SVET Reports
Qtum Execution Review and SVET Rating
You've, probably, noticed that, occasionally, I can't restrain myself from lashing out on founders for their stupendous lack of transparency on the side of the state of their projects finance.
I remember back into 2015, when I'd started reading Vitalik's blog and was dumbstruck as well as bewildered, when I first found there the detailed monthly outline of Ethereum team expenses.
I didn't keep the records, so my recollections of those accounts might be off, but, if I remember correctly, at that time they were renting about 100 sq feet in a center of Paris spending on it and everything else (devs incl.) about 150-200th Euro a month.
My confusion, however, was not caused by this ridiculously small :) sum but, rather, by the mere fact that it was communicated to the whole world in so outlandishly open and matter-of-factly manner.
That, probably, had became one of the small steps leading me to the important personal revelation that the old, rigid financial universe, which, as a former Arthur Andersen auditor, I have always witnessed to be rigorously secretive and monastically scholastic (by the absolute necessity as I'd firmly believed back then) might be soon overthrown by the rising native talents with their irritating audacity and indisputable ingenuity.
However, during 2018-2019 crypto-winter, I started worrying when it'd became obvious that we, with our newly born economy, are facing the roll-back to those dangerous habits of founders in mass preferring to keep their stockholders in a dark as of a state of projects own finances.
I found that to be highly hypocritical and disgusting that people, which issue readily available for unsophisticated investors and highly liquid IOUs and whose declared goal is to make 'the world a better place' by exposing financial accounts and transactions of everyone else to casual observation all across their global networks, choose to keep their accounts either opaque or completely secretive.
During all that time I have not been able to find a single (!) project, which stands high to that important challenge we all face - to voluntarily and regularly reveal project's financial records to everyone's scrutiny in order to avoid traps of old, monopolistic on truth, corporate and largely oligarchic system of, so-called, 'big firms' acting in unison with inept govs bureaucrats posing as a 'trusted investors representatives' and regularly betraying this trust to an unimaginable extend.
Well, today I report to you that I found the One :)
The Qtum Foundation, headquartered in Singapore at 3 Fraser Street #05-25 in Duo Tower (Validity is b) has chosen otherwise and reported in its latest blog that during the third quarter of 2020 (July, August, & September) they spent 189.0 BTC (an average of 63.0 BTC per month) in the following proportion: 'Technology Development' - 75.3%; 'PR and Marketing' - 17.9%; 'Operations Costs' - 2.9%; 'Compliance Costs' - 0.0%; 'Business Development' - 2.8% and 'Technical Cooperation' 1.1%.
Qtum has raised a total of $17M in funding over 5 rounds so far, which with that tempo of expenditures and a standard, transaction fees based revenue model (Solution is b-) will get them a run for less than two years (Equity is b-).
Qtum is funded by more than a dozen boutique VCs, including, secretive Asian Cowboy (74 investments, 11 exits, including Spotify), Seoul based Hashed (founded in 2017, 34 investments with only one known exit) and small but renowned Distributed Global from Los Angeles (16 investments including Nervos, 1 exit).
I recognize, of course, that just one, single post (see a link below) in Medium, which discloses limited information about expenses but still misses all of the rest of accounting data (including, project's assets and accumulated liabilities) is not enough. It might be just an occasional spark soon to be drawn in a dark ocean of 'proprietaries' and 'none-disclosures', but it might, also, signifies an important shift in DeFi founders mentality.
The shift from the Peter Schiff kind of the Jurassic world which is populated by dinosaurs fighting each other with golden horns in the dark of their paper jungles towards the elegantly transparent universe of silently quarreling consensus algorithms and spiraling towards celestial objects personal ERC721 tokens :)
Well, at least, I hope that Patrick Dai - a former Alibaba employee, a graduated of Draper University and a drop-out of the doctoral degree from the Chinese Academy of Sciences - as well as his Team (a-) will keep high the banner of transparency.
Meanwhile, I salute them for that ground-breaking post and expect from Qtum to deliver no lesser ones in the nearest future.
Result for Qtum Execution (Solution - Validity - Equity - Team):b- / b / b- / a-