Dear DOP Community,

On Friday, we experienced an unexpected disappointment with the launch of our token, $DOP. While we are fundamentally a technology project, our focus has always been building robust technology, developing a thriving ecosystem, and fostering a strong community. We are not here to be preoccupied with the token price, as it is determined by its holders and not by us. However, the token price reflects the community’s trust in the project. Seeing that this trust was much lower than anticipated deeply concerns us, and we are committed to doing everything possible to restore it.

We want to address these issues transparently and honestly.

 

Understanding the Launch: What Happened?

The $DOP pre-sale started at one cent. During the private sale, prices ranged from one cent to eight cents in different rounds. We also ran an airdrop campaign with our testnet and mainnet, receiving tremendous support and trust from the community as we built our initial mainnet on top of Ethereum. This support was evident across social networks, at various events, and through your purchase of $DOP tokens, demonstrating your confidence in our project.

To ensure a smooth listing on major exchanges for the community’s benefit, we kept the tokens untransferable until the very last moment. We released the tokens only when Bybit, the second-largest exchange worldwide and our main listing partner, opened deposits. Unfortunately, simultaneously, a user created a Uniswap pool with 100,000 USDT and zero $DOP tokens, effectively opening a long position. This led novice crypto users to quickly liquidate some of their airdropped tokens through this pool, causing the price to start lower than expected.

To be clear, this Uniswap pool has nothing to do with the DOP project or its affiliates.

 

Exchange Opening Price

The listing price on different exchanges is decided solely at the exchange’s discretion. Each exchange sets a different price based on its reasons, and it is not up to us. It is very important for us that you understand this. It’s also important to remember that the starting price has no significant real effect. Whether it starts at $100 or a tenth of a penny, the market decides where the price will settle after a few seconds. No one could buy at that price; this was merely a marketing visual effect that exchanges create to attract an audience with a huge green candle. In our case, while the first available price appeared to be a tenth of a cent, there was no actual liquidity at that price point, and the price quickly surged to almost four cents.

Ultimately, the token holders decide the price, not us.

 

Market Conditions on Listing Day

The day of our listing was probably one of the worst days in the crypto market during the last two years, with three significant events negatively impacting the market: Mt. Gox’s announcement, the German government’s crypto sell-off, and FTX’s announcement of altcoin liquidation. Each of these announcements had the potential of negatively impacting the market individually and could have damaged the market. Still, all three occurred together on the same day, just before our listing. As a result, the market took a big hit, with Bitcoin trading below $54,000 and Ether around $2,800. We knew postponing the listing would result in even greater backlash from the community, so we decided to proceed as planned since we cannot time the market.

 

Addressing Binance

As everyone knows, we have been engaged with Binance from day one. We participated in Binance Campus and later in Binance Blockchain Week. We have maintained a good relationship with the Binance team and expected to be listed on their platform due to the size of our community, the strength of our technology, and our multiple conversations with senior Binance team members.

Given multiple indications from Binance, we felt confident they would be our listing partner. Therefore, we chose to wait with our TGE. In hindsight, this decision was wrong. We shouldn’t have made the community wait so long. It would have been much easier if we had known sooner that they would not be our listing partner. This would have allowed us to launch the token back in March, as the community wanted. Despite our disappointment, we respect Binance’s decision-making process.

We fully appreciate the advantages of being listed on major exchanges like Binance. These platforms offer increased market exposure and often lend additional credibility to projects. The potential for reaching a larger user base and the associated benefits for trading volume are significant, and we understand why our community was eager for such a listing.

However, it’s crucial to remember that a project’s value isn’t determined by the exchange it is listed on. We draw inspiration from projects like TON (The Open Network), which has achieved significant success without being listed on Binance. This does not diminish its value. A project’s true value lies in its technology, tokenomics, and, most importantly, the strength of its community.

 

Change in Management

Following a mutual decision, we have decided to change our senior management team to position DOP better for future success. We’re excited to welcome Mr. Avidan Abitbul, who will replace Mike Corral (Former Head of Business Development) as our new Project Director. Avidan joins us from Kaspa after having helped propel the project from inception to ranking within the top 50 on CoinMarketCap.

We wish Mr. Corral the best of luck in his future endeavors and thank him for contributing to our project.

 

Our Immediate Actions

1. Increase Liquidity: As promised, we have allocated over 5M USDT to provide liquidity to various exchanges and buy $DOP. These tokens will be transferred to the DAO.
2. Transparent Communication: We will provide more frequent updates and insights into our strategies and actions. Transparency is vital to rebuilding trust, and we are committed to keeping you informed every step of the way.
3. Community Support: Our moderators in the Telegram and Discord communities work 24/7 to answer all of your questions. We will conduct a weekly AMA in the coming months and are here to listen to our community and provide answers and support.
4. Review and Learn: We are thoroughly reviewing the launch process to identify what went wrong and how we can prevent similar issues. Learning from this experience is crucial to our growth and success.
5. Upcoming Token Burn: As part of our commitment to our original project schedule, we will conduct a token burn on Monday, July 8th. This burn will involve approximately 100 million tokens. The burning process will be carried out by distributing tokens to pre-locked wallets with various lock-up settings. For example, some of these wallets are locked for three years, with the lock period starting on July 4th. This action aligns with our tokenomics strategy and demonstrates our commitment to the project’s sustainability.

 

 

Scam, Scam, Scam

It is very disappointing to see different community members using this word to express their disappointment. DOP is led by a hardworking, honest, and skillful team working 24/7 for the benefit of the project.

Let’s look at the facts:

1. Mainnet is live.
2. TestNet drew over 2.6 million users.
3. In our social networks, we have over a million followers.
4. Marketing is working hard with multiple campaigns and events.
5. Our business development team has been creating meaningful partnerships. Some were announced, like with Bitcoin.com, and some will be announced in the coming weeks.
6. The tech team is working harder than everyone else to ensure we stay on schedule with our product roadmap.
7. Since our launch, there have been over 600,000 transactions.
8. The funds are in place to ensure the project’s continuity for many years.
9. Calling this a scam is disrespectful to everyone. We will not tolerate this. We respect our community members and ask you to respect our team members.

If you are unhappy with our products and work, we are eager to change that and will work hard to do so. But if all you care about is the token’s price, and if it goes up, we’re okay, but if it goes down, then we are scammers; we urge you to sell the token and get out.

 

Our Commitment

Our vision for DOP remains unchanged. We are dedicated to creating a robust, decentralized platform that benefits our community and token holders. Our roadmap is on track, and we are working tirelessly to deliver on our promises now more than ever.

 

The Future of DOP

No serious project reaches its peak on the very first day. Although the launch day did not meet our expectations, we are confident that many beautiful days lie ahead for DOP. Data is arguably the most important asset of our age. Building a solid protocol and marketplace to allow individuals and organizations to own, control, and monetize their data holds immense potential, especially with the booming AI industry requiring vast amounts of data.

Our team is professional, hard-working, and possesses the skills and work ethic necessary to create long-term value for our community. By working transparently and communicating with you regularly, we aim to build a bright future together.

To conclude, we draw inspiration from Henry Ford’s words: “When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.”

Thank you for your understanding, patience, and continued support.

Having said that, we strongly believe that actions speak louder than words – stay tuned.

 

Sincerely,

The DOP Team