3 Important Lessons We Learnt From Our ICO

After the explosion of ICOs in 2017, we can now look back on some major successes for businesses looking to build the new crypto-economy. At Power Ledger, we are fortunate enough to count ourselves in this group.

At the start of October, we closed Australia’s first Token Generation Event generating over A$34million in contributions. As anyone who has been through an ICO will tell you, it wasn’t a simple process but it was hugely rewarding.

Here’s some of the main things we learnt.

Have A Solid Legal Framework

The progress we’ve made since our ICO really does come down to the solid legal framework we have established for the POWR token. A critical part of conducting our token sale, was the legal advice that we sought from our lawyers, Allens + Linklaters, a leading international firm whose support was invaluable.

As a company, we don’t believe you can build credibility if you bypass regulatory environments and expose stakeholders to potential risks and liabilities. This is one of the keystones of our business and many of our global partners see this strategy as a significant benefit of dealing with us.

Anti-Whaling Works

We went into our ICO thinking about about how we could use the process to ensure people engaged with us, rather than just raising capital to fund the growth of our Platform. We wanted (and have!) to build a network of incentives. This is why we wanted to attract a broad range of token holders, not just a few big whale investors intent on price speculation.

We were offering a product, with multiple functionalities and uses within the Power Ledger Ecosystem. We weren’t about to offer a limited supply that persons or companies with deep pockets could snatch up in a matter of minutes.

We had a presale that lasted three days and a main sale that was four weeks long. The strategic pre-sales were only for partners looking to grow the platform, not the token price. We also had a $25K cap on presale and the main sale was deflationary by design, as the token price increased the more was contributed.

Although this meant the team was working around the clock for months, an uncapped sale of this kind meant there was no incentive for whales to buy up all the tokens and resell them on exchanges at a higher price to actual users of the platform.

Instead, we had a sale where anyone who wanted POWR could get it. This resulted in a ‘grassroots movement’ of small buyers who want to change their energy future and participate in our Ecosystem, rather than just large crypto-traders.

The Power Of The Crypto-Community

The community is so important and you have to look after them. You’re never going to be able to please everyone but the majority like to know that their questions or concerns are being addressed and heard. To meet the needs of our community, our staff worked literally around the clock answering the community. You could find at least one of the co-founders in the Telegram room during the token sale. This created meaningful relationships and valuable discussions about the technology.

When some of our team members were at the Ethereal Summit in San Francisco they got greeted multiple times with ‘You are ‘so-and-so’ from Telegram!!!’.

We knew that community support was crucial for our project going forward and were likely to become the initial users of the platform. They have been instrumental in increasing awareness in our project and are now alerting energy companies across the globe to our offer. This is a powerful thing, and we aren’t about to take it for granted.

The community has grown faster than we ever could have imagined, and it’s great to see them rally behind the project when we have updates. By the time we share an update on Reddit the community has already posted it on the major crypto forums. They’re always hungry for content so it’s important to strike the right balance between producing content for them and keeping it in line with the overall company vision so we don’t get sidetracked.

It’s shown us how powerful it is when we work together.