The State of Period 1 Dividend Payments

Shareholders,

I’ve dreaded writing this topic.

Not because I have news that is bad, but because I’m ashamed that it has taken me this long to get back in communication with you all. It hasn’t been that I haven’t wanted to, it’s just that I kept hoping that I would have all of the pieces in place to make it much easier to report the status of the grant’s operations to you all.

“One more day and I should be ready…”

After eight days of uphill battles and missed self-imposed deadlines, I’m looking at another morning and have decided that the best course of action is to manually provide a report and then worry about the automation after that.

This report will be longer than most and I want to address two different things, in addition to providing the current operations overview: challenges that have made reporting difficult, and the state of the first dividend.

Reporting

I don’t know how many of you have spent time looking at the data that you can get out of the exchanges, but for those of you who haven’t spent hours a week doing it, the best word I can come up with is lacking. The exchanges may be stable and secure, but they are horrible at making it easy to extract the information you need to make it easy to report information.

For example:

  • BTER doesn’t store transaction data farther back than the last 24 hours. They have indicated that they would be finding a way to make archived data available, but with no update in over three weeks, I’m not holding my breath that it will be here soon.

  • CCEDK’s records are a lot easier to access (they store everything). This is a double-edged sword. For each market that is supported, a separate account is needed. The transactional data that they make available includes all sales information and fees, but it is interspersed between every placement and cancellation of an order. That would be manageable if it was filterable (it isn’t), or if it was just a big table that could be dropped into an Excel spreadsheet (it can’t be, because it’s a paginated list with about 50 records per page). The account that I use to manage the NBT/BTC market has transaction records that cover 2537 pages (at last look). That is just one of the four markets I manage, so you can imagine the challenge in trying to keep up with everything.

There is also the problem of timing. To log into each account, record the current balances and confirm that pricing is correct, and then transfer that information to the reporting template that I created, takes about 30 minutes. By the time I am ready to publish the information, it is already outdated.

Because of this, I have been working with @Ben, @Desrever, @Pennybreak, @CoinGame, @WoollySammoth, and @jmiller to devise a way that custodians can generate near real-time reporting for the shareholders. It has been a priority, and a lot of time has been spent on coming up with a system that does what it is required to do, but it hasn’t been the only priority of the Nu development team so it is slow going at times. We are very close to having it completed and ready to be made available to anyone who is a custodian. I was hoping that it would have been done before I had to write a letter like this – I was wrong.

Finally, reporting has been tedious because we’ve been fighting different problems with the bots, on and off, for the past couple of weeks. The NuBot developers have gone above and beyond to identify and fix any problems that we’ve seen, and with the release of 0.1.3, I feel that we’ve got a very stable product running. The time leading up to this has been rocky, which has made getting access to a consolidated set of logs to report from impossible.

This leads me to the point of conversation that is of the most interest to shareholders — When will the first dividend payment for Period 1 be made?

Dividend Payment

I’ll probably date myself with this reference, but when I was younger, before the advent of online banking, I kept my cheque ledger by hand. This was fine until I made a mistake, or I missed recording a payment. Once the ledger was off, it could be very time consuming to go back through and locate the mistake and carry forward all of the corrections.

The reporting issues that I’ve been struggling with are like that.

I can tell you that the grant’s operations have been going reasonably well; the fluctuations of the BTC/USD and PPC/USD exchange rates have left the buy walls “exposed” at times, and the “self-buy” defects have cost quite a bit in fees, but both of those are more or less just part of doing business. We can find ways to adapt to address them, like fixing defects and identifying ways to limit arbitrage. However, these challenges have made it very difficult to accurately track the sales volume.

NuBot was designed to allow a custodian to set aside a portion of each sale into a “withholdings” pool. This was originally created to support my grant operations. Unfortunately, at the time that Nu went live, this feature was not ready. I had hoped that I would be able to manually shift funds between accounts on a periodic basis to work around this limitation until the feature was ready. Well, it’s now November 6, and the feature is ready but is still undergoing testing.

What this means is that between the out-of-synch reporting, and the lack of consistent 10% withholdings, I do not have a clear picture of what the sales have been and how far into (or beyond) the Period 1 sales goal operations have been.

The funds have continued to be recycled from the sell walls into the buy walls and back again. I want to stress that nothing is unaccounted for, just that the reporting hasn’t been able to keep up with operations. I could continue to spend time trying to catch up and “correct the cheque ledger” or I can ask for forgiveness and a clean slate.

But what does that really mean?

I want to get back on track. To do so, I would like to ask the Shareholders for feedback on two possible courses of action.

  1. Treat all operations from the 22 of September until this upcoming Saturday, November 8, as a “trial run”. All dual-side sales will be considered part of a (new) “Period 0”. The funds that have been withheld for the dividend to date (currently worth approximately 100 BTC and 20,000 PPC – to be converted fully to PPC) would be distributed to shareholders no later than the 11 of November. This dividend payment is less than the 72,000 NBT equivalent that the Period 1 was supposed to pay out, per the original grant proposal, but is definitely a good portion of what it should be. Starting on the 9 of November, all sales would be considered part of the (new) “Period 1” and would be tracked against the original goal until 72,000 NBT equivalent in dividends were ready to be distributed.

  2. Continue to hold the funds that have been set aside for the Period 1 dividend, while also starting to collect 10% per sale using the NuBot functionality (once it has been fully tested). Once the 72,000 NBT equivalent is reached, consider that the end of “Period 1” even if the actual sales volume to date would far exceed it. Once the dividend payment is made, per the original agreement, we move to Period 2 and continue to track as planned.


I want to make sure that I do what is in the best interests of the Shareholders, and I see pros and cons to each of the options outline above. There may be additional options that the shareholders would like me to consider, so I am going to open the floor to discussion.

Thank you for your patience, and I am vary grateful for the support that I’ve received from the Nu team and other shareholders over the past two months. I promise that I will continue to do all that I can to manage the grant’s operations in an open and (more) transparent manner, and I apologize that it has taken me this long to post on this topic. My pride got in the way and I had continued to hope it would be resolved before this became a necessity – I was wrong.

Writing this wall of text took considerably longer than I anticipated it would and I must be going to a meeting right now, so later this afternoon I will post the operational report for the current balances in orders and in hand.

Humbly Yours,

Kiara Tamm

7 Likes

Just a suggestion. Since you keep a big amount of NBT both buy and sell, you give a big volume of trading to the exchage webste. So I think you can negotiate with CEO of exchange platform about the fees. You should get lower fee rates or free of charge.

Just a thought to reduce your cost.

3 Likes

Hi Kiara,

First off, thank you for the update… I know how hard you’ve been working so taking the time to update us like this is really appreciated.

I didn’t realise that Bter only hold 24 hours worth of trade information.
If it’s any help, I’ve re-commissioned some old Python scripts to connect to Bter and get your trade information every five minutes. Any new trades are saved to a local database. It’s not much but at least it would give a rolling ledger of your trades on Bter.
If you think it might be a help, I can link you to the code and talk you through the setup. Once you are recording the trades, we can work on some way of accessing them so that they are useful to you.

Sammoth

Edit: Apologies, I didn’t cast my vote for which of the two options I preferred. I agree with the consensus below and vote for option 1 (the first one). I think your ‘trial run’ has taught valuable lessons which have helped the Nu network in more ways than just maintaining the peg.

5 Likes

Thank you for taking the time on reporting this. I am sure shareholders are aware of the trial nature of your operation and Nu as a whole. No-one expects flawless execution of projects of similar complexity and novelty from day 1. We are doing incremental improvement and going fast on that.

As a shareholder of a risky venture, I am prepared to accept as many delays as it is required for us to learn how to operate smoothly.

Good to learn that while we still have such a low number of custodian and one month of operation we are already building systematic reporting systems , dockerized and auto updated. Go ask anywhere in a bank how long does it take to implement such things =) .

So, I am personally giving my call for the option 1.

PS: please edit your post to label the second option with a 2.

I agree with everything desrever said, including his selection of option 1. This is all very new to everyone and it sounds like you’re doing the best you can to stay on top of things. I think shareholders should be understanding during these beginning stages. Things will only continue to improve from here as we learn better ways of doing things. We appreciate everything you’re doing! :smile:

I support the first option presented as well.

I think most, if not all, of shareholders can agree that it’s reasonable there were errors in the beginning. It’s certainly a complex operation to get running efficiently. My only question is if you have an estimate for how much these “self-buy defects” amounted to?

Kiara,

I can only dream most future custodians will act as professional as you have. I applaud you for taking on these challenges and complications with the attitude you have.

I vote for option 1 as well. It seems fairly clean.

Kiara,

I think that having had your position for the last weeks was not much fun, but a lot of hard work. And I appreciate your efforts for both supporting NuBits and being as transparent as possible in this.
Thank you very much for your good work!

I’d like to vote for option 1 but I think it might be worth considering a motion vote. I’m not sure whether or not motion votes are intended to be used for votes of this kind, but as option 1 alters the conditions of the custodial proposal (which has been approved by a majority of voting NuShares holders), more than a “forum vote” might be needed.
Who knows who of the forum members even has NuShares (and if, how many)?

I don’t want to spoil choosing option 1, which is in my opinion very good approach to treat this situation.
But I felt the need to ask this question.

A motion vote seems like a good way to handle this. How long do they take to pass?

At the very least, if everyone votes for the same motion, about three and a half days.

me too for 1. i agree for the motion vote

Seems we could get more opinions, then open a vote and get pretty close to KTm’s Nov 11th schedule then.

Thanks for all your hard work, Kiara!

While I believe that starting dividend payments will be good for the shareholders and share price, I think that without a motion vote, this decision should default to #2. This is because I believe that there will ultimately be more damage to share value if we set the precedent that our custodians operate outside of their terms. I do not mind waiting a little longer to ensure the early health of the network and to establish trust in our product. Some may argue that you have already operated outside of your terms. I would disagree with that and direct those critics to the Risks section of your proposal …

" Should the NuBits market fail to deliver the expected return, the Custodian will not be held liable for claims of lost profits related to operations of the Grant.

External, non-market threats include technical problems, … “

pb

Just wanted to say that it’s best to go with a motion vote. I think those of us from Peercoin are just used to solving these things in the forum. When it concerns decisions that shareholders should be making, a vote should be held.

How exactly would you vote on something like this though. The current voting setup doesn’t support multiple choice from what I understand.

v0.5.0 supports multiple motions.

I don’t read Kiara’s original post to mean that she doesn’t want to use the motion process. Rather, before a motion, she wanted the shareholders to be able to have a conversation.

Once a motion’s content has been hashed, it shouldn’t be changed. Motions are great for reaching consensus regarding an idea that is already fully fleshed out; not so good for concept discussions.

One more notice for you in case you don’t know this. When you trade on Bter.com, you got BTR points as rewards. You can convert BTR points to CNY(Chinese Yuan) once a week. Currently 12,000 BTR can get 6 CNY equal to 1 USD dollar.

Another good about bter is that it gives daily interest in some coins. BTC and PPC are amongst them.
Thus if you plan to have those coins for some days in the exchange then BTER can give something extra :wink:
for example if i have 45 BTC in bter i get 0.002 BTC/day :wink:

I doubt that this can outweigh the risk of holding substantial amounts of BTC or PPC at an exchange…

Yes, it is a risk. but it is the same risk as long as you have the coin amount there trying to exchange it. if it takes a day then it is not useful, but if it takes more than a day then it is a little bit interesting :slight_smile:

So are we to put it to a motion vote then?