ICO is a dangerous game | 危险游戏

This is a continuation from the last post where I witnessed the power of smart contract in real life. Well, my gratitude was just elevated to the next level for what I'm going to the report in this post.

For a quick recap, I was taking part in an ICO public sale and it failed. Got my invested fund back almost instantly as the smart contract promised as such, all fund will be refunded if the public sale softcap was failed to hit. However things are not as smooth for the presale investor whereby fund was collected in a not-smart-contract way I supposed. And the ICO admin claimed that they will refund the presale fund after deducting administration and marketing fee.

There were no progress for over a month since ICO failed, while I have got my refund back and has nothing to do with the rest of the matter, I still interested to follow up how things are going. Eventually got an update for the long-awaited presale refund.

Each Presale investors are getting 25.68% of their investment

Yes, you read that right. A bloody 25.68% refund for all the presale investors, 75% loss without doing anything. If you have invested 10 ETH in the presale, you are getting back 2.56 ETH as a refund. The Telegram channel was booming with raging messages from investors after the official announcement, so happening that the momentum was comparable favourably with the period when airdrop was announced back in the days.

Honestly I was deep in shock as well to learn this outcome. I thought the marketing fee would maybe eat up a few percentage of the investment and people should expect to get back at least 90%, I was naive. And I can't help but immediately linked the "crime" word with everything going on behind the scene.

I wasn't expecting anything like this coming at all, call me innocent and I will accept that. However I'm not alone in the channel, people are mad.

Some member made a good point saying that investor should not bear any responsibility for marketing fee, let alone making them pay that steep price for a failed ICO. I would call that a sane and logic statement. I assumed that should be the default mode of every ICO on the market.

On the other hand, admin from the team defended by claiming there is a particular clause in the Presale agreement which all the investors have been signed and agreed to. Personally I wasn't aware of this clause and was too lazy to dig it out and verify the claim. But if it is true, the ICO team is probably not guilty.

The annoyed investors then asked for a complete breakdown of accounting report, admin promised to provide that although that is not compulsory according to the legal term. But I guess this pretty much should be the end of story.

Verdict

This incident totally changed my perspective towards ICO. Though the team would make everything looks legit on the surface, there are just too many loopholes can be exploited behind the scene. According to the members, 2000 ETH was collected for presale, 75% of it would be 1500 ETH which equivalent to 1m USD. For marketing display by the team over the period, I would say 1m USD is more than an overkill.

• Read every clause on the bloody contract before signing when money is at stake. Losing 75% of fund for nothing is no fun.
• Code is definitely more reliable than human.
• ICO is a dangerous game.

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自从上次的第一次 ICO 失败后，现在来跟进一下后续。前文提要为 ICO 失败后，presale 的投资者由于没有收到智能合约的保护，还在等待官方公布清算后的退款数额。

结果几天前出来了，那就是所有 presale 投资者可以拿回 25.68% 的资金。也就是说投资 10 ETH，拿回 2.56 ETH，剩下的被宣传费用报销了。也就是说投资者什么都不做，75% 的钱就蒸发了，你说神奇吗？

尽管官方人员说 presale 协议上已经说明了这个条例（我也懒得去查证反正事不关己），但是可想而知的整个群组还是吃了原子弹一样，吵得炸开了。

经过这次的 ICO，我学到了：

• 和钱有关的所有条例，读清楚才好签下。
• 代码果然是比人类靠谱多了。
• ICO 真的很危险。

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