Good day to you Lethean community! We are using this update to showcase the growth of our Browser VPN, give insight into the Q&A call this past week, and welcome new additions to our team.
Q&A Call Recap
On April 12 we had an open Q&A call with our community. Although not many members of the community asked questions during the call, we had a large number of questions that we were asked ahead of time. The team answered all of these questions and recorded the call, so those of you that were not capable of making it will be able to listen in. You can find a link to the Q&A call here. If you are not capable of listening to the call, we will be releasing a transcript of the call in the very near future.
Important Q&A answers
During this Q&A, a large number of questions were centered around our operating costs and the runway that we have left for the project. Our monthly operating costs are between $1,000 and $1,250 depending on cloud expenses. This means that with our current operating costs, we have a runway of 22 months. These monthly operating expenses are paid for by team members. The team member who pays for the costs is then reimbursed in LTHN at a market rate. As a team, we do not sell Lethean on the open market to pay for our operational costs. Keep in mind that this runway is also based on the current value of Lethean. As our value increases over time, this will extend the runway. Please also know that the team is more than happy to answer any questions that you may have. If you would like to ask any questions, you are welcome to do so by using any of our social links below or sending an email to one of the following: casey@lethean.io, alex@lethean.io, or talis@lethean.io.
We know how important it is for our community to be able to ask questions like the ones posed in our Q&A, and we look forward to doing more events like this in the future. Our hope is to have a larger number of people available when we have our next Q&A. The next time we schedule an event like this, we will open a poll for the community to vote for the best time to speak with us, so more people will be available to ask questions. We hope to welcome more people at our upcoming AMA in the Lethean subreddit on the 26th of April!
Upcoming Reddit AMA
As announced in our last update, we will be holding an AMA on April 26th at 1:00 PM UTC on our subreddit. We will open an AMA thread as we get closer to the AMA date where users can ask questions ahead of time, and we will answer them during the AMA on the 26th. We will also be available for questions the day of, so if you would like to hold your question until the day the AMA occurs, you are welcome to do so. We will keep everyone posted as we get closer to the AMA so that the community can ask questions ahead of time or prepare questions for the day of the AMA.
Use of the Browser Extension and VPN
If you had the opportunity to listen to our Q&A, you may have heard that we are interested in tracking the use of our full client VPN with SDP use moving forward. This information will show the amount of use the full client VPN is receiving. It is important to note that tracking usage of through the SDP does not reveal any client data, and will only showcase the fact that the SDP is being used to connect end users with an exit node. Lethean cannot, and will not collect any data from users.
As we set up ways to review the growth of the people using our full client VPN, we would like to share with you the number of people that are using our browser VPN. The graph below shows the continued growth of the Google Chrome Browser VPN. The screenshot below shows the number of users in the last 90 days.
In addition to the growth we are seeing in Google Chrome, we can also see the steady increase in growth with our Firefox extension.
The last time these metrics were shared was approximately one month ago, and we can see the sustained growth of usage of both the Google Chrome Browser VPN and the Firefox Browser VPN over time.
Website Update
On April 12 we released the new version of our website. We could not be more pleased with the results. So far we have received very positive and encouraging feedback. We welcome any feedback that our community may have about the new site. If you have any questions or comments about the website, feel free to reach out to us. Below you can see an image of our homepage.
One aspect to mention is that we have listened to the community and added LinkedIn/Github to each Team Member & Advisor on our team page. With the new website being live, we are running a promotion to celebrate the new design on our Twitter, which can be found here. We encourage everyone to participate in this event and to explore our new website.
Community Driven Marketing Campaign
We would like to highlight our community member, Pixels, who has been running a number of community driven marketing campaigns. Pixels raised approximately $500 from willing community members. With half of this funding, Pixels ran an advertisement that garnered 500K impressions. The other half of the community raised funding was used in a Twitter marketing campaign. The team would like to take the time to celebrate the initiative that Pixels showed with running these campaigns.
Team Additions
We are very excited to announce the addition of our new Chief Strategy Officer, Austin Talis.
Austin is a strategic consultant with heavy interest in personal privacy and applications of blockchain technology. An avid follower of the growth and updates Lethean has undergone since its inception as IntenseCoin, he has observed the development of what used to be a far-off goal in the minds of the community into a powerful force of privacy. Now, Austin has aimed his efforts towards that very same community and hopes to organize community and team member efforts to ingrain Lethean in the minds of consumers as the decentralized platform for privacy it exists as today. “Adoption is key for Lethean to make a lasting name for itself in the broader VPN marketplace,” Austin notes, and he welcomes community members to contact him via email (talis@lethean.io) or Discord (atalis#4413) should they want to contribute ideas or would like to participate in this endeavor.
We are very excited to work with Austin and see how his expertise in strategy will help drive growth for Lethean.
We are hiring!
Our development team is looking for qualified people to apply for a core developer position and a release quality manager position. You can submit an application for either of these positions by visiting our Jobs page.
Developer Corner
The last few days development wise have been dedicated to bug fixes for the Windows VPN. We are also beginning to work on the MacOS and Linux full client VPN systems. We have also been working on the service discovery platform (SDP) to enhance functionality for providers and provide the marketing team with data about the total number of proxy/VPN sessions established, which was mentioned above in Use of the Browser VPN. We expect to roll out an SDP update this week. This update will not require action by users.
Reminder & Discord rules
As we mentioned in a previous section (Important Discord Q&A answers) of this update and in the Q&A, we are not selling the premine to cover any expenses that are paid in FIAT or crypto by team members. With regard to limiting free speech in our Discord or other community platforms: We never want our community to feel that they do not have a voice or that they cannot voice their concerns to the team. We are very involved in our community and we see the value in the feedback that we receive. However, we have rules that we require the users of our social platforms to abide by. Including being respectful to us, the members of team. As a team we work very hard to make this project and keep it running. We treat each and every community member with the utmost respect, and we expect the same courtesy from our community members. That is to say, that they treat the members of the team and other community members with respect.
Socials
As always, you can contact Lethean via any of the social networks below.
Email: Contact@lethean.io
