The Sacred Pivot

Hi Sacred Family,

We would like to share some important news.

After careful deliberation and in light of recent events, we have decided to pivot Sacred’s product direction as the best way of moving forward.
Here’s why:

Earlier in August, we were shocked to hear of the new regulations coming from the US affecting privacy projects. As you probably have heard, the US Treasury came down hard on Tornado Cash, banning US citizens from interacting with the protocol. On top of that, an arrest was made of one of the key core team members of the protocol.

We have built our product on top of the Tornado Cash code base. While different, Sacred does share many Tornado Cash mechanisms. Which puts us in a very difficult position.

As arrests happen, government rulings against Tornado cash have been made, and exchanges around the world move to block addresses that have interacted with the protocol, we watched as the risks of proceeding forward unfolded before our eyes.

So we investigated every possible means to be compliant very thoroughly. We thought that perhaps there was a way to be compliant and still move forward as planned.

• We talked to our legal team extensively. Knowing that some of our team is doxxed, we looked for legal clarity as to our developers’ and your future if we moved forward as planned.
• We discussed options with advisors and investors over the last few weeks, looking to get a complete understanding of the risks and landscape before us.
• We then came up with options and ideas that might allow us to move forward as initially planned.

After several weeks of sprints with legal and tech, we found each potential solution increased your friction of using our dapp. We left no stone unturned in trying to find a way to launch Sacred V1.0 so that we could give you the privacy you deserve, but also be regulatory compliant.

Our lawyers also could not guarantee that IF we continued down this path, even with complex adjustments and measures in place, that it would reduce the risk of legal action (or worse) taken against you, our team, or otherwise.

Thus, even though we have a finished product (that has recently been audited), we saw pivoting Sacred as the best direction to take.

Understanding the pivot

We believe privacy is a Sacred human right. It’s our core value.

However we’re in a very uncertain regulatory landscape as it relates to crypto-mixers. Unfortunately this is not just isolated to the United States. Although presented with this challenge, we also see an opportunity to implement privacy in a new way that benefits us all.

Here’s what we’re looking at:

1. There are still large DeFi and Privacy needs that must be addressed in the market
2. We now have clearer legal parameters to work with (we are avoiding private wallet-to-wallet transfers for now).
3. We have a strong team, established ways of working and the best privacy focused community we’ve ever seen.

Our target within the next month is to capitalize on these opportunities and find how we can pivot Sacred Finance to be a major player in the space. We already have a team that has proved itself as more than capable of the task.

What does the pivot look like now

A. We will pivot our product away from private wallet-to-wallet transactions, more colloquially known as “mixer” products.

B. We will dedicate ops to innovating in the space to help us effectively improve our product and transition into a DAO.

C. We are investigating and working on some great new ideas that center around DeFi, DAO tooling, and Privacy and we want to involve you, our community. We want to know what you want to see tackled in the Web3 Privacy and Defi Space — knowing that “mixers” are not something that we can legally interact with at the moment.

D. We have a list of ideas and new directions, based on the extensive conversations and collaborations we’ve done with legal, investors, advisors and more over the past month.

However, before making a decision in any one direction, we’d like to include you into the discussion.

We’re asking for your input if you’d like to give it

We know we’ve got a fantastic community and a lot of bright minds here. We’re interested to know about:

• Any problems you experience in the DeFi Space?
• Any problems you experience with Privacy?
• How are you solving these problems now?
• How much do you really care about these problems?

Please use the answers to above questions and then also answer below questions:

• What do you think we should pivot towards?
• Where do you think the opportunities are?
• Is there anything specific that you think we should pivot towards?

We would love to have this conversation with you!
Please share the answers to above questions and other thoughts/ideas in our discord. In the category Sacred Community you can find a channel named community input pivot.

Stay tuned for more updates. As we are committed to growing Sacred and making it a success, we will come back even stronger!