Hello,
What I will be detailing here is not intended to announce a DAC, but as I explained over here...
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,15756.0/all.htmlThere doesn't seem to be an "announce your company" area, so this is where I promised to bring the discussion.
Please note that this is not intended as an announce. It is just a way to quickly answer questions that the community has had regarding us.
I am posting here because I promised I would give a complete rundown detailing.
#1 Who we are
#2 What we have planned
#3 Why we are planning it
#4 How far along we are
#5 What we still need to do
#6 It's expected impact
#7 Roles that remain to be filled
I try to always keep my promises, and I'm usually really good about meeting deliverables.
My goal was to have this thread opened for discussion about 24 hrs ago.
That did not happen, because the domain we were using for internal email exchange went offline due to an ICANN related issue.
The actual issue was resolved almost immediately, but it appears that the internal communications within our company are still disrupted due to DNS caching of the previous state. We've been using SMS alot, but there is only so much you can convey in 255 characters.
In case you're wondering about the ICANN issue, someone forgot to confirm something during the domain registration & renewal process, and it unexpectedly wiped us off the internet for a few hours. We are now waiting for the internet to catch up. Thank you clayop for bringing the matter to my attention so quickly.
Since there is no way for me to create a moderated thread, I would like to ask that everyone hold off on asking questions on this thread until I've had a chance to clean it up and go a bit more expository. I'm thinking I can do that by Monday assuming Murphy's law doesn't strike again.
That should give me enough time to work out several fundamental technical items still on my plate (domains still not resolving, email down, equipment move etc). Once those are out of the way, I will hopefully have more space to go into greater depth about things.
It will also allow me time to invite the other members of the project into the discussion, so we are all here standing together and then you can ask us anything.
In the meantime, let me give you the gloss of it, because you have been so patient with us.
As you know from the topic of the thread, we are called gemspace.
GEMspace stands for Global Electronic Marketspace.
We had tried to come up with an acronym for the "SPACE" portion, but everything we tried ended up feeling a bit tortured.
gemspace is our official registered name on the blockchain, we also use globalelectronicmarket. globalelectronicmarket is used for running test transactions, whereas gemspace is the live "official" business account.
The company name is Gemspace Holdings Inc, but the registration paperwork has not returned from the state yet, so there is a possibility that this may change. It is a joint venture between several other companies who are all smaller, closely held companies from Wyoming, Colorado & California and a few international players as well. For legal & tax purposes we are incorporating in Wyoming, I'll update this posting to provide a link to the business registration once it's confirmed with the state.
The purpose of gemspace is to provide the world's first fully SEC compliant platform for small business to access the US capital markets.
We are operating under the JOBS Act, mostly Title III.
What makes us different from other "crowdfund" platforms is that we are building new technology to allow you to create fully compliant offerings and leverage the power of the blockchain. In essence we will be turning the blockchain into the official "share transfer register", for any company that launches through our service.
Furthermore, we are building an exchange site where investors will be able to swap shares into and out of other bitAssets such as bitUSD.
The exchange site will ride directly on top of the decentralized exchange already built into bitshares. Thus the exchange site itself is really more or less there to attract people who would otherwise not have an interest in cryptocurrencies.
The final piece of the puzzle is a gateway. Our gateway is a bit different than most. It isn't a "website" where you put in banking details etc. Instead we are creating new firmware that will run on top of the most popular ATM platforms to allow existing "bitcoin" ATMs to offer the full range of bitshares & bitassets. The goal is that an end user can go to the ATM, and buy or sell their bitassets directly for cash, in addition to processing their regular bitcoin business.
The gateway firmware project is being developed as part of the gemspace project, but at the technical level it is tied to bitshares, not gemspace.
This is necessary, because each country has it's own laws regarding the sale of equities and gemspace itself only targets compliance with US & Canadian laws.
In otherwords, we don't want an ATM owner in Brazil or Zimbabwe to be hemmed in by US law.
We just want to ensure he/she has the best platform possible to increase their sales.
There are other pieces of this puzzle as well, but these are the most important and highest profile at this time.
As you can probably guess, this is a monstrously complex undertaking.
The technology to make this work is my primary job and 20hr days have been the norm since March 25th.
My name is Devin Luker, I am known here as tsaishen (chinese money deity) and I am the CIO. Because making the technology comply with SEC regs is a huge part of what I do here, I've found myself in a cycle of constantly pivoting between what we CAN do from a technical standpoint and what we are ALLOWED to do from a legal standpoint.
As broadly sweeping as they are, the technical aspects are actually only a small part of the puzzle.
There are also business, legal and financial matters, that make up the bulk of what is going on behind the scenes.
For example, our original goal was to launch with a "vote for your favorite company" community site. Then we would take the top 10 each month and join them with an attorney who would walk them through the SEC registration process, from there we would give them compliance tech and let them manage it.
We found out at the 11th hour, that the way the rules now read, would not really allow for that model. This caused a business model pivot, that resulted in changes to requirements and of course the fundamental tech needs to be adapted to match.
So those of you who were expecting the voting thing, just be advised that voting is no longer a thing we will be doing at all.
Instead each company interested in listing will be fully vetted upfront, the opportunity screened and listed with the SEC directly.
In otherwords, you can just vote with your wallet.
The newer model is cleaner and simpler though. Speaking from a technical standpoint, the new model is actually easier for us to implement. From a business standpoint though, the compliance burden went up dramatically and this will result in a much slower on-boarding process.
We have a real advantage in the fact that the new SEC guidelines don't go into effect until 60 days after they were published in the federal register. This gives us a little breathing time to allocate more resources to optimizing the compliance pipeline.
Honestly though, it's not much time, and for the moment I'm wearing more than just the CIO hat, a certain chunk of the business planning work now falls to me. This is one of the main reasons I was seeking to purchase bitUSD and pay people up front for their efforts in our launch. By getting payroll sized up and allocated, there would be no problems with at least ensuring that at the end of the day we had no "accidental" volunteers as I've seen happen in so many other companies during pre-launch.
So this is a very high level overview of the 7 items I promised to discuss in depth and I realize that it barely only even touches on half of them.
It's currently 5:00 AM, I started writing this at 2:00 AM, I have a meeting at 6:00 AM and then I am physically moving equipment the rest of the day. I don't expect to be back online until around 8 or 9 PM which is when I have a skype with the rest of the tech team. I expect that to run until midnight, mostly because we will be doing a team coding session.
Sunday I will be working to stand up the website so we at least have a proper landing page for you guys to check out, then I'll hand over the landing page to marketing. Once that is complete, I will come back here and update this posting. I will eventually need to sleep, but the rest of the team is busier than I am. I am inviting them to come here and at least make introductions. We want you to know who we are, we're just a bit busier than we expected to be at this stage.
Thanks for taking the time to read this, and I'll see you Monday.
Topic: gemspace -- SEC compliant platform (Read 21013 times)
