Crypto in 2018 Part 2: The year of oversubscribed ICOs

Honestly I did not see this one coming. The number of subscribers in some ICOs is insane, But I guess with the influx of noobs and everyone looking for the next coin that’s “going to moon” if was bound to happen. I’ve attempted to participate in 3 ICOs this week and they were all over subscribed.

The first was Bee Token, the second was WePower, the third was MedicalChain. I have so many mixed feeling about all three. The up side is they all managed to raise the funds they needed for their projects, the down side was the experiences.

For Bee Token, whitelisting and KYC was done well ahead of time, and they were very clear about how they would release their contract address to ensure no one got suckered by phishing attempts. They also set individual caps for all participants so that everyone would get a chance to get some BEE tokens. That seems fair but when you want to contribute 1ETH and you get capped at 0.1ETH it’s disappointing. Everyone’s cap was different, and based on what each person said they wanted to contribute. All in all it was ok I suppose. If you whitelisted, then chances are very little that you missed out completely.

The down side was the ridiculous amount of spamming and phishing that happened in this project. Form emails to the Telegram group. A lot of people lost so much money. They claim that they were not hacked but the emails were sent out with full names, and to whitelisted participants, so how did the hackers get the data? Still waiting to hear the real story on that one. The number of spammers in the Telegram group was insane, admins had to delete ALL messages just to keep out the phishing attempts.

For WePower, whitelisting and KYC were also done ahead of time. They too had a cap for the Whitelisted participants. A blanket 0.2ETH for the first 5 hours, then it was open. After the 5 hours, whatever was left, if anything at all was gone in seconds! Again, disappointed at the low cap but glad I was able to participate.

The downside to this was that they sold most of their tokens in a private pre-sale that happened after the public pre-sale. So while supporters were expecting 25 million tokens to be available at the main sale, only 10 million were available in the end. Most supporters felt stabbed in the back. I don't blame them. Especially those that had been there from the early days.

This one had a bright side though. Knowing that in the past, websites have been hacked and contribution addresses changed to redirect funds to hackers accounts, and having learned from the bee token telegram insanity, they did something that I think every ICO should probably adopt going forward. The telegram group was muted, no-one could post. The last message contained the official contract address and was pinned. They also announced their contract address on twitter. It was awesome.

Medical Chain was excessively oversubscribed!! I have never seen anything like it. The worst part was their decision not to do KYC ahead of the ICO like everyone else. Instead, they did their KYC at the start of the ICO. So it went something like this: ICO starts, you log in, submit KYC info, wait to get the green light, then send in your ETH. Problems, so many problems. The KYC info was processed as 1st come 1st serve, if you didn’t send the right info there was no second chance, you were simply out. The site didn’t run smoothly for everyone, so many didn’t get in when they should have. They were overwhelmed, and they should have known this would happen considering the number of people that had shown interest. Here is a message that was later posted in the Telegram group following a lot of angry messages as the ICO closed faster than expected.

“TOKEN SALE COMPLETED - $24,000,000 Hard Cap Reached
Congratulations to all those who got through and bought MedTokens. We appreciate there are a lot of frustrations from those who didn't make it through. We received 45,000 KYC applications in the first 2 minutes. We processed 1,773 applications in total. Please stay tuned for our upcoming API release and exchange listings announcements.“

45k submissions in 2 minutes!!! If you are planning an ICO out there, this is how not to do it. Needless to say I did not manage to get through on this one. But hey, 2/3 is not bad at all.

In conclusion, the WePower experience was the better of the three in my opinion. It was a great idea to mute the Telegram group to cut out spammers/phishing attempts and pin the contract address. I also liked that they limited contributions for a short time to allow everyone a chance to get some tokens.

NEXT? I’ve signed up for another oversubscribed ICO! I hope they learn from those that have gone before them. They have yet to announce their KYC process and when exactly the ICO will take place. Who you ask? It’s Current Media. Check them out! They already have over 40k members in their telegram group. Read their whitepaper, sign up if you like them. Here is their quick video on what the project is about:

Thanks for reading, see you on the next post!

-pinkdust

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