Safein Update / Identity Prioritized / Ceased Development of Payment Functionality
By: Audrius Slažinskas
Tags: Blockchain, Kyc, Identity, Product Updates

Our decision to postpone the Safein token sale has given us a much-needed time to rethink our priorities and goals, and to shift our focus back to the product. We are confident that our decision to delay the sale was right, and so we are pleased to be back on track with a refreshed mindset and eagerness to pursue our vision. Today, we would like to reveal to you a revamped and improved strategy for Safein, which has come to fruition following careful deliberations, analyses and discussions with our team and industry experts.

Over the course of the last 12 months, many things have changed in the blockchain sphere. Other than the market fluctuations that usually take the central stage in the media, the rise and the demise of the ICO concept has been another prevalent trend. The sheer number of Initial Coin Offerings grew dramatically in 2017. More and more people were drawn into the space as contributors, and a great deal of professionals from other industries have moved to working with new blockchain projects aiming to become “the new […]” or “the killer of […]”.

However, it appears that fewer and fewer projects are actually delivering on their promises after the token sales are completed. Setting aside projects that were created to literally get money from naive investors in an unregulated space, we see two important causes of blockchain-projects failing. One reason for this is, of course, the fact that ICOs offer an easy way to raise funds and build blockchain-specific products purely based on the hype, without first actually measuring or understanding the potential demand, applicability, and need for these products. Another reason is the highly technical nature of the blockchain technology, which does not permit these products to reach audiences beyond the technically-savvy people and those who are just chasing easy financial gains.

Safein was initially conceptualized as an identity platform that allows any user to surf the web with one single verified account for every website. The cornerstone of this vision was and remains our conviction to grant users full control of their personal data — something that is much lacking in today’s online experience, prone to irresponsible security practices, and resulting leaks and hacks. The idea was born from our own experiences and issues we faced building various e-commerce projects, but we came to realize that this is applicable to virtually any online business these days. We validated our idea on hundreds of business cases, crunched a lot of numbers to understand not only our potential growth scale, but also a realistic scale, and we’re determined that we can actually achieve something here by creating an identity layer that would make the user’s experience online simpler and more efficient.

During the early stages of our product development, a number of promising crypto payments projects emerged, and we therefore decided to extend the Safein vision with integrated payments solutions that we saw as a natural add on to a universal identity gateway to e-commerce.

We pursued this vision with great passion and made our way into 2018 with high expectations due to the upward trajectory of the market, and the continued public interest in new projects built on blockchain and crypto payments. Markets then turned around rather quickly, however, but we remained confident in what we were doing, with no plans to retrace. In 2018, we began actively attending blockchain events and arranging meetings with industry professionals to market our upcoming launch, gain feedback, and seek out partners. Eventually, we made acquaintance with a number of highly experienced people and companies that were showing interest in the idea of Safein.

We then quickly realized that the main cause of interest for these groups was the fact that there does not exist a single working blockchain identity service, despite how long ago it was started, that can be remotely considered applicable on a large scale, and usable by everyday consumers. Our focus on the customer usability, user base growth, and aims to actually create a working solution prior to raising funds via ICO, resonated extremely well with the people we spoke to. On the other hand, one question always remained for these crowds. Namely: “Are you not aiming too broad and too quickly by already working on such add-ons to your core functionality as payments?”.

These discussions forced us to rethink our focus, goals and competencies. What did we come here for in the beginning? We realized that our initial idea, which at the time had not yet been obfuscated by hype and speculation of the blockchain industry, was sound. We rediscovered how a true blockchain-based identity solution, done right, can sweep over the entire market, simply because there is a huge demand for it, from both users and businesses online. Identity, data privacy and data security altogether comprise an extremely large market that has just begun uncovering its massive potential, and likewise an enormous risk exposure. In the wake of recent social media scandals, we are convinced that the price of personal data privacy can only keep growing, and that secure identity solutions will likely revolutionize how users interact with websites in the future.

Since we never intended to get stuck on developing the core of our platform forever, or to develop features that would add only marginal value to our business, we have decided to cease the development of (resource, time and maintenance intense) payment functionalities for now and to focus on what we know to be the most inefficient and costly part of online commerce — identity. As noted, we still see the payments functionality as a natural add-on to the identification part of the business, thus we could come back to the idea of combining the identity and payments in a single wallet sometime in the future (either by developing the payments functionality ourselves or partnering with some other services provider for this part), but for now, we’ll focus one hundred per cent on delivering Safein as, primarily, a platform for identification and easy access. Accordingly, no add-ons shall be added to Safein until the core functionality of the platform is rock solid and well-known in the market.

For the foreseeable future, Safein will provide a single verified user account for everything online, and a complete KYC solution for businesses. With laser focus on security and the user, we are currently working out a development roadmap for the next few months to build an infrastructure that can be readily used by businesses for their all-around KYC needs. This stage will highlight our first large-scale effort to grow our identity platform user base, to which Safein will provide easy access to services requiring verification. Our team is also tweaking our communications strategy and laying out an updated plan for execution of marketing and business development activities. Also, following general market trends and advice from our strategic partners, we have made a conscious decision to raise a significant amount of funds with private and institutional investors before launching the ICO, as this would give us a stronger footing for further expansion as well as the ICO itself.

It will be an intense period, but we have always had high aims and will continue to dedicate all our efforts to improving the online experience for everyone with Safein. We are hoping for your support, and as always are awaiting your thoughts and feedback. Several other announcements will be released shortly, so stay tuned!