Share sale by 'Internet 2.0' firm MaidSafe accidentally leaked on Twitter

Nothing to worry about, says CEO David Irvine

Details of an equity sale by decentralised networking firm MaidSafe were leaked prematurely yesterday causing consternation among some would-be investors who feared a repeat of a previous fundraising effort when they were left out in the cold.

The equity offer is intended to raise £1.75m for 6.5 per cent of MaidSafe. It is being handled by BnkToTheFuture, an online investment platform specialising in fintech, blockchain and cryptocurreny companies.

The official launch date for the campaign is 12 September but a link to the share application page, which is only intended to be accessible to existing certified BnkToTheFuture investors, was posted on Twitter by an enthusiastic investor, who has since apologised for his haste.

The reason for the unease among some of MaidSafe's many supporters goes back to 2014, when the start-up made history by raising $6m in only five hours via a 'crypto-crowdsale'. The sale of 459 million MaidSafeCoins, a cryptocurrency token sold on anticipation of future earnings from MaidSafe's SAFE Network platform, was planned to take place over 30 days, but in the event the tokens were all snapped up by buyers exchanging Mastercoins at an attractive rate before many enthusiasts had a chance to buy them.

Registering as an investor on BnkToTheFuture can take up to five days, and some supporters feared that history was about to repeat itself. However, with a minimum individual investment on BnkToTheFuture set at £1,000, this is very unlikely to happen.

MaidsSafe CEO David Irvine was sanguine about the accidental "soft launch".

"It's happened, but it's all been discussed on our forum and I see no harm at all," he told Computing. "We are always very open so it's part of the landscape."

After 10 years of development, MaidSafe released an alpha version of the SAFE
(secure access for everyone) Network in August. SAFE is essentially a rewriting of three of the seven internet layers to allow information to be encrypted, replicated and shared across users' devices in a peer-to-peer fashion. Participants will eventually be paid for the use of their resources (storage and CPU time), earning a cryptocurrency called Safecoin. In this way servers and data centres run by the likes of Google, Microsoft and Facebook need no longer be a feature of this alternative internet.

For such an ambitious objective, the team is very small, comprising 13 developers out of a total of 17 staff. This round of funding is intended to allow MaidSafe to recruit more developers and to build out the features and functionality of the network, so that third-party coders can more easily create applications that work on the network.

"We're trying to target developers as much as we can at the moment," said COO Nick Lambert.

"We're a small team and we can't create all these apps ourselves. Although we have some apps guys our main domain expertise is in networking, but when we get to the stage of building a search engine for SAFE, for example, we're not going to do that ourselves. We're going to rely on someone with expertise and experience in search algorithms from Yahoo or Google."

The company is also seeking to develop partnerships with compatible software projects and hardware vendors.

BnkToTheFuture

BnkToTheFuture founder Simon Dixon sees great potential in decentralised networking and crypto projects. Kim Dotcom, founder of the now defunct file sharing site Megaupload, recently signed an agreement with the firm to raise funds for his new decentralised networking venture, Bitcache.

"Our online investment platform is niche to financial innovation and technology. We specialise in fintech deals but our investors are interested in encryption, blockchain and decentralised technologies also," Dixon said.

"MaidSafe is the exact type of project our investors are interested in seeing," he added. "It is slightly outside the scope of our usual fintech deals, but in line with the type of deal our investors are interested in."

There is a longer interview with Simon Dixon on our sister site V3.