saj

People in our space took real risk early. Built real capital. And the products that are supposed to serve and benefit them are all limited by traditional banking infrastructure that wasn't built for them. I’m one of those people. Premium fiat-backed cards can't enable global access because their rails won't let them. Crypto cards have the rails but not the access. We built on different rails so we could deliver both. Premium access, globally, for the people the traditional system was never designed to serve.

In January I shared where we were, what building the Corn network taught us, where real demand lives, and why stablecoins have become impossible to ignore. What I didn't say is what we were already building. We've been heads down since. Not talking about it. Not teasing it. Building it. Quietly. I'm not sure how many more signs the industry needs. Every major fintech and payments company has or is in the process of adopting and integrating stablecoin rails. Stablecoins have graduated from experimentation to infrastructure serving hundreds of millions of people. That's not a narrative. That's a foundation worth building on. For Corn to enter its next chapter, it has to close the door on the one before it. In order to dedicate the entirety of our focus and resources on what's next, we will be sunsetting the network over the coming months. We are proud of the work we did and who we built alongside, but infrastructure without sustained organic demand is a lesson, not a product. What’s next for Corn isn't an evolution of what came before. It's a different product, for a different purpose, on a different set of rails. Something uniquely re-imagined. This is the most convicted I've been over the last 10 years building in the space. For anyone who's been here through the experimentation, the uncertainty, and the resets, I don't take that lightly. Tomorrow you'll see what your conviction and belief helped us to build. The future of Corn starts tomorrow.

The demand for this community fundraise was pretty astonishing and I’m super pumped to have 675 new investors joining the cornfields all aligned around the long term success of the project. I think this is a big moment for @use_corn and honestly we hope for the space as a whole. Hopefully bringing ICO’s back. What this announcement isn’t is another “oh this crypto project raised millions” type deal. We set out to do things differently and address key issues that were staring us and the industry in the face. @chainyoda said this on the @therollupco podcast a few weeks ago so I have to give him credit. Fundraising and the space as a whole is like a pendulum. Swings all the way to one side and then back to the other side. Rewind to 2017-2018. I was born in these trenches so know them well. When ICOs were booming it was all about complete open access to the best upcoming projects with an equal playing field for the biggest and the smallest investors. Unfortunately we weren’t ready for this with clear regulatory hurdles and most projects having nothing but a whitepaper with some marketing rizz. We pushed the pendulum all the way to the left. Fast forward to 2024, it swung to the extreme on the other side with a small number of large investment groups being the only ones with early access to the best new projects which then led to inflated private valuations and finally retail having to buy at peak prices once TGE happens. After 2024 and most tokens being down only from TGE the pendulum was ready to swing the other way. Now here we are as we begin the momentum shift. The problem is clear, how do you create fair market opportunity for the smallest and the largest investors to participate in projects pre-TGE in a compliant and vetted way. Same terms, no special treatment or agreements. This is exactly what we pushed to try and solve. Lucky for us, @legiondotcc and others see the same problem and built platforms to allow projects like Corn to actually accomplish this. With what we like to call the ICO 2.0, we did just that. For our sale we had; 🌽 4287 applicants from 102 countries 🌽 $69M in requested allocations 🌽 675 investors chosen 🌽 $8.3M in accepted capital This includes the majority of participants investing between $1-10k alongside groups such as @polychain , @tribecap , @LaserDigital_ , @ambergroup_io ,@babylonlabs_io, @offchain, @Presto_Labs @hypersphere_ , protocol founders and many many others. Finally a fair market opportunity. Leading into our TGE we now have over 700 investors that got in early and one of the largest long term committed communities of any project in the space. That’s what you want pre-launch. But that’s not the only thing we sought out to solve. As the pendulum swung it brought token distribution approaches to a pretty bad place. Airdrops and liquidity mining became the most popular ways to distribute tokens. Unfortunately those proved to not be what would align long term holders with new projects. Too often we see airdrop farmers get criticized for mostly selling right after the claim then leaving the community. I don’t think that’s fair. The problem isn’t the airdrop farmers or mercenary capital but instead it’s the lack of alternative options to attract long term holders to a project. Through the @legiondotcc platform we were able to execute a much more tailored and focused token distribution while ensuring these users were in it for the long term with vesting mechanics that matched the team and all past investors. We spent time thinking about who the ideal token holders would be and curated thousands of addresses and social profiles from the @babylonlabs_io ,@arbitrum , @_kaitoai and Corn community that we uploaded as achievements into the system. Then when users from those communities applied we could see it and prioritize selecting them as investors. Finally a way to filter and attract long term community members. Let’s f**** grow More ⬇️