A tale of two ICOs.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way
Charles Dickens

Can there be a better way to describe the ETH network state of matters these days?

There were two big ICOs in the last two day. Both had hype and a great idea behind it, both had a similar cap but they could not have been more different in how they decided to approach the "ICO problem" and what effect this had on their end result.
I focus on the end result because they BOTH got funded - as everyone knew they would - but there are more ways to get there.

Let's look at these two and see what worked and what broke the network :)

STATUS.IM

What is this?

"Status is an open source messaging platform and mobile browser to interact with decentralized applications that run on the Ethereum Network."
It was one of the most hyped ICOs in recent times, on par with Bancor and Bats. Everyone wanted in and the fact that Blockfolio decided to stick it to the top of their app certainly put gas on the hype. ( gas, got it?!!?!?!? ).
They had a hidden cap that was revealed to be 250.000eth and they said they had something called "dynamic ceilings" to give everyone a chance to get in and a limit on how much mining fee to pay so you won't get ahead like some whales did on other ICOs. All sounds pretty good...in theory.
In practice, everyone jumped on the contract from the first second and the network could not take it. In 10 minutes or less no tx could go through. No one knew if their tx could get in as the ethscan was blocked as well.
What is funny is that even "myetherwallet" had a banner about this that said:
"The FOMO IS REAL!" :))
Nice touch, are they on Steemit?!

So, it was chaos. No one knew when the ICO ended or if it was still going, people ketp sending funds LONG after it was closed. Some of the transactions only appeared today.
What's more, everyone who wanted to do anything on eth yesterday and to some extent today got boggled down in the crossfire. People couldn't send tokens, frustration was all time high and for some of the believer it was a moment to think long and hard if this is what the promise of ETH was:
An ICO machine that could not even this properly

Needless to say, yesterday was a dark day in ETH history and everyone who still believe in this should wonder if their faith is warranted. A good read here.

It was about to get worst!

---

CIVIC

What is it?

"**Civic’s model allows for on-demand, secure and lower cost access to identity verification via the blockchain. Background and personal information verification checks may no longer need to be undertaken from the ground up every time a new institution or application requires one. **"

Civic had all the makings of a succesful FOMO hard ICO. It was clear that it's gonna be a bloodbath which might be the final nail in the shaky ETH coffin. And yet....

...it wasn't!

This ICO was an example of well ran, pretty fair and civilized ico! Amazingly, all their promises seems to have been met.
You had to download an app ( civic ) and confirm your identity then you scanned a QR code when the ICO started and were placed in line.

Of course,. all the whales and all the little guys had to draw a number to see where they stood in line. That's a touch of genius imho because it was all the luck of the draw. Eventually, you had your number and you could just wait in line like a civilized brit!

Hey, that's already really good! But how can you be sure that a whale does not draw a small number and gets all the coins before you get a chance.
This is where THE SECOND touch of genius comes through.
When you get your turn, you had to chose how much you wanted to contribute and there were fixed options:
100-200-500-1000-2500$- and so on so fort. I think up tto 10.000$?

Each of this options were in limited number with the biggest a few and the smallest infinite. So obviously the big contributions ended fast so by the time our whale hits her number it might only be able to contribute 100$! That's beautiful!!

Afterwards you got a string of data and a fixed amount you could send and contribute. You had send exactly that amount and only once for it to work.

Now you might think, hey! what if a whale opened 100 pages to have 100 numbers in the draw?!
Sure, fair questions, but you needed 100 apps on a phone with their e-mail and phone number confirmed! That's a lot of trouble to go through!

In the end, most people get in. Most with less than they wanted but a "fair" distribution was ensured and the eth network wasn't bombarded with txes by loonies trying to get into "ICO BRO ICO" without really understanding what the fk is going on?!

I was pleasantly surprised by this and the contrast was too much for me not to make a post about it. Maybe future ICOs can learn something from this. It's time to take it seriously because the toy is already broken and we are headed towards total kaput.

The markets thinks so anyway: