room to breath and move forward without any uncertainties and hangover. We want to stress at this poin that this is indeed a mjaor accomplishment. Warp Finance had tremendous liabilities which could have been a serious risk for the project. Now we ended up in a spot where we have truly options, no obligations or liabilities and a good stack of assets to work with.
Q: What are the benefits of exiting the incubator?
A: First of all transparent communication is easier. As Advanced Blockchain is a publicly stock listed company in Germany we needed to take close care of which information we share based on German law (you don’t want to mess around with German law…) . Every public information Advanced Blockchain related has to be shared equally accessible to everyone and as most of our daily operation had some kind of connection to Advanced Blockchain we felt limited in our communication capacities as we didn’t want to do any small mistakes which could have bigger impact.
While being in an incubator Warp was often perceived as a piece of a bigger unit by potential business partners and service providers . This resulted in rates and quotes we often couldn’t engage with. By being a small and agile team we believe we can leverage this into better deals with future project partners.
And last but not least it is worth to mention that the Advanced Blockchain incubator isn’t setup to necessarily work with an actively running product. The key competence of the Advanced Blockchain incubator is developing new ideas from scratch in an efficient way after a certain framework. Getting their developers familiar with the Warp code in a whole different environment and took time. On top of that the market climate didn’t allow to hiring new developers to fully engage with us which resulted in regular fluctuation and much slower progress than hoped.
Q: Was the exit only pushed/planned by ABAG or did the WARP team also push for this?
A: The initial push actually came from the Advanced Blockchain but was proceeded in mutual agreement. As Warp was never really scheduled or planned to join the incubator initially, plus the continously staying bear market, it was visible that the support couldn’t get more intensified. Based on this MrStiive and Chris came to the conclusion that an exit and independent approach will have a better effect than staying in the incubator.
Q: Will Advanced Blockchain sell Warp tokens during a bull run?
A: We can not foresee the future so we don’t know. Generally speaking we left the incubator in good terms and there is no bad blood. Advanced Blockchain still has a big interest in Warp to succeed but are also still an investor who is looking for getting returns in one day. We are confident that Advanced Blockchain will reach out to the Warp Finance team before executing any sales and hope that we are in a state that we can buy them from them over the counter.
Q: When will we see a new roadmap for 2023?
A: This all depends on when we have the needed developers available for doing the job. Our goal is cearly to get version two released during Q1 2023 as the majority of work is done. If we generalize it it should be around three weeks of full time smart contract development, getting the fixes checked by an auditor and afterwards making sure that frontend integrations work. The reality still is that we need to find developers which may take time and they need to familiarize themselves with the code. We got the confirmation of the most recent smart contract developer who did the fixes of the audit so far that he will be around to help the new developers to speed up the process.
If you made it up until here, congratulations! You really seem to like the Warp and we are thankful for that.
Sincerely, Your Warp Finance Team
