The path forward for our citizends

Dear citizends,
A few days have passed since the Community Sale, and we’ve had the chance to sit down with our partners to chart the path forward. We’re thrilled to share our new plans with you, and we hope you’re as excited as we are about what’s coming next. First and foremost, we want to extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone for being involved, active, and for sharing your feedback. We have also had a significant number of backers offering to fund the project privately, which we are deeply grateful for, and we intend to create a format for that, in line with our values and community orientation.
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First contribution phase debrief

What worked well

Community growth and engagement

During our first contribution phase, nearly 1.8k fully-verified citizends acquired their citizend Passports to participate in the sale, and we received over $282,000 of commitments from 120 of our early community members.

However, despite a significant amount of interest, our minimum funding level of $500k was not met, and all the commitments have been automatically refunded, in line with the citizend procedures.

Many people have given us feedback and advice over the past days, and this summary below is our team retrospective for the benefit of all citizends. We welcome your constructive views on how we can improve and will be incorporating them going forward.

Financial commitment

One of the main reasons we built citizend is to enable users to participate in the early stages of a project development beyond community support and airdrops, to actually have skin in the game. While we didn’t reach the minimum cap, $282,000 coming from the community is a sizable amount. We really appreciate the support of everyone that participated.

Engagement with the community

Thanks to the Community Sale, we were able to see the true value that comes from building a community and getting its support. We were truly humbled by the support and the constructive feedback following the Community Sale, and are happy to see that the community has remained active in the last days. We have several updates to share in the next few days and are excited to move forward with you being a key part of our story.

Product was live tested and Smart contracts were secure

There’s no better test than a live test. The citizend Community Sale was the first event on the platform, and we can say that, despite some areas for improvement, both the product and smart contracts performed as expected. This has also allowed us to prioritize our roadmap going forward.

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What didn’t go so well

Metamask warning

As several of you noticed, when trying to contribute to the sale using Metamask as your wallet, some people would see a warning message saying the contract was not verified, and that it could be a scam. This message came from Blockaid, a company building a security feature integrated into Metamask that flags when a contract may be deceptive. 
Obviously, this warning was incorrect, as our contract is verified and audited.We informed the Blockaid team immediately after the sale opened, and they confirmed the flagging was incorrect. However, it took 18 hours for them to remove it, which likely stopped some people from participating in the sale. We now have a direct line to the Blockaid team to make sure this will not happen again in the future.

Raise amount was too ambitious, and soft cap too high

In the current market, over the last months, most community and public sales raised below $300k, and several projects didn’t meet their soft caps. After looking at the amount of verified citizend Passports (1.8k), analyzing other project sales on other platforms, and assessing the sentiment in the community, we thought that our targets were reasonable, but now it is clear we may have been too ambitious. We also believe that setting the soft cap relatively high at $500k may have made some people hesitant to participate in the first place. There’s not much more to say other than ‘lesson learnt’. We will take this into account in the future.

We should focus on building our own community first

We have several projects interested in collaborating with citizend in the future, but we believe it’s crucial to first make the platform exceptional and strengthen our community before opening it up to other projects. This includes Posemesh, which will not be conducting their community event on citizend at this moment.

Registration flow needs UX/UI improvements

The citizend platform relies on Fractal ID and idOS for user verification and KYC reusability.The way idOS is designed, it enables users to only verify their identity once, and then re-share their KYC credentials (i.e., citizend Passport) with a wallet signature in the future without the need to go again through a verification form or submit more documents. This is a substantial improvement to how most token launch platforms work. However, we detected some users had problems when interacting with the system from a UX point of view. We are addressing these issues, which should bring a much better UX/UI for all citizends.

We should have conducted the sale in Arbitrum

Arbitrum is and remains a core backer of citizend. The plan has always been for citizend to conduct community and public sales in Arbitrum. However, we set the Community Sale to take place on Ethereum, and we worked on some optimizations for the network and didn’t want to rush a deployment in Arbitrum that could result in some last-minute issues. In the weeks prior to the sale, gas fees on Ethereum were rather low, but that changed with the ETH ETFs announcement, which resulted in relatively higher gas fees on the Ethereum network, which may have stopped some users from contributing to the Community Sale.

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Second contribution phase will open soon
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We’re excited to announce that we will be opening a new Community Sale in the coming days. This sale will run for several weeks, giving everyone the opportunity to contribute and engage with the citizend community. During this period, our focus will be on improving the product, building the core team, and nurturing our community.

Here are the details for the upcoming citizend Community Sale:

• Network: Arbitrum One
• Start-end date: June 26th, 2024, at 12:00 pm UTC - July 26th, 2024, at 12:00 pm UTC
• Min-max raise amount: $50k-$250k
• Price/token (FDV): Fixed $0.20 ($20m)
• Number of CTND tokens to be distributed: 250,000 - 1,250,000 (0.25%-1.25% of total CTND supply)
• Min. contribution/participant: $100
• Max. allocation/participant: TBD - Rising Tide Mechanism will activate after the max. cap of $250k is reached
• Lock-up terms: 20% TGE, 6-month linear vesting
• Contribution token: USDC
• Requirement to participate: Approved citizend Passport (Fractal ID KYC Plus)

IMPORTANT: As a token of our appreciation for those who have been with us from the beginning, participants of the previous CTND Community Sale will receive an additional 25% CTND tokens based on their confirmed contribution (e.g., contribute $1,000 USDC and receive 6,250 CTND – 5,000 CTND for the contribution + 1,250 CTND bonus).

Thank you for your patience and support. We are excited about the journey ahead and can’t wait to continue building the future together with you.

Best regards,

The citizend Team

*CITIZENS, RESIDENTS (TAX OR OTHERWISE) OR GREEN CARD HOLDERS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND RESIDENTS OR CITIZENS OF THE BRITISH VIRGIN ISLANDS, CAYMAN ISLANDS, NORTH KOREA, IRAN, RUSSIA, VENEZUELA AND CANADA ARE NOT ELIGIBLE TO PARTICIPATE IN CITIZEND’S COMMUNITY SALE.

Terms & Conditions can be found here.

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