84% of all Tokens are Being Sold in Private and Pre-Sales

During the first two months of 2018, already 2 billion USD has been raised in initial coin offerings. A tremendous 84% were sold during private and pre-sales, leaving only 16% for the general public.

Some companies claiming to build a fair decentralized system for purpose XY even skip any kind of public contribution completely. That’s a disgrace to Satoshi’s vision, part of which was that access shall be open to anybody.

In the course of the last months, ICOs have risen in popularity. The Telegram group size of a popular project used to be 10k six months ago. They can easily reach 30k group members today.

Telegram raised the max cap of Telegram groups from 50k to 75k and then to 100k. The main reason where ICO groups. They are measuring their success of the project with numbers of members in those groups. Even if the groups don’t have more than 10% of active users, and usually use some giveaway tactics to pump their groups.

It is becoming more and more difficult to get into token sales. Often, this is due to a bad organization of the KYC process, bad smart contract policy, GAS war and pools that are negotiating their special offers.

One of the most popular ICOs of 2018 was Refereum. Refereum in itself is a great project. They have an MVP that works well, great partnerships, a top-class team and there is a need for disruption in their business area.

Yet, it was one of the most disappointing ICOs, the community did the marketing and large investors got the tokens. People interested in Refereum had the possibility of earning RFR tokens from the beginning on by using the platform and referring it to friends. This spiked a snowing ball which landed great marketing results. They managed to reach 100k members in their Telegram group and a huge community of active platform users.

On February 8 their ‘pre-sale’ was supposed to start. Everybody was waiting for instructions on how to participate in the promising project. More than 100k members of their Telegram group received this message: “THE REFEREUM TOKEN SALE IS COMPLETE.” Refereum reached their overall hard cap. The number of chosen investors was unknown. They ditched the ICO. That was supposed to happen a little later this year. They then claimed that they had chosen those investors who had shown the most interest in their actual business.

In the eyes of many potential contributors and loyal community who devoted their time and passion to promote this project, Refereum sold off to whales or other more privileged investors and used the community to promote the project.

KYC is not just limiting the ability to contribute to the ecosystem, it serves as a tool to regulate and monitor our financial transaction, and puts us at risk of target hacker attacks, imagine if someone hacks KYC database they can connect wallet addresses with actual faces and names which makes the hacker attacks more likely to succeed.

2100NEWS.com will be attending the KYC & AML Summit Europe taking place on 7th March 2018 in London so stay tuned for our live reports on this topic on our Twitter and Facebook accounts.