Smart contract saved me some ETH from a potential ICO scam

Months ago I partook in an ambitious ICO that aims to provide a channel to make real use of payment cryptocurrencies. Due to various reasons, the ICO failed and could not proceed further. Refund was started in immediately in using different mechanisms.

Public sale refund by smart contract

To the public sale(ICO) participant, refund will be executed by smart contract by Ethereum platform where this new coin is build upon. The smart contract says that if the softcap could not be hit by the end of ICO, fund collected to this certain address will be open for refund claiming. Or it hits the softcap development team will gains access to the fund to carry on the project.

So investors in the ICO period can have a peace of mind knowing they have the protection by the code. Unfortunately (or fortunately), I got the chance to experience how the refund works in smart contract.

Overall, the refund is not fully automated but still requires some simple operations on the user side. Following the guidance using MEW, I've got my ETH back very quickly without issues.

However, things are not as smooth for another category of investors.

Pre-sale refund by human

Pre-sale is where investor will get maximum benefit for funding a new project right before ICO kicks in and brings in mass investors.

Smart contract is not used in the pre-sale stage and I have no idea why. It seems that all fund is collected via normal transaction. After crowdfunding failed, the dev team announced that pre-sale investor will get the refund after their accountant minus minor admin fee from the collected fund.

Sounds logical to me and not a difficult operation to carry out. None of my business nonetheless. I got my refund from smart contract after the ICO ended and I moved on.

One month later I randomly click in the official Telegram channel and check. What? The refund for presale is not yet done??

It's been like over a month for a simple refund like this to process, are you kidding me? People are ranting to the admins that they want their fund back, some of them even start to consider taking legal action upon the team.

The admins on the other hand, keep responding in a professional manner and keep the folks cool. But there is only one theme the admin's response, keep cool can wait for official announcement.

I would be mad if I was one of the poor pre-sale investors.
Now admins you can't blame people for losing patience or even start to relate this to a scam. I'm not sure how difficult to get the refunding job done definitely it is not something cannot be settled within a month. This is ridiculous.

I'm so glad I didn't take part in the presale.

Verdict

This is the first time I witnessed and made real use of smart contract. It does help a lot in shifting the trust away from third party(ICO team in this case). I hope the team will figure things out soon as I think this is likely not a scam despite damage has been done.

---

前一阵子经历了第一次 ICO 失败，在退款上看到了 Smart contract 的威力。那个团队设计 ICO 的筹款是由智能合约来进行，在某个时间之前必须达到一定额度的 Softcap，不然就会启动退款合约，后来也很不幸的 ICO 失败了。经过简单的手续后我也很顺利的收到了退款，反看在 Pre-sale 的投资者就没这么好运了。

Pre-sale 不知为何没有使用智能合约，用的是普通的交易方式。所以 ICO 失败后，团队要扣除点管理费再把余款退换。这样一拖就拖到了一个月后的现在，电报群里的投资者早已怨声载道，有者还打算采取法律行动。而 admin 翻来覆去也得个拖字诀。说真的，是我的话也会很暴躁。希望尽快有个好结果吧。

真好运被强大的智能合约救了。

---