Week in Ethereum News




December 4, 2016

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Token Sales

  • Branche unveils a twist in crowdsale mechanics: the pre-sale pledge.  They have a normal structure: 15% bonus week 1, 10% week 2, etc, but if you pledge 10 Ether before the sale begins (in under 24 hours – at midnight on Monday), then you get a 20% bonus regardless of when you later send your ether.
    • Kudos to Branche for putting particular effort into their crowdsale mechanics.  It will be very interesting to see how much they raise, given that probably many in the community haven’t interacted with the payday loan industry.   
  • Block CDN has raised 95k USD at the moment.  Reddit discussion.

General

Token sale thoughts

  • Daniel Zakrisson analyzed similarities of unsuccessful token sales for Iconomi.  
  • Two things I’d add:
    • X Factor 1: Most of the unsuccessful sales have been from non-English speakers. I’d advise all crowdsale founders to make sure they have a fluent English speaker.  As I discussed in my token sale framework, one of my heuristics is whether a project communicates effectively in English. Given how predominant English is in the Ethereum community, failing to communicate effectively in English speaks to competence.
    • X Factor 2: a successful crypto crowdsale depends on attracting whales (ahem, most whales are native English speakers).  I cherrypicked a few token sales and checked how many tokens were held by the top 5 addresses: Augur was 28%, Golem 45%, and Digix 43%.   Crypto whales are tech geeks by definition, so techgeek projects like Golem are a more natural fit than a B2B project like RexMLS.
      • My guess is that most successful crowdsale founders met the whales in person at conferences and meetups.  Note: those founders may not have known that they were meeting big prospective investors. Meeting people face to face matters.
  • Will anyone fill the Crowdsale Analyst void now that Daniel Zakrisson has moved to Iconomi?  
    • I considered doing so, but probably will not. Early on, I thought this newsletter would be a vehicle for my token sale research and writing. However, though I enjoy investment research and writing – I passed the CFA exams for a reason! – I’ve found that I don’t enjoy giving negative reviews to founders on the Ethereum projects which they are pouring their lives into.  Positive reviews are easy, eg, my Augur: Uber for Knowledge piece, but I am impressed at how Daniel was able to mix candor and constructive criticism in his analyses.  

 Dates of note                                                                                                           

  • Dec 4 – Next ether.camp price change
  • Dec 5 – Branche token sale begins
  • Dec 11 – Next BlockCDN price change
  • Dec 12 – Branche price change
  • Dec 15 – vDice crowdsale ends

[I aim for a relatively comprehensive list of Ethereum sales, but make no warranty as to even whether they are legit; as such, I thus likewise warrant nothing about whether any will produce a satisfactory return. This is not investment advice.]                                                                                                

1000 subscribers by year end?

Over the last week,we went from 650 subscribers to 840.  Thank you!   Getting to 1000 by the end of the year went from being a “stretch goal” to likely achievable.

I actually put a few dollars into Reddit ads late in the week, but most of the growth was early in the week from Reddit.  So I’m very appreciative to Herman Maas for posting to Reddit and those who upvoted, as well as everyone who tweeted it.

If this issue was useful to you, would you share it on social media or email it to a friend?    

Just in case you want to send me Ether (or tokens?):  0x96d4F0E75ae86e4c46cD8e9D4AE2F2309bD6Ec45

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