A tale of two ICOs.

in crypto •  7 years ago 

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 :)

collage.jpg

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:

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Until now I think also that the CIVIC ico was the fairest ico on ethereum network! Very well done! It should be a paradigm for the ICOs to come !!!

Wow. Thanks for visiting man!
I was not around for all the icos of the past..but I think it was by far the best in recent memory...probably this year for sure!

I am ot sure people will adapt though...greed is a powerful motivator :)

I completely agree. But then we have the EOS one :)

the one true chain!? :D

Very interesting and informative read. I'm new to the crypto world to be honest, knowing only the popular names, and I had no idea about ICO's etc.

Learnt a lot from Steemit and a few friends. The Crypto world is both crazy and awesome. Thanks for the article :) Upvoted!

www.icocountdown.com

This is what Ive been using. Gives you the "when" the ICO opens, and the info on each company looking to open wide on Ethereum. Obviously you have to do your homework, but its a solid gateway to knowing whats coming.

crazy + awesome = crypto.
You got that right :))

I have moved my funds from forex into crypto and the potential is hige. Infact huge is a small word in crypto.

I was following the Status ICO and just did not know what was happening. Talk in the forum was that the ICO has ended yet the ICO ws still open. So all in all bad communication all around and a lack understanding of a newway of doing things.

The same here...hope all will go well.

The question remains though... Why do these two projects need tokens?

I am a huge fan of Ethereum, the tokenized web, Web 3.0, etc. No doubt about that!

But I am not able to grasp why a mobile browser/messenger app or a blockchain-based identification protocol needs tokens. Am I missing something?

I have used Status on my mobile phone on the testnet. And it's an amazing application!

But, not all of the Dapps need tokens.

A bit of a frenzy, I guess...

Civic needs tokens because it is the only way to keep the system decentralized. The decentralized eco system will reward users and give away tokens through the affiliate programs to promote mass adoption. So people will get tokens for free for trying the service.

Could well be, I don't know anything about Civic. Haven't looked in to it.

I like that you ask the important questions. I wonder this myself....

I think nowaday , there are more and more ICO avaiable on market, but it is believed that not many people not understand what the project is doing and just blindly invest on it with so called 'reputation'. Actually some of it is scam or some project needs more time to establish. So it is important that people should have a clear understanding of the project before investing on it...

"should" indeed..but do they? :)

I think my illustration covers up my opinion about Ethereum and ico's

https://steemit.com/ethereum/@kyriacos/the-magnificent-ethereum-machine

I tagged your post too, dunno if you noticed :)

Just did. I am so swamped with work, I didn't even notice the hyperlink.

Hilarious but very insightful. The Civic ICO was the first one in a while that I can say actually did something to make their investors feel respected. From the little guy to the whales. Kudos to their team!

I agree with you. It was first ICO I've invested. It was easy and straight forward. I'm actually getting sick of this wanna be NEW business model - First Blockchain that, that and that.... Sometimes it feels that it's straight forward scam. There will be a lot of money throw away, but I believe we will learn from it - White Paper it's not a full business model plan. So lets wait couple months for some others fails.

there will be a lot and the consequences of their failing...who knows. MAybe trimming the fat is good :)

That's really well said man. Exactly what they did!!
[ lol at your name :D ]

Agree with @bnt statement. Thanks for detailing it all @razvanelulmarin it has me much more motivated to get involved with an ICO....assuming its run similar.

EOS and Tezos seem to be the next two that will offer a fair distribution...allegedly :D

Ok, I have seen info about EOS flying around of late. I will look into both. Thanks!

Completely agree, still couldn't understand why a messenger app needs 270m dollar, it's the ICO like this destroy confidence about ethereum, glad that civic shows everyone the right way to do it.

:)) I like that ppl talk about the app actually working like it's a great achievement...it's not that hard to make an working IM these days.
270m is a nice amount. They want a lot of iPhones!

Ha.. the concept of running mini apps through the IM probably won't go down too well with App store review too, sounds like running alternative app store.

Thank you very much for this intro into these 2 ICOs . I'm constantly on the look out for new opportunities and try to be there when it happens .
I really appreciate your work and kindly ask you to make these kinds of posts as often as you can .
Cheers

Ahhh, this was so frustrating. I could have got some Civic but my transaction didn't go through. Nice post, i will resteem and upvote.

sorry. blame Vitalik!!

Great post.
I might sound like a blind believer in ETH, but I think they are lucky to get these tests early on and not like Bitcoin when they started cracking down after going mainstream. So, if they react quickly and release the necessary fixes, then I believe there's a bright future for ETH.

When it comes to civic the ICO structure was really interesting, but what if they struggled to get funded because of that structure? They probably were really confident, but these things are really hard to predict so, I doubt other ICO's will use something similar.

Hey!
I think there was exactly 0% chance for them to struggle in any way.
But they put the respect for the client before greed and that means a lot down the line. I think it will do good.

As for ETH...yes, you make a good point here!! I am not sure if they can adapt fast enough though :)

Well, ETH has a development team in place so, it should be faster than with BTC I guess.

yes, but that is not enough anymore...a lot of things are faster :D

-:) medase (Twi for thank you)

cu placere

Very much informative and helpful post. Thanks for sharing.

sounds interesting!
please take part in my little survey about altcoins. If you like!

https://steemit.com/crypto/@ilsignore/survey-altcoin-crypto-trading-survey

Con affetto -- ilsignore

I didnt get into the civic ICO because it took a bit longer than what I expected but the way they handled the ICO was amazing.

They had a cap.
They had few layers to prevent that people that just heard of the ICO could rush in with a few BTC and buy before those people that actually did some dilligence and were wainting for days.
The "buy line" also helped in not clogging both ETH and BTC chains
Lowering the total amount that one could donate was also a good idea so that a greater number of investors could get in.
Maybe unfair for some, but fair for most.
Nice play Vinny

As for Status, jsut another greedy ICO which will end up failing in the end IMO.
Just like most of the projects out there.
Following the hype can be very dangerous.

Perfect points. I do agree.
The thing is that status actually has a nice project too! Who knows, maybe in this case, the hype was warranted.

I believe it does, but they still were very greedy and it is always a bad sign.

Maybe future ICO'S can use something other than Ether to raise money . It is obvious that their infrastructure cannot handle the massive amounts of demand that are present when ICO'S occur. Maybe they can use something like bitshares than trade the bitshares back into ether on their own time. Somethings got to happen to level the playing field. It seems highly unfair that someone was not able to buy their share of a ICO because of a technical difficulty

Looks like the minimum investment is $50 US

Amazing

Well your post is very good to always look, if this goes on I can give a hundred until there.
Thank you for posting useful for us all, good luck bro, hopefully always in the protection of god

Great post, very informative. Highlights the problem of greed. I can never understand humans. For some people there will never be enough.

Congratulations @razvanelulmarin
You took 56 place in my Top 100 of posts

''Smash that like button, let's get 500k likes or I'll kill my dog'' - every Youtuber ever

Very poignant, upvoted!

Thank you for your work
It is very interesting
I am your new follower
Best Regards Andrei

You had one job. Haha.
Good informative post.

The status ceilings and contribution limits were an interesting idea. They used a formula to calculate the maximum contribution for each ceiling. I think it was something like (limit - contributions) / slope. I'm not sure how the slope was determined. It did result in a nice distribution of owners. I think what really caused the issue was the gwei limit. I like that you couldn't buy your way in, but it caused the entire blockchain to get congested with high gwei orders that were just ultimately rejected by the contract.

thank you for sharing
it's wonderful~~ !!

I could not buy tokens in civic because my android was not supporting their app and there was no other way to contribute :(

I bought some status... was my second ico but it wass a hell to get some...

But I hope this and steemit make my dream come true..
Please read it if you have some spare time.
https://steemit.com/travel/@rival/help-needed-west-coast-usa-what-to-see-on-once-in-a-lifetime-family-vacation-2017620t21552720z

I really hope you are right. I hope future ICO's take a page out of Civic's books. I'm just worried that they wont care...

I was waiting on the Civic ICO later today and they stopped all trading just when I was at number 618. Needless to say, they said they'll resume tomorrow and may have 2 million available maximum. So I'm keeping my computer on all day in hopes of keeping my position in line lol. Let's hope I can get some!

I wanted to get in both of ICOs specially the status as I feel jave more chances of getting popular and they were also giving 10k for.1 ether.

Both times I could not get it due to ETH network congestion and that queue thing in Civic.

Will get them on excjages now after 1st big dump.

Thank you so much for for explaining, very useful. Thanks for sharing :)

i did not know this Civic ico. Thanks for sharing.

Great Summary! Thank you for that. As of late, they have suspended any purchase till tomorrow. They mention the clogging of the ETH network and problems at Coinbase as their reason. Let's see how they proceed tomorrow. I have been waiting in line...at least it's orderly

Great read! It's important to highlight such issues. Many people just invest in ICOs due to them being ICOs there is no real substance to why they do it!.

Disappointed that I didn't get either!

This post received a 2.4% upvote from @randowhale thanks to @razvanelulmarin! For more information, click here!

Thank you very much very informative read, quick question any promising ICO coming this week? I was looking yesterday to civic but I didn't have the funds to invest. thanks again