From XYO Network newsletter :
“It's funny thinking back now.
This whole journey started on a fall day in late 2017 when I was intellectually bored and depressed out of my mind. It started as I was walking back from the Downtown San Diego library, where I worked every day, even weekends.
And it started with one simple phrase...
I had just moved back to California exactly one year earlier where I had been living for about three years in the U.S. Virgin Islands, on the island St. Thomas.
My lifestyle was the epitome of internet marketing success.
Each day I'd wake up, work on tuning my online advertising campaigns, tweaking my ad messaging and would watch my automated algorithms make changes in real-time to my marketing.
Then I'd sit back, kick my feet up on the white sandy beach, and stare out at a silhouette of islands while sipping the most delicious rum drink ever invented... the Bushwacker.
But man... I was dead inside.
We have one life to live. And though it sounds fun and appealing at first, living the 4-Hour Workweek tropical lifestyle gets stale after a while.
At a certain point you start to wonder, what else is there to do?
Creating a lifestyle business that makes Instagram followers jealous isn't that fulfilling... Hate to break it to you.
So, in my illustrious quest of making very well thought-out decisions (joking), I packed up my stuff one day in October 2016 and moved to San Diego, California with the idea that it would be a bit easier to build a technology company there, than on a remote Caribbean island!
While I was away in the Virgin Islands, I had this subtle fear that the technological world had moved on without me.
I had this feeling, or fear maybe, that my skills in launching exciting ventures had rusted while I was away enjoying island life.
Nevertheless, I pressed forth and began building a team. My thinking at the time was that the reason I was extremely unfulfilled is because I needed to hire and grow a team around my current business (digital advertising technology).
But I quickly learned this was a huge mistake.
I was in denial at first, but what I ended up building turned into even a more unfulfilling venture than my single-person digital marketing business had!
After about six months of trying to press through the emptiness of working on a business with no true authenticity and purpose other than arbitraging and making a few bucks online, suddenly...
I had to stop.
I had to put on the brakes.
I spent the next month transitioning out my other team members to wind things down.
I then planned to take some time off to pause and reflect on why I like building companies in the first place.
This brings us to the summer of 2017.
During this period, I was lost and didn't really know why.
I had spent the past ten years of my life working 24-7 in order to build a lifestyle Tim Ferriss would be jealous of.
But it was hollow. It was empty.
It was completely null of purpose and substance.
We're here on this planet for who the hell knows why, honestly.
Nobody really knows. But one thing is pretty certain, you've probably only got one life to live... unless there really is reincarnation...
Anyway...
After months of self-reflection and reading voraciously, I discovered that really there's not much to be discovered when it comes to building something that's fulfilling.
You either do or you don't.
You either try to change the world or sit back and let the world try to change you.
I'm honestly not too sure what my thought process was at the time. But let me recount the moment for you that changed my life and got me (and now YOU) started on this journey in the first place.
So going back to where I started...
It was October 2017 in Downtown San Diego. I was walking on Columbia St. back to my home in Little Italy. Back from the Trolly train station, which I used every day to drop me off at the Downtown Central Library.
Then I glanced up and saw a sign on a building that had the logo, "Webble".
This sign looked familiar because I recall seeing that same exact logo when I would check back up on the LinkedIn profile of my very first boss out of college in 2008, Arie Trouw.
Arie was the only person smart enough (meaning, crazy enough) to actually launch a company in 2008, the worst recession in recent history.
By sheer dumb-luck a Headhunter firm that Arie hired to find software engineers came across a SoCalTech article that featured me. I had just launched the world's first white-label microblogging platform (basically a Twitter clone for communities) called "Yonkly". Keep in mind, this was when Twitter was a new thing and just a tiny company.
The recruiter read the article, read about me, contacted me and told me about what Arie was doing with his company.
I ended up interviewing with Arie. The conference table was literally a Ping Pong table. After the interview, I ended up taking the job, which entailed commuting for two hours per day and making next to nothing.
What started as five guys and a ping pong table, quickly grew into one of San Diego's most exciting startups, employing over 200 people!
It was a wild ride. A truly exhilarating experience.
And as I was walking back home from the library that day, I saw that Webble sign.
I had walked by it about a handful of times before, but the negative voice in my head always crept up and said, don't get distracted just focus on building your digital marketing business...
This time, though, I said to hell with it. Why not? And then decided to reconnect with Arie to see what he'd been up to.
But this time around, things were different.
I began thinking BIGGER...
Here's why.
During that time, I couldn't stop thinking about...
ETHEREUM
I'm a "latecomer" to the world of Ethereum.
I guess I was just too busy island hopping in the Virgin Islands to catch the revolution that was happening under my nose.
I recall first learning about Bitcoin in 2010 or 2011.
And I mined my first Bitcoin around that point as well (even though I didn't really know what the hell I was doing at the time).
I thought it was novel, and interesting (even though I didn't really get its implications at the time).
The one thing I do know is that it didn't really consume my life the way it did for others.
I continued to go about my way and live my life as usual.
But then Ethereum entered the world.
For some reason, I simply lumped Ethereum into the same category as Bitcoin. And didn't really understand how it was different, or even bother looking into it at all.
But one day my friend Chris explained it to me in a way that finally made sense.
He explained it like this:
"Think of Bitcoin as a calculator on your smartphone, and Ethereum as the Operating System that allows any developer to create any type of application they want."
That hooked me.
The very next day I began looking into Ethereum, I loaded up my exchange account and bought a bunch of it.
I then bought a book on the Ethereum platform. From the very moment I opened it up, I couldn't put it down. And I couldn't put it out of my head. As I started to understand what Ethereum was, my mind began racing. I couldn't think about anything or talk about anything for a week straight.
And with this going on in my life, I looked up at the building of Arie's latest venture, and thought... man, we need to do something in the world of Ethereum and build something amazing before the centralized authorities ruin it.
This time around, I silenced the voice in my head telling me to just stay focused on building a one-man automated lifestyle business...
and said....
"Screw it, let's do it!"
I then hit Send button on an email to Arie about reconnecting.
As you might remember, towards the end of 2017, almost all cryptocurrencies began to spike in value.
And for almost no reason, either!
I recall receiving text messages from friends highlighting their prowess in picking certain tokens to purchase.
And because I was skeptical as hell, and just to prove how much luck was involved in picking tokens to purchase, I decided to take a chunk of money and spread it EVENLY ACROSS EVERY SINGLE LITTLE TOKEN ON BINANCE!
Smart, right?
I literally remember purchasing a token called "TRON" and recall thinking, well if this thing goes to zero, at least I have a reason to actually go see the movie (which I've never seen).
And BAM!
Two weeks later, it was up 8233.33%
Now here's the deal, the easiest person to fool is yourself.
And I wasn't even close to being fooled.
I come from the school of thought embraced by Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Value Investing and actually building something of substance.
Rolling the dice on various tokens was just play. It was for fun. For me, putting your money on the line is the only way to truly learn how things work, because it makes you pay attention!
I was intrigued.
What the most recent cryptocurrency wave taught me is that our community, our world, and the future is INEVITABLY going to be BORDERLESS.
What is fascinating with cryptocurrency (which I think of as almost COMPLETELY separate from the blockchain), is that it brings together an OPEN, INTERNATIONAL community.
It enables people to trade and transact and participate DIRECTLY with one another without the fees, steps, red tape, phone calls and text messages involved in using your OWN money.
Here's why this ate at me.
On one hand, the logical (conservative) side of me told me to just focus on marketing products online, eCommerce and the stable line of business that predictably brings in profit.
But on the other hand, I lived through the "Web 2.0" revolution. A time where I worked on projects with various people. Including Ryan Graves, who later on went on to create a little-known company called Uber ;)
I also recall getting an office tour from Biz Stone at Twitter when they were 30 people, and remember how intensely and insanely focused Ev was as he sat at his desk typing away.
The cryptocurrency and blockchain revolution reminded me of this time.
And this time around, I didn't want to play it conservative.
I wanted to get involved.
I wanted to jump in and help.
And it turns out...
Arie was on the same page.
My thought one night was, "What if we could turn our location network of IoT devices into miners?"
You see, XYO Network is powered by a company called XY.
Launched in 2012 after a successful Kickstarter, we’ve shipped over 1 million location beacons that enable you to track and find just about anything using a mobile app.
The problem Arie pointed out, which I already knew, was that with blockchain miners, they need to be able to process INTENSE inputs and conduct cryptographic computation.
The location hardware IoT devices we specialize in developing didn't have this capability.
But Arie snickered and said, that wasn't where the real value was.
The real value sits in connecting the REAL WORLD with the blockchain world.
I remember then talking through it a bit more...
And then I understood what he was getting at.
It was one little-known word, which is about to change the world...
"Oracles"
Now to understand what an "Oracle" is, let me first give you a brief example.
The power of Bitcoin rests in the ability to transact in a PEER-TO-PEER fashion with another person (WITHOUT a bank or financial institution taking a cut of it in the middle).
With Ethereum, you can craft similar types of trade, but it doesn't have to be financial.
It can be anything.
This is enabled through something called "Smart Contracts".
So let's take an example.
Imagine if I didn't know you and wanted to bet you $10,000 that the Patriots would beat the Eagles in a football game.
Before Ethereum, we'd have to use a sportsbookie, who'd end up taking 5-10% of the transaction.
However, with Ethereum, one can now create a smart contract that is set to call out to espn.com to check the score of the game one second after the game ends and then it can deposit the $10k worth of Ether from the loser to the winner.
We've thus created a peer-to-peer transaction in a trustless manner!
Now in that example, the one key of that contract is what's called the "offchain data source".
In that example, the "offchain data source" is espn.com (necessary to get the score of the game).
The term used for an "offchain data source" is an "Oracle".
Now here's the most exciting question/concept perhaps in blockchain history...
What if, instead of calling out to espn.com (as the oracle), you could instead call out to the REAL WORLD, to get information about the real world in order for the smart contract to execute?
Meaning, you could create transactions whereby you could write code that says, "If this item gets to this XY-location (Latitude-Longitude)", then EXECUTE the smart contract.
This essentially opens up an ENTIRE WORLD (literally and figuratively) to blockchain.
However, this type of project requires not just a ton of work and capital. It also requires completely FOOLPROOF technology, proofs and protocols.
It requires well-thought out components that create a healthy crypto-economic ecosystem AND incentivize the supporters of the network (both location-verifier infrastructure components and token holders).
AND ON TOP OF ALL THIS...
It requires EXPERIENCE IN LOCATION HARDWARE.
It was a massive undertaking.
Essentially, the idea is to bridge blockchain and the real world by creating a decentralized Proof of Location network powered by the blockchain.
A people-powered location network that would result in far more certainty and DISPLACE GPS technology.
To make this a reality is quite literally pretty close to pulling off a miracle.
It would require significant community support, significant capital and significant risk.
But most importantly, it would require a group crazy enough to work nearly around the clock to make it reality.
And Arie and I both knew, without a doubt, we were the ones to do it.
This was the birth of the XY Oracle Network ("XYO Network").
XYO is more than a technology.
It's more than a network.
XYO is a movement.
A movement in bringing blockchain to the real world, and doing it in a way where we NEED help and people like you to make it a reality.
Get ready for the journey of your lifetime.
And buckle your seatbelt.
Because things are about to get real.
There are 3 simple ways you can get involved in the movement that's decentralizing location...with attitude!
#1: Join our community here and on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, and Telegram.
Chances are since you've made it this far, you've already completed the first step (and we are happy to have you!)
#2: Buy XYO Tokens
XYO is the digital oil of tomorrow that will power the location infrastructure of tomorrow.
At the time of writing this, XYO is in the top 100 cryptocurrencies worldwide.
With 10,000 other cryptocurrencies, this places XYO in the top 1%!
#3: Become An XY Equity Shareholder
As you already know, XY is the company that helps power the XYO Network.
What makes XY unique is not only has it been a leader in the location hardware business since 2012...
But XY went through the extensive process of qualifying for the SEC's Reg A+ Equity offering.
This means that anyone (and not just "venture capital" firms) can invest in the company helping to power the XYO Network!
However, there is a catch...
XY has a hard cap set by the SEC of $50 million.
That means once this amount of shares is sold out, you will never be able to buy XY Equity EVER again at the current price of only $8 per share.