Some comments from slack to explain our strategy:
The project is not abandoned. The founder Nathan Rixham aka consolidation aka @markpfennig was funded to work on the project for one year. He then took all the source code and broke of contact, leaving many people including the foundation with lost funds, loans and other broken promises. We are perusing this to try and recover the code. It might go to legal action which could take years, but we are resolved to follow through to make sure those that were scammed are made whole.
As far as the crypto currency goes, it does what we need, we are not a crypto currency oriented project. We are a mass market oriented project which is get a large user base using marking in daily use.
We operate as a global team transparently, with this being our main communication and decision making area. In truth there's not much to decide. The strategy has always been constant, to grow the user base and to grow marking, leading to a successful product.
We operate on a consensus basis, we dont vote, unless something is clear and unanimous. I suppose our only requirement is to prevent a hard fork, which isnt on our radar at the moment.
hope that helps!
to break it down a bit further, by my calculations for member of the bitmark user base puts about 1-3 satoshis on the coin, our main user base right now is poloniex, but super net have said they want to implement too ... theres a few others interested in marking based projects, one nice thing is that if any one marking project goes viral the whole of bitmark goes viral
my guess is that poloniex has a user base around 10k and growing
if we get to 1 million users we may be able to play in the same league as litecoin
but i would say a more realistic goal is to try and get to a broad user base of around 25,000
which hopefully through poloniex and other efforts isnt out of the question
that will hopefully be a spring board to hit 100k users which I think would then start to create a virtuous circle of growth