Purpose of this Forum Community

Proposals
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During the AMA #123, on June 9, 2023, Colin informed us that with the new Foundation, upcoming DAO structure, and this community forum, the project could grow very fast based on community-driven input. Just listen again to his description of “Decentralize governance vs centralization”, and this example he gave about “monetization”. Below is the transcript (a little bit adjusted for readability), starting in minute 57 (about advertising/monetization)…

"Main thing is just again kind of getting to a point where we’ve got a team or an agency. Somebody who’s specifically focused on driving that out. Again not trying to just develop yet another search engine… and to build this huge centralized team here in Midland, from where we’re gonna go out and do all the selling.

No, what we want to do is to have external “groups” come in and help develop us with all aspects of advertising (ad units).

So, helping to determine what the basic capabilities are, what are the requirements, or we need better reporting, or hey we need some other type of functionality, whatever it is that’s kind of like polishing that offering to make it exactly what the customers need.

And then identifying those customers, and then developing the campaign to go out and onboard them all into the system.

Trying to have somebody responsible for all those different facets.

So, one might facet may be the execution of that plan. Or let’s say the community proposal might be… hey we’re going to put a proposal out or the community is going to identify a proposal that goes out that says hey we’ve got this homepage ad unit or ad takeover and we need to develop all of the best practices around the creative determining how to best generate results and which types of projects/businesses groups would be the best fit for. And then that becomes public information something that is available to anybody who wants to then kind of take that information, and go do the outreach, do the kind of work to onboard people, and then set the system up.

So, it’s a commission-based model where if you end up in this type of role (where you are doing outreach to crypto projects bringing them into the home page takeover ad unit), you get X percent of the PRE that they spend to run that ad.

And then it enables anybody to go out and build a business around onboarding all the different advertisers.

I know to some people probably it feels like we’re going slow and we could go faster.

But as all these pieces start to come into play, it’s gonna start going so quickly because it’s not waiting on one centralized company, one group of people to do this.

This can be an open competitive marketplace where we could have “tons” of different ad agencies going out and doing this thing.

And then ultimately that real estate becomes very scarce. There are tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of potential people that ultimately could want that ad unit and there are only you know X number of slots as that becomes more competitive then the pricing gets realized within the ecosystem and so that’s just kind of a micro-cut.

It will be awesome how the whole system is intended to operate. It just takes a while to kind of get those core things in place and then you know get that next level of the system in place where we can start to identify all these opportunities, enable people to fill in the gaps, and enable many different people to ultimately compete within a Marketplace to earn from the value that is present, that can be sold and offered out to the General market."

All in line with the Vision Paper (October 2020), a “community-driven project”… just one quote that explains the core concept …

Re-read chapter 9 of the Vision Paper about Tokenomics, and especially the last paragraph…

“Given that the leading search platforms today spend billions each year to operate their search businesses, it would be foolish to believe that Presearch (or any company) could reasonably ever raise enough money or hire enough smart developers, product managers, and data scientists to compete at that level. That’s why the Presearch model is drastically different. When Presearch earns advertising revenue, instead of being a big, for-profit corporation trying to take advantage of users, Presearch funnels that earned value back into the platform, leveraging PRE as the unit of accounting and value transfer between the various stakeholders. Presearch has no traditional shareholders expecting a return on investment, as for-profit corporations do; therefore, PRE represents and holds all value over and above that which is required to operate the Platform.”

Now, 2 months later and after this Forum is live for 6 weeks…

The team did expand with Tim Enneking and his team members in the roles of COO, CFO, and CMO who took over the project completely.

And we have to believe that the project was running out of cash and strongly needed a capital injection.

First, we have no clue about the current financial status. All we know is that the ICO dollar proceeds (November 2017) were $20M (donated in BTC and ETH), and the original PRE war chest consisted of about 400M PRE tokens.

But what’s left in “cash” and the number of PRE tokens?

All of a sudden without any community input… the project now became a “centralized” organization controlled by Tim and his team, which will be funded by A) additional Venture Capital and B) via increment of the maximum number of PRE supply (probably from the current 500M tokens to 1B tokens as “leaked out” in the presentation sheets of AMA #131).

Ad A)

The whole idea of the Presearch “built-by and for the” community was to have a not-for-profit Foundation where the decisions would be made via the DAO governance structure. The foundation should be registered in a “crypto-friendly” jurisdiction. So, it became Panama (yes crypto-friendly, but with less “legal user and investor protection”)…. And now, the working company will be located in Delaware (not that crypto-friendly but with more legal protection for VC funders).

Of course, this creates a “conflict of interest” between this new “profit” working company (its shareholders) and the PRE token holders.

The first conflict is already visible… with the token buybacks.

Tim wants to make us believe that we should be happy with a 1% up to a maximum of 20% of buybacks of PRE tokens if the “working company” earns revenue (from advertising). The original and whole idea was that “all” the revenue would funnel back into the platform (ecosystem). Yes, I agree that not many buybacks were done by the team… but the team had sufficient PRE tokens from the ICO (500M minted PRE tokens) to reward searchers and node operators. The underlying idea was always that the project should become “sustainable” (in the initial phase founded by the ICO receipts) and that later earned advertising revenue would be used to buy PRE tokens on the open market. Nothing new… as an “investor” I have waited for years to get to the point where all tokens would be in circulation… and the team needs to start the buy(backs) of PRE tokens on the open market. That’s when the “scarcity” starts to play a role, and should be the main driver for the token price appreciation… until that moment… the token would be suffering from token inflation (the gradual release of all the “not sold during ICO” PRE tokens, i.e. from 100M tokens to the maximum of 500M PRE tokens). Now, Tim wants to increase the total PRE token supply… and the inflation won’t stop but will increase. (And no, we don’t need additional PRE tokens to fund the research and node operator rewards… we need “monetization” with the help of the community)

Ad B)

Completely ignoring the Vision Paper where inside was stated that the current 500M tokens were the absolute maximum, no more tokens will be minted ever…

The current contract smart contract was meant to give us stakeholders the “guarantee” that this couldn’t be changed ever…

In hindsight, a worthless promise as it may seem now…

(And as it seems so easy to “technically” adjust… who says that a new increase in tokens supply won’t happen again in the future if the project is running out of money again?)

You know, a change in the smart contract to allow multi-signature (as this is what CEXs are requesting?) can be a good initiative… but to combine it with the (sneaky) increment of the maximum total supply, and to add a minting and burning feature without discussing this upfront with the community in official chat/community groups, doesn’t give me any trust in Tim and his team.

Side note: it’s just ridiculous that the only feedback and explanation about the capital refunding and smart contract adjustment is given by Colin and Tim in the “PRE (Unofficial) Trading Telegram Channel”.

An unofficial channel dedicated for discussing charts, TA, and the PRE token (and other tokens) price behavior.

Instead, this community (or the official Discord channel) should be the place to discuss about these important topics.

So far, Tim and Collin as far as I can see, have never commented or replied to all discussions and proposals inside this community.

Speaking about taking your community seriously…

I can continue with the new roadmap…

It was set up in a relatively short period of time via internal discussions by the (new) Presearch team (initiated by Tim Enneking with a focus on fast “execution”). But there was no “community input”… (very strange if the project aims to be “community-driven” and just has introduced this “community” where stakeholders posted several good ideas that could have been included in the roadmap).

So, is it a coincidence that no new proposals were made by community members since the new roadmap was presented?

Normally, if “we” were taken seriously… the new roadmap should lead to additional “communication” and new ideas or additions…

Wasn’t the roadmap meant to be “dynamic” based on community input?

And what about…

Postponing the first DAO vote to Q3 2024… giving Tim and his team all the “control” for the next year.

So, long story, this project has been transferred from a community-driven project into a “centralized” project where major important discussions are/were made without any community feedback or discussion.

Hence, I’m waiting for Colin, Tim, and the other new management members to step into this community and answer discussions and proposals.

Moises and other administrators try to do their job inside this community… but the real answers should be given by management team members… (also don’t ask people to replace good ideas… you know, first, you ask people to place discussions/proposals in this new community, and now they should be added to the AMA… there should be one place for discussions/proposals… and all unanswered questions should be included in the upcoming AMA).

A community-driven project starts with discussion before important decisions are made…

No, “just wait and see what the team will decide” (f.e. Search Staking, cutting down the regular search rewards by 90% from 0.1 PRE to 0.01 PRE).

So, please let the management reply to this discussion… no need for an admin to answer…

BTW, the last time I asked Tim personally to reply in the main Presearch Telegram chat about the token supply increase… the discussion/answering was taken to the unofficial price chat group… this is not the group where I want to be a member of… I want answers (from Colin and Tim) in official groups…

I used to be a big fan of this project, always defended Colin and the team (especially in Alexandre Maksky Telegram channel), and I do own a significant number of PRE tokens… but I was fully surprised by what happened in the last 2 weeks and I’m upset (to put it mildly) how this has been communicated, let alone that I don’t agree with many important changes…

So, I still have many ideas/suggestions about how to improve and scale up this “project” but I want to spend my time, money, and energy on a project where this kind of input is being appreciated and taken seriously…

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Hello I am a community member. It is an important discussion and I would like to make a few comments. 1 Price of a token in the long term depends on the value the search platform creates for users and advertisers. The new team can help a lot with that. Then demand and supply will result in a good price of pre for a long time.
2 Some conflict between the team and the community is ok. But Colin needs to reassure the community members about the decentralization part of the project which makes it unique.
3 Including possibility of minting in the contract would be a breach of trust. Team promised that 500 is max supply. If minting is included in the new contract the team wouldn’t keep the promise and pre holders and community will be in inferior position. This I think is not the aim the decentralized search engine project.

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Hello here is a snippet of Colin’s answer.
Colin Pape, [29/7/2023 6:42]
My two PRE here…

Yesterday’s dump was caused by a (relatively) big chunk of liquidity someone placed on KuCoin as a limit buy order for around 850k PRE. One of the larger bits of liquidity openly posted at a near-market price in a while.

Liquidity is low in all of crypto these days, but PRE has had even lower liquidity for a while as we have focused on end users rather than traders so far (I’m sure that is going to change, with Tim actively onboard now).

Someone saw the buy order and decided to take advantage of the liquidity.

It is what it is.

When I first noticed the sizable buy order, I thought it was a great sign of confidence in the roadmap, and that it would provide a solid level support - funny how things can turn around like that in a market like this. :joy::woozy_face:

———————

Regarding the roadmap, it’s pretty comprehensive. It is also ambitious and is assuming a pretty significant investment in the growth of the dev team, which Tim believes he can fund through external investment in the operating company.

Presearch is a great opportunity, Tim and his team are committed to making it happen, and he’s been looking at ways to access capital while ensuring that PRE remains the focus (he is the largest PRE holder) and that additional capital can drive the utility value of PRE through actual growth in adoption that is focused on monetization and tokenization.

———————

We’ve spent years trying to avoid introducing any other value into the project and just focusing on PRE, but it’s forced the pace to be slow, and we have a window of opportunity to grow rapidly and capture our rightful position in the CMC top 100 before / during the next wave of adoption (aka bull run) that should happen due to the bitcoin halving next year into 2025.

If we can hit the milestones outlined in the roadmap, we’ll be in an amazing place to capture the hearts, minds and interest of the greater crypto community. The project still has so much growth ahead, and is barely on the radar of the speculators who have driven vapourware projects to multi-billion dollar market caps.

———————

Regarding the increase in total supply some have brought up, we had a miscommunication internally that I will take responsibility for, as I’m the one who puts the weekly update slides together.

We have been discussing restoring the max total supply back to 1 billion PRE for a number of reasons, and the time to make the call is now, before we lock down the contract to try to secure a listing opportunity with a major US exchange.

Setting the supply at 1b will enable us to launch the Presearch blockchain on Cosmos while also maintaining the ERC-20 token that will be necessary for exchange / defi / wallet compatibility, which is super important. The tokens can be bridged, but there’s a bit of a weird concept of bridged ERC-20 PRE running on Cosmos PRE chain (PRE on PRE) to wrap your head around.

Increasing the total supply gives the project some flexibility for bridging, but equally importantly also enables the project to continue funding rewards (which has understandably been a big community concern) while it gets to a PRE-based regenerative token economy, and also incentivize exchanges to list the project, Youtubers we sponsor to promote it, etc.

Low supply due to the 2020 burn has kept us focused, but has also been a huge challenge with the looming supply crunch (which we’re pretty much at internally, even if not on-chain). We’ve looked at every mechanism available to extend the PRE runway (reward breakage, etc.), but it’s become apparent that we simply need more supply of PRE.

We’ve discussed maybe doing an increase to a lower amount than the original supply of 1b that was proposed, but rather than make incremental changes, or find the project in a similar situation in a year or two, think that restoring the original supply will ensure that the project has the PRE it needs to get to the promised land.

The timing for such an announcement is never great, and certainly some people will be upset, but this is what Sherry and I had discussed before Tim really got

Colin Pape, [29/7/2023 6:42]
heavily involved, he reluctantly but largely supported it, and I thought this was about the best timing we had to announce it, as it dovetailed with the smart contract announcement, and with the sharing of the roadmap, it was going to really be an offsetting situation at least.

I think if you really understand how the token can be used to drive real growth and adoption / monetization / tokenization, and with the increased transparency of a foundation that is reporting treasury holdings, adding multi-sig to the contract and locking it down further, combined with the blockchain bridge and the increased utility that is being offered with the blockchain, it becomes more exciting than painful.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t had a chance to produce the weekly update slides until right before the video.

Trey and I had been up until 4am finalizing the roadmap, and with so much going on the past while, the slides were really a last-minute production. Due to not seeing my email and messages in the final hour before the update, Tim literally hadn’t seen the smart contract update slide until we were sitting there on Streamyard (the video broadcasting service we use) with Rice.

The messaging around restoring the supply wasn’t what Tim wanted to see, but we didn’t really have time to fix it, and the show had to go on, so there was a hasty executive decision to pull it from the slides that we kind of gapped had already been shared with Rice and published in the video description. :woozy_face:

Definitely a shitty situation that could have been handled better, but again, it is what it is.

———————

At this point, hopefully we can now have more of a discussion that the project will be best served by restoring the supply of PRE to 1 billion, with more transparency around the treasury, a commitment to never increase the supply beyond the original 1b PRE (unless there’s a community vote a few years down the road - it’s hard to see the future years out, but that’s about the best way to ensure that whatever options are best for the project are preserved).

With locking down the contract, doing any other potential increases would require an actual token swap, rather than just the contract edit that we can do now before we lock it down, so very unlikely, and again, with the community in control of the token by that point, not a team decision to make, and nothing to really worry about now - just wanted to set expectations.

Regardless of what happens in the future, years down the road, the immediate impact of a restoration of the total possible supply would be effectively nothing. The actual on-chain supply will not change beyond any accounting measures taken just to allocate PRE to different treasury wallets, etc.

There will be wallets to support the Cosmos chain bridges, rewards, etc. at some point, and all of this will be enumerated publicly for transparency via a page with wallet addresses with labels and hopefully on Etherscan too.

First thing would be to get the Foundation IP transition complete next week to enable the Foundation to officially make the decision to restore the supply to 1b, a smart contract update would be performed sometime next month to lock down the contract with multi-sig, change the total supply value, etc., and the accounting changes (including possibly the sweeping of the thousands of deposit wallets holding hundreds of millions of PRE into a master platform wallet) and allocations to publicly-identified wallets would take place.

Aside from the cost of sweeping thousands of wallets (we need to send ETH into the wallet, which costs ETH, then we need to send the PRE to a master wallet, which costs more ETH), there have also been considerations with CMC and CoinGecko, as having PRE in master wallets makes it harder to get them to report increases in the circulating supply.

It also has been nice, we figure, in lieu of having staking wallets, etc., on chain (which will happen with the Cosmos chain), for those depositing to see their deposited PRE sitting in the wallets they’ve funded the platform with. But if we are going to work

Colin Pape, [29/7/2023 6:42]
towards labeled treasury wallets, and maybe do automatic sweeping, then that might need to change.

Some of the considerations are technical, others are resource-based (dev team, dev capabilities, capital investment, etc.), and I don’t know that it’s feasible to accelerate the PRE blockchain to enable everything to go on-chain faster, but might be something that can be done there.

———————

One of the real value-adds that Tim is bringing to the table is capital markets experience, and if capital comes in as expected, then the pace of development on this roadmap is certainly feasible, and as Tim wants, there may even be some shortcuts / reprioritizations that can accelerate different releases (like potentially moving staking wallets on-chain).

It’s been a weird situation because there’s always been significant interest from VCs and other investors in the project, but never a way to facilitate their capital investments in a way that works for them. If Tim can sell a minority equity position in the OpCo to values-aligned investors while the Foundation holds a controlling interest, then it’s a good way to inject significant resources into the project (without selling any PRE), and then in time, when the Foundation has the capital and desire, to eventually buy out those investors and make it a wholly-owned resource again.

Nothing is set in stone, but those are the kinds of discussions that are happening, that I think are pretty interesting and exciting.

———————

Anyway, just wanted to provide some information and context. Everyone is doing their best to be transparent and communicate openly, but in a space that tends to lack patience, and where there are risks of FUD, etc., it can be challenging.

I’m grateful to you all for the opportunity we have here, and feel like the path we are on is better than it’s ever been for executing and realizing the Presearch vision. There’s still a ton of work to do, plans to finalize, etc., but I’m also grateful that Tim is so eager to jump in and make things work.

Tim’s self-confidence, capabilities, vision and experience are important to the next phase of the project, and although his style and mine are quite different, I really value what he brings to the table and believe it’s what’s needed to drive our success in rapid fashion, and to realize the potential that we have here.

Tim and his company have been our top keyword stakers in the past, are now our top node operators, earliest institutional supporters and ongoing advocates. He’s a mentor, butt-kicker and more.

Lots of people are involved in the project, all playing important roles, but when we have someone who is so passionate and committed to Presearch, and is now taking an active role in driving execution and taking on more of a leadership role, I feel extra grateful. Tim is a great example of a hardcore community member stepping up into a position of more influence, which is really in-line with the ethos of the project.

Sorry for the really long message - I’m sure there are lots of thoughts and questions, and hopefully I haven’t spoken too out of turn, @timenneking, but wanted to weigh in here and help provide some context, establish some dialogue and ensure that Tim is well-supported as he undertakes to help transform Presearch into one of the most dynamic projects in the industry.

Thank you all for your support.

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Hello, it is not that the project was running out of funds, but they are needed to speed up the development of the project. It simply needs VC money to execute on its road map in a reasonable period of time.

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If you have the opportunity, I invite you to join the Telegram Price Channel where Colin and Tim explain that and other things in a very detailed way, This is the link for you to join and see the discussion.

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Thank you for your comments.

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You’re welcome buddy :slightly_smiling_face:

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we can’t give you specific details about the funds because we don’t manage that directly, we know that there is still supply to reward the node operators and to move forward with the project but it is absolutely necessary to look for several sources of monetization since now there are much more staff Among the project’s own expenses, on August 15 there will be an Ama where the whole team will participate. We will place the link on all the official channels. That would be the right time for questions of this type to be answered in a more appropriate way by Tim. , Colin, etc. so in that sense it would also be something much more dynamic between the community and the team

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I understand, Hopefully a core group member can answer it. :+1:

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Ben is right there are concerns and issues that should have been discussed with the community before these decisions/actions were made.

I stopped posting on here for a few weeks because it seemed to have no point. There is no follow through, additions to the roadmap, or actions taken on any of the proposals. If you want the community to participate and be excited there needs to be actions or at a minimum reciprocal communications from the Team, otherwise you will get NO NEW COMMENTs, recommendations, or IDEAs. Nothing in this forum has been actioned even on very simple things like page layouts or filters that should take less than a few hours to change.

I like to see that some actions are taking place but I fear the community is not a part of any decisions or the roadmap which was one of the biggest draws for me to this project’s vision. THERE IS SO MUCH POTENTIAL AND Presearch COULD GET SOO MUCH ADOPTION but I am concerned the current roadmap is either veering away from the original vision or delaying that vision until some point in the future unknown? If the Team is serious about the original vision and large scale adoption they have to focus on developing many ways that put the keys to multiple streams of income in the hands of the people and adoption will come. This doesn’t mean Presearch gives away all control, it means Presearch is partnering with the people and allowing everyone to include Presearch and VC investors to profit from the success of the best search provider platform in the world. Yes great unbiased search results and a good user interface are important but the best moving forward will be reflected by who is willing to give users and their community the most power. Presearch can be that platform and attract the world OR they can play by the old rules and maybe get a little short-term success only to be ground into the dirt from the incumbents. Someone will end up doing what I am describing and they will get the initial win for the idea and become the innovative pacing threat to the establishment players. It should be Preaserch but the roadmap needs many additions!

You also can’t have just 1 means of getting PRE back into the treasury there should be multiple product lines and multiple mechanisms that give users more inherent control otherwise they can’t bring people onboard (users, new products, or advertisers).

On another note I am still not clear on the exact details of search staking? It seems like you can stake but your stake could be slashed by presearch if found to be farming. This should cut down on farmers dramatically but, my fear with this as we previously discussed in this forum is this concept will likely cause more headaches for the team or invite legal actions if inadvertently wrongfully slashed (BTW anyone that gets slashed will claim it was wrongful even if it wasn’t now presearch will likely waste time and resources dealing with a few). However, as as I have previously mentioned I would like to hear more of the exact details of the program before I cast further doubts on it.

AI has so much potential not just for Presearch to develop their own LLM but to also allow the world to leverage presearch too. I am talking about those who will innovate faster and create better niche AI with better public and private data to launch their own API accessible AI via Presearch for the world to use. This with Presearch’s built in security and privacy in place. For their efforts they can get compensated in PRE from users who wish to use their niche AI data w/ presearch also getting a cut. everyone wins. This is so obvious and something I have been saying for months but nothing is being done or at least is on the roadmap. It is only a matter of time before a competitor adds this AI launchpad/aggregator for community AI services and if that were to happen, PREsearch will once again be behind the curve. A small startup can’t afford lost opportunities like they did when Bing and Google beat them to market with AI search, we lost the opportunity to onboard hundreds of thousands or millions because of that.

BOLD VISION AND BOLD EXECUTION is CRITICAL. Build the PREpayments page. allowed consumptive PRE payments for AI allow others to launch their with their own pricing on Presearch and use other established AI that have API access like Claude 2 etc then upcharge for their use. Presearch then could become an AI startup haven with the biggest collection of public and private database AI services in one place but it is also providing that amazing service without having to give up your own email or user information. You maintain privacy and security.

I am just venting now because I am frustrated so I will stop there.

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Thanks for this @Ben! It would be great to get @Colin’s feedback on it. We seem to be sliding away from the initial thesis and letting fund managers/VCs take over.

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Unfortunately it takes money to make money. If the project runs out…it’s game over.