Announcing the CLC Group Shares Presale
With the Chainlink mainnet fast approaching, we at CLC Group share the broader Chainlink community’s excitement about witnessing the first decentralized oracle network seeing the light of day. At the same time, the reality of things rapidly moving from the conceptual towards the concrete has translated into a more immediate need for ecosystem participants such as node operators and third party projects to align their progress with that of the underlying network. To put this into words that have recently echoed within the ecosystem, it has been a shared effort to “put our ducks in a row” in preparation for what is to come.
Our Progress
For CLC Group, this preparation for the Chainlink mainnet has meant ramping up our efforts both on the technical as well as the business development fronts. Our core team of developers led by our CTO Burak Benligiray has been hard at work building the Honeycomb platform — starting with the API marketplace that will connect Chainlink oracles to high quality APIs through our Software-as-a-Service external adapters with per-call pricing.
On the business development side, we have published our first 15 data providers who will have their APIs available on the marketplace, and have dozens more in the pipeline. All in all, the pace of our development on both fronts has been more rapid than we expected during the writing of our whitepaper, and we are extremely happy about the reception our project has had, not only within the Chainlink community of node operators, but also among data providers who want to integrate their data with tomorrow’s smart contract economy.
Beyond Bootstrapping
As with any startup business, progress usually comes with an increased need for funding. Scaling CLC Group beyond its bootstrapping phase is no different in this sense. Building the highest quality platform of services for the Chainlink network of node operators will require the full time effort of many people, not only in the technical development of the platform itself, but also in the business development of signing up the highest quality data providers possible. This is why today we are opening the signup process for our first funding round.
With this round, we aim to raise enough runway to develop and improve the Honeycomb API marketplace, listing service, and Nodary oracle certification service for the next 12 months.
CLC Group Shares
The first question one might have then, is: how are you raising the funds and what is the underlying asset of the fundraise? With the emergence of STOs as a viable funding method for companies — especially in the blockchain space — we have decided to raise our funding in exchange for something traditionally only available to venture capitalists and business angels: equity in our venture.
The rationale behind an STO fundraise is derived from our motivation to remain as much an ecosystem-owned project as possible. By raising the funds in exchange for equity, we want to enable members of the broader Chainlink community to own a piece of CLC Group and our services as a whole, as well as be able to share in the success of our venture in the time-proven way of equity share ownership, with the added liquidity benefit of doing this in tokenized form.
Tokenized Equity Shares and Regulation
With our goal of providing the broader Chainlink community with an opportunity to own tokenized equity in our company, we have spent the last months researching ways of doing this that adhere to local regulations and enable as many community members to participate as possible.
In the process of incorporating CLC Group, we looked at multiple jurisdictions and their regulatory approaches to tokenized equity, ultimately deciding on Estonia as the place of incorporation. Estonia was chosen due to its access to the European Economic Area, its progressive approach to cryptocurrencies (having issued over 900 crypto business licenses in the past year) as well as its startup-friendly taxation policies.
Even in a crypto-friendly jurisdiction like Estonia, however, tokenizing assets like company shares is not something one does without consulting with lawyers specialized on the matter. This is why we will work with a local law firm in Estonia in order to fulfill the regulatory requirements of tokenizing our company’s cap table, as well as other various local corporate and commercial legal matters.
Token Sale Schedule
CLC Group Shares will be released to the public in two separate offerings. The percentage of equity offered in these two token sales translates to 30% ownership in the whole company — 10% in the presale and a further 20% in the STO which we currently estimate to take place in Q1 2020. In total, 1 million equity tokens will be created in the STO, representing 100% of CLC Group company shares. In the presale of CLC Group Shares taking place on May 1st 2019, participants will be able to purchase up to 100,000 placeholder tokens which will later be swapped 1 : 1 with an equal number of equity tokens created in the tokenization of CLC Group shares. In the STO, we will offer another 20% of the tokens for public sale.
CLC Group Shares Distribution
10% — Presale
20% — STO
60% — Founding team
10% — Advisors and further hires
CLC Group Shareholder Rights
We aim to afford CLC Group shareholders the following customary rights and privileges of common shareholders: ownership in the company issuing the shares, the right to share in the profitability of the company via dividends, and the right to vote on major issues. As a preliminary estimate, we will be looking to pay out quarterly dividends to our shareholders to the degree of 25% of all CLC Group profits. Please note that the foregoing is merely a proposed structure and is subject to the confirmation of our members and the review of local counsel.
Presale
The presale will be conducted as a token generation event where we create up to 100,000 placeholder ERC20 tokens that will be swapped 1 : 1 to the final equity token during the STO. Participants in the presale will be able to purchase CLCG placeholder tokens (ERC20) by sending ETH to the token sale smart contract.
Note: Unfortunately we cannot accept presale participation by citizens of the United States due to SEC regulations.
How much are you raising?
The presale will be hard-capped at 4000 ETH.
What is the price of a single CLC Group Share?
We are raising the 4000 ETH in exchange for 100,000 CLCG representing 10% ownership of CLC Group (0.0001% per token), so the price of a single CLC Group Share in the presale comes to 0.04 ETH. In other words, for every 1 ETH you get 25 CLCG.
How do I contribute?
In order to contribute to the presale, you first need to sign up for the CLC Group Shares Presale Whitelist. To do this, submit our whitelisting form at: www.clcg.io/tokensale.
The whitelisting process includes a KYC procedure which requires all participants to prove their identity with a photo ID. In addition to the KYC, we ask each participant to provide the non-exchange Ethereum address from which they will be contributing to the token sale, as well as their estimated contribution amount. CLC Group retains the right to close the whitelist before the token sale date if the estimated total contribution amount significantly exceeds our hard cap.
Presale notes
- Secondary market trading of CLCG is not prohibited (in fact we couldn’t prohibit it if we wanted to), but we want to emphasize that we will not be able to swap the placeholder tokens to security tokens for US citizens due to SEC regulations.
- CLC Group Shares represent ownership in CLC Group but do not carry utility functions in our services.
- The presale tokens are placeholders for only the 10% of the total supply. This means that the team will not get any presale tokens.
