I have been watching several ICO closely during this tumultuous period amidst the various announcements by the Chinese government and speculations of what will be the impact to the entire crypto space. This is definitely a trying time to be launching an ICO and many an investors are jittery and am on the sidelines awaiting certainty before investing. Although there are several diehards that are just charging head on into any ICO they can find.
The interesting thing about the Change Bank ICO pre-sale is the less than “normal” level of hacking or phishing. While this is a strange indicator, I do noticed that phishing level tends to follow the popular ICO events. Most hackers are just going after ICO that attracts lots of investors and hope to catch a few non-suspecting investors who send their BTC/ETH to the wrong wallets. But for Change Bank, the level of phishing seems low. Perhaps the hackers did not think it will be worth the effort or perhaps the security measures and pre-announcements and preparations done by the team has been sufficient to prepare most of the investors so that phishing attempts do not succeed. I do believe it is the latter, kudos to the team. Read about the Change Bank team’s blood and sweat in their preparation here.
The other thing I noticed is the amount of ether raised in this pre-sale. The team achieved 36K ETH out of a hard cap of 50K. In this hard times when the Chinese government is banning all ICO as well as possibly all the bitcoin exchanges, I would rate this as a roaring success. We need to be cognizance of the fact that there is a minimum investment of 10 ETH too cos this would prevent smaller investors from taking part in this pre-sale. If you look at most ICO, there are often a larger proportion of investors who come in with less than 10 ETH. So I think this minimum investment level had also limit the amount to be raised during this pre-sale. On the note, I also did not notice much big ETH sums during this pre-sale, indicating perhaps that not many institutional investors are aware of Change Bank yet. But with this success as well as the publicity just raised by the BBC World News feature on Change Bank, there will be a lot of pent up demand for Change Bank. Be ready for a rush when the main sale starts this coming Saturday, September 16th at 10PM Singapore time.
These 2 key observations leads to suspect that the main sale will be a success and likely to end early. We will likely see a number of institutional investors who have not heard of Change Bank until the BBC feature. Lets watch the main sale this Saturday.