Status.im ICO Accused of Shady Practices
Status.im ICO took place on June 20,2017 raising more than $270 million making it the most successful ICO of the history of cryptocurrencies. Despite being such a successful ICO, Status.im has been accused of using shady practices in the ICO.
Issues with Status.im ICO
The Ethereum network once again faced several issues during the Status.im ICO just like it did during the Bancor ICO. The whole Ethereum network went into backlog and started to clog. This resulted in failed transactions and people not able to send funds to the smart contract. After the mess started to clear up, it was found that the first few transactions that got cleared were huge and were from whitelisted addresses that didnt follow the Gas limit set by the Status.im team.
It was later addressed by the Status.im team that those transactions were not by a single person but were pooled up transactions of 2000 people with a KYC process from ICOage. The second transaction was pooled up transaction from imToken. This was done to prevent the network from being ddosed. However, some contributors still set the gas price about the limit which resulted in the network congestion.
Despite the explanation given above the Status.im team, the community has accused them of setting such obscene hardcap to which no explanation has been provided. Also, the users were not informed promptly about the whitelisting address procedure. It was explained on the Status.im website but wasnt available clearly to users.
Apart from these issues, there was also reports against f2pool of removing user’s transaction with their own transactions so that they secure a position in the ICO before anybody else.
Conclusion
Despite all the issues, it is still a fact that Status.im raised $270 million in their ICO which is huge. However getting returns on this is going to be difficult for the investors if the team fails to deliver. What do you people think about the above issues? Should there be lower hard cap on ICO’s? How can this be avoided in the future? Let us know in the comments.
Why not have a pre-presale for those groups and your whales in advance? Maybe it’s only obvious in hindsight. I think a lot of future fundraisers can learn a lot from this.
8 young guys gathering 270 million dollars for writing a whitepaper based on an already existing application. It’s good marketing and that end of story and end of money.
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