An Open Letter to Block.one

Dear Block.one,

As an EOS Block Producer candidate, BuildTeam has been following the state of affairs in the EOS community closely and working to keep our nodes fully operational & ready for action should we be elected to a top 21 or standby position.

We are excited that you are going to start voting on BPs as per your statement of June 28 and hope you will consider supporting Buildteameos, in light of our excellent track record of running public RPC nodes for the Steem community and proven ability to deliver quality blockchain applications.

We are actively exploring ways we can contribute to the EOS community, both through development efforts and using our considerable marketing resources to run EOS education campaigns for the general public.

For example, through the @steemdrive billboard campaign project, we will soon place an EOS billboard in a highly visible location in Manchester, UK. The billboard expresses a positive theme of unity between Graphene based blockchains. More details are available in this post:

https://steemit.com/steemdrive/@steemdrive/manchester-united-graphene-billboard-campaign

In terms of development efforts, we are focused on creating desktop and wallet style apps with an improved UX. So many of the early EOS tools are not especially user friendly, and we have seen much confusion from non-technical people looking to get onboarded to the EOS ecosystem. We aim to bridge the gap between technical tooling and the everyday user.

Data analytics is another area we intend to focus on, making it easy for people to get an overview of activity happening on the EOS blockchain through easy-to-understand visualizations.

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We now take this chance to address the 6 considerations you outlined as guiding your participation in the BP election process:

1. Honesty, integrity, and fairness.

We pride ourselves in being an upstanding member of the Graphene community, aiming for fairness and ethical consideration in all our business dealings. We have a public abuse reporting process by which customers can report violators of our Terms of Service. And we launched a community maintained whitelist on to ensure high standards of behavior for users of our popular Steem-based upvoting service Minnowbooster.

Whenever we launch a new product, one of our first & foremost considerations is making sure their are no avenues for abuse or unfair treatment of users. When loopholes are found, we work with the community to close them quickly and decisively. Without the support of the community, our business could not exist. Many people place their trust in us everyday and that is not something we take lightly or for granted.

Also, our entire company finances are maintained on the Steem blockchain, with all transactions auditable & part of the public record. This keeps us honest in our financial dealings.

As an indication of trust, in the last year our @minnowbooster project facilitated over 15 Million Steem Power worth of delegation leases via escrow and Steemvoter has been a custodian of automated voting to thousands of Steem users since 2016.

Three of our members, @thecryptodrive, @reggaemuffin and @themarkymark respectively hold trusted positions as top 20 and top 50 witnesses on the Steem blockchain.

1. Transparency of identity, activities, and decision-making.

BuildTeam strives for transparency in all that we do, with frequent posts on Steem to give updates on our business activities. We run a customer support Discord server where anyone is free to ask questions and talk with our staff. Information about our business is given on our website www.buildteam.io

We also have a social media presence on Twitter and Telegram, which provide other routes for users to interact with us.

The identities of our leadership team are in the public domain, including:

• Ricardo Ferreira - CEO
• Paulius Uza - Head of Development
• Nelson Ferreira - Systems Administrator & Multimedia Director

Further identities can be made available via private correspondence to Block.one on request.

Our team operates in a private Discord channel and has hold weekly executive and management meetings to steer the direction of BuildTeam as a whole. We have an executive of 3 members and a management sub-committee of 10 members who execute the directives decided upon in the minutes of the meetings.

1. Abides by smart contracts and programming of network participants, in the absence of proven systemic bugs.

Our position is that smart contracts are every bit as legally binding as traditional paper legal contracts that pervade human society. The frequently used term "code is law" represents a fitting standard that should be adhered to in normal circumstances.

However, intent of code is also important. Law-abiding citizens abhor those who take advantage of unintended legal loopholes. When such loopholes are found, laws should be changed and contract language updated to close the loopholes.

1. 24/7 timeliness in processing transactions, upgrading the network, and emergency response.

We have a globally distributed team with representation from many countries including Germany, New Zealand, Japan, Greece, the Netherlands and areas of South East Asia. This gives us round-the-clock support coverage to ensure that in an emergency we are always able to respond.

Our backup & primary Block Producer nodes have been running 24/7 since the launch of the network, and we have been keeping up with version upgrades as they are released.

It's also worth pointing out that regardless of which way the ongoing RAM debates turn out, BuildTeam is well positioned for future network growth. Our primary Block Producer node has 256 GB of RAM so we are well equipped to meet the storage needs of the network for the foreseeable future and are prepared to upgrade as needed.

1. Compliance with the Ricardian Contracts entered into when becoming a block producer.

Ricardian Contracts are meant to express & clarify the intent of smart contracts and the consequences for misusing them. We welcome this feature of EOS as it provides a valuable decision-making tool to resolve "code is law" disputes. As such, we agree to fully comply with the terms of the Ricardian Contracts related to BP activity, and to be bound by those terms in any future arbitration cases that may arise.

1. Alignment on the EOS Constitution, the latest of which can be found here.

It's important for all Block Producers to hold themselves to a high set of common standards by which their behavior can be judged. The EOS Constitution provides such a framework of standards, and we fully support it & agree to abide by its provisions. We also look favorably upon the changes you put forward in your proposal for version 2.0 of the Constitution.

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We are grateful to you for producing the excellent EOSIO software and excited to see the emergence of a brand new generation of decentralized applications that will make use of it. Thank you for your consideration and you may refer to our Block Producer candidacy announcement for more detailed information about our organization.

Sincerely,

Ricardo Ferreira
@thecryptodrive
Chief Executive Officer
BuildTeam.io

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Thank you to Steemvoter customers for allowing us to use your Steem accounts to upvote this post by virtue of your free subscription to the Steemvoter.com bot service. @steemvoter is proudly a @buildteam subsidiary and sister project to @minnowbooster.